Bite your liver

Bite your tongue. Or liver. Or small intestine.

Once upon a time in Sweden, that bastion of good design and high taxes, I said, "I will die if I ever have to eat mystery meat with the chief." You may remember.

Today, Kari and I crashed a Christmas celebration (that's all we could get, my Church Holy Days and Feasts internal calendar fails me) and ended up with a five-church papa in a hut eating said stew. We also enjoyed fermented sorghum flour tortillas and Tang.

Such is the Sudanese adventure. I've been her a week and it is the most extreme stop yet on a few different fronts. Most notable is the lack of electricity or water. K & J have a generator and we can pump water from the ground when the donkey boy fails to show up, but we use a latrine and headlamps a lot. Another most notable is the stark lack of non-Sudanese people. Particularly female ones. We were greeted a week ago at the dirt air strip by a troupe of mustachioed SP staff. I imagine it was partly for my benefit. Kari is the only white woman out here, save yours truly. And this is her life when I leave.

The last most notable thing is simplicity of life. I say that not as a project manager or mother of eleven, but as a hanger-on, so be advised. But we wake with the sun, work hard at tasks no one in the USA has been working hard at in the past 60 years, eat whatever we can cook on a gas stove, manage an inconsistent construction team of men (J), manage contentious and hard working women who cook for the construction team and students (K), and drive on dirt tracks that take a Land Cruiser one hour to go 10 miles (or three hours on foot, which is everyone besides us). But as long as you’re expecting all of that, plus an occasional flat tire (one of Kari and my great triumphs besides the shish kebabs), it is fulfilling.