this morning, during breakfast, a loudspeaker blared thick

Arabic.  today was a clean up day in abyei.  everyone was to

clean the space outside of their tukuls, or face consequences.

tonight the air is full of the sharp smell of plastic.  fires line

the road.  as you walk down it, you can see the black shadows of

people tending them flicker and dance.

on the way back to town after my run first those weeks ago, I saw a

cloud of smoke moving across the horizon.  it bunched on itself,

then came loose.  as it grew closer, I saw it was a flock of a

thousand birds.  un marriage du ouiseau.  they landed in one

tree, all one thousand, and sang.

within twenty minutes of landing on wednesday, I was stopped and

hassled by soldiers then told I had to attend the hospital because a

child found a grenade and pulled the pin.

welcome home.  to the place with no face.

noone knows who abyei belongs to and noone comes from here.  no

face.  yet  more arrive each day.  the future is being

decided even now, but I can’t see it.  I am too close to the

centre, and today, I can only see smoke.

there are soldiers from four different groups, and I can make no more

sense of them than I could when I arrived the first time.  my

field co starts talking about recent tensions between acronyms, and I

lose the plot.  thankfully, my job is in the hospital, the radius

of my life 480 paces.

the measles is settling.  in shala. god willing.   two

admissions yesterday to add to fifteen sweating in the

recubra.    the feeding centre has grown.  the

families of  thin children spill out of rooms onto mats.  the

girl I wrote about before, the “now you see her, now you don’t”,

is still in the hospital. I talked with ali as he waited for the wfp

plane to take him away, and he told me he saw her laugh for the first

time. I was glad to see her.  I will tell more about her another

time.  I’m on call today, and need to return to the hospital.

it was 46 today.  people keep on saying the hot season is coming

with straight faces.  I’ve started to sleep outside.

old

home.

new home.

old

roof.

new roof.

flower

bike.

agok.