from Marial Thon in the Southern Sudan airport

Dear All,

I'm waiting in a jumble of people in the Juba Intl Airport, sweating from every pore as people crowd into one another, many human scents wafting from our places of origin. The airport is not air-conditioned. There is one big room for all of the flights, domestic and international.

While I am writing the desk staff comes and check-in is done efficiently. I step around people to the immigration counter where they stamp my passport and then I fill in their register to give them a record of my visit. I go to security. I am given a quick pat down ignoring the lumps in my pocket and then through a metal detector that does not work.

My computer bag goes through the X-ray and the man tells me to take out the computer battery, which I do though he never looks at it except briefly when I hold it up.

I then pass into the one room departure lounge with very worn but fairly comfortable overstuffed leather chairs and sofas with crammed in everywhere suplemented by a few plastic chairs.

But before I sit down I have to pee. The door to the men's room lies directly in line with those coming into the room from security but there is not a door that will close. So those coming in get to see me standing at the urinal doing my thing. No washing hands here.

There is a sink but the entire top of the faucet-the part with the handle to twist, lies at the bottom of the basin, broken free from its threaded bounds.

But I'm on my way back to Nairobi and home-just waiting for the plane to land.

It's the five month birthday of Southern Sudan today-a new airport is being built built just down the way and I rejoice in their growing time.

Love,

Mere/Dad

Today, from Nairobi:

Enjoyed your blog on time. I built my workshop completely around proverbs and stories. So to begin to help folk understand that proverbs reveal something about the culture from which the people who created it came, I gave them two proverbs to consider. One was “A log can be in a river for a long time and never become a crocodile.” And the other was “Time is money.” I asked what they thought it meant, where they thought it was created and what it might show about the people who created it. The discussion of the last one brought out the huge differences that you referred to in the blog. It is not only chronos and kairos but time as repeated cycles vs a line. There is not sense of time as a commodity but, in facing modernity——[both have to be understood].

My correct Dinka name is Marial Thon (Thon pronounced with a silent “H” but aspirating the “T” sound but not the “O” sound as in “ton” but rather in “tone”). It means a “bull with black and white color & strong bull at the same time.”

Look forward to seeing you soon.

Love,
Dad