Catching up here...

We finished Integration training on Thursday, that is combined training with the new military and civilian employees here in UNMIS. It was very repetitive of our police-only induction training last week, which was very repetitive of our Pearson Peacekeeping Centre training the week before we left Ottawa, which was very repetitive of our RCMP pre-deployment training we took the second week before we left Ottawa. Enyways, we met some nice people, a group of German military officers, some Australian military officers who invited us to a birthday party last night at Australia House, and two young, very pretty Sudanese women from Khartoum; one who has a degree in Sociology and will be a security guard checking for ID cards at the front gate and one with a degree in Economics who will be working in Maintenance cleaning the base. Obviously they look at these jobs as a foot in the door to become eligible for jobs that are more suitable for their qualifications once they become available. Our university graduates in Canada could learn a lesson here.

One of the women, Souaousa (ph? Pronounced Sow-ou-sa) told me it was always her dream to work for the UN! Hmmm! The things that make you go “Hmmm”.

Interesting place this Sudan. We were thinking that none of the local people liked us because we said good morning to everyone as we walked to work and nobody responded. I started saying "Salaam" instead and now they smile and say "Salaam" back. I'm glad all this cultural awareness training I've recieved wasn't for nothing!

My health (read: digestive system) is off and on, but I find curry is very good for the digestive track; for breakfast yesterday I had two omelettes, pancakes with jam as there was no syrup, and curried potatoes. For lunch every day they serve curried vegetables. I’m developing a taste for curry.

And coke unfortunately. The coke here tastes like the coke back home. I wasn’t going to drink coke here (pop is the “cigarettes of obesity” don’t-cha know!!) but one of the guys told me of an RCMP member who went on four peace keeping missions and never got sick because he drank coke everyday which killed anything bad in his digestive track. That’s good enough for me. In this case the cure may be worse than whatever ails me but I’ll use any excuse to drink coke.

Now we sit and wait for our barrack boxes to be released from Sudanese Customs (anybody remember how long it took for us to get our visas to come here?). We’re not going to deploy to Juba till we get our barrack boxes as all of our mosquito nets, DEET etc., some of our medical kits are in our barrack boxes. It is rainy season in the south, the mosquitos are bad and malaria is an ever-present danger so we need our mosquito equipment.

Yesterday and today are days-off for the military and civilians so we just kind of sat around; I’m using the time to catch up on some correspondence. I phoned down to Juba yesterday morning to find out what I’m going to be doing down there and was told they are “having discussions” about what to do with me!

Today we have driver's tests in order to get our UN driver's licences.