Contd....The layoffs, the pregnancy and the chaos that ensued

So hopefully on the 6th the judge will instruct Mike to buy a few cows and that'll be that and I'll get my assistant compound manager back.

Now moving on to yet another "only in South Sudan story". So I posted for this new "Office Manager" position around town to help out with inventory and accounting. The posting requires that applicants have an undergraduate degree and had like a whole list of requirements and about 10 bullet points of job responsibilities. I posted this on the 22th and the applications were due in until the 30th.

Everyday I would have one or two people drop off their application at the gate or come inside talk to me and hand their application over to me. Barring 1 the 8 or so applicants that I met did not really speak any English and certainly did not have an undergraduate degree. So finally, I asked one of them if he was indeed applying for the office manager job and what in his eyes made him qualified for it. Oh! I forgot to mention, his application job envelope said "transport officer application". So at this point I was totally bewildered. I thought, I was in charge of the Carter Center here, who's been going around advertising a transport officer job behind my back.
The guy whips out the posting of the Office Manager Job that he had made a copy of, (which in itself is pretty impressive for South Sudan) and points to the no. 5 bullet point on the job responsibilities section.

"No. 5 - Help the transport officer calculate the fuel being using on a monthly basis"

So in case its not clear yet, this guy was applying for only one of the responsibilities of the Office Manager job. I couldn't get myself to tell the guy that he had gotten this all wrong. We were looking for a guy who could do all the ten things listed. Not 10 guys doing one thing each. But I was like "Thank you Chol, we will call you if we are interested".
Then I went back to look at the other applications, and yes you guessed it all of them barring one were for "No. 5 - Help the transport officer calculate the fuel being using on a monthly basis".

The evenings here at the compound are actually pretty awesome. I made friends with these Italian folks that work for CEFA and we have a good game of 5 on 5 soccer three times a week. The rest of the evenings of the week it rains, so Peter Mawel (Papa Mike) the mechanic and I - Papa Mike being his call name during the war days here, sit and have some quality "hookah" with chai.

The best thing that happened this week was me slaughtering a goat, those of you who haven't done it, ya'll have no idea what I'm talking about but those of you who have, know that its pretty interesting. The interesting and kinda unsettling part of it all, were the thoughts running through my mind as the events of the goat cutting unfolded. Steffen, the former Op manager was leaving so he bought two goats for the last supper here in Rumbek. Now butchers all over East Africa just like in India are muslims, (never seen a butchery in Africa that didn't have a resident muslim slaughterer yet) as muslims arn't supposed to eat meat that is not Halal (the animal has to be slaughtered in the name of God so to speak, similar to Kosher, where a Rabai has to bless it). So me being the resident muslim had to slaughter the goat.

Now up until the point I actually did it, I'll be honest, I wasn't too sure about the whole thing. I mean, I like everyone else here is a big hypocrite when it comes to such things. I love all sorts of meat but killing the animal myself, naaah, I just want it in pieces so that I can cook it, I don't want to see all the blood gushing out and the animal being in pain for a good 30 seconds before it actually dies.

So Aloro, the turnboy took the goat down, grabbed the legs and handed me the knife. I asked him repeatedly if the knife was sharpe enough, and which one of the three I had there was the sharpest, cause I wanted this to be quick and dirty. Finally, I decided on which knife to use, pulled the head of the goat back and "Bismillah-e-wallahallah-o-akbar" and obviously the blood came gushing out and I kept going till I made sure I cut off the main artery so that the blood would come out faster and the poor animal would get out of its misery a bit quicker. Well as I said earlier the whole thing might have been 30 seconds tops, but something very piculiar happened that has me thinking even now. Up until the point that I actually did start the process of cutting the goat's neck I was very nervous, mainly for the goat. I didn't want to hurt it, it had done nothing to me and I felt really really bad for the poor thing. I didn't even think I would go through with it at one point, but the moment I started cutting into its skin, all that care and fear for the animal disappeared. All I cared about was getting the job done and nothing else. No more thoughts of how the animal would be in pain. I will admit I might have even enjoyed it a little.
Since then I've been wondering about how these things that we feel like - acts of torture or extreme violence are unfathemable for anyone to do, and we abhor everyone who does them, and we can't believe how normal people can do these things? are they not human? etc etc. Well I realised yet again today that I am as much capable of doing really bad things and enjoying them as any "lost boy" of the South Sudan child army. Humbling to know that perhaps there is nothing, absolutely nothing special about you except for the circumstances that you were born in.

Till next week, Kwaheri