back from Sudan

Hello all,

I am back from South Sudan. Fantastic. I have many stories, of fires and landmines, car crashes and general tense situations, and of nice people and bathing in the Nile too. So I'll start trying to write a summarised version as it could take forever otherwise. For tonight though, I shall just try and upload some pictures to previous posts.... fingers crossed.

Since coming back I have mainly just chilled out, done all my washing, and got back into the swing of Nairobi. We went to an Ethiopian restaurant called Habesha's. It was really good fun, nice food, cheap (450ksh each, bargain!) and eating with your hands from a communal plate always gets the banter going. We had a slight incident on a matatu on the way there as we'd left it a bit late so it was actually dark by the time we had got there. There was this drunk guy and he was harassing us a bit, and then Leila (the new attachee) got her chest groped as she was sat behind him, and when Hannah and I were trying to get off he grabbed our hair and was holding onto it quite hard. A lesson to not take a matatu after 6pm really, and to not get too complacent. A couple of the others stayed out at the home pub down the road until about 1am on friday night and got harrassed on their way back by some guys who got out of a car with what was apparently the most massive gun, and so were a bit shaken up by that. And then Saturday night Hannah, Leila & James went to this carnival club thing, which had loads of different stages and was set to go on til morning, but then James has his fancy phone stolen and so after some stress they came back at about 2.30am. So yeah, many things to warn us to be much more careful. Taxi's everywhere after dark etc. Not that I would have done anything otherwise myself, but I'm obviously far more sensible than most (or overly cautious, whatever). :)

So with work today I had to write up some notes from the only proper site we found, and then Dave showed my what to do with the spreadsheet to archive this stuff from Somalia. So I created the new spreadsheet and then spent forever trying to make the scanner recognise negatives, which I did in the end, but only about 2.30pm so I only had 2 hours to get stuff done. I still managed to scan in 50 negs though, which I was quite pleased with, but I need to try and get more done as there are hundreds to do.

Anyway, now I shall try and upload some photos, and then Hannah, Sarah & I need to sort out what we're doing for Christmas. Mmm, Christmas in the sun.

xx