5 The office of South Sudan Express is a hive of activity. Two of their eight vehicles are being repaired, and workers in orange jump suits are preparing for their morning rounds. Reception is a narrow cubicle on the side of the road, and I talk to Cheng, a Dinka from Bor, who is running the front desk. ‘We have a lot of problems’, he tells me.‘So many complaints: people tell us that we don’t pick up their rubbish in time, or we don’t pick up enough of it.’ He smiles as he is passed two pieces of grubby handwritten paper – ‘You see? More complaints’. Giulio Petrocco, the Italian photographer whose images you see around these words, and I ride with the South Sudan Express workers in their truck.We sit in the back, on top of the rubbish, as we wind our way slowly through the streets. Some markets have collectively organised their rubbish collection and pile it on the side of the road for the workers to collect, without gloves or removal equipment save a plastic tarpaulin and a rake. Shop owners, angry that their rubbish sits and festers by the side of the road, berate the company as we go through Juba.The workers, who are all Sudanese, direct complaints to their overseer, a snappily dressed Dinka man who wrote a Masters thesis on hospital waste management. He listens studiously, noting everything down. Others, unable to pay the high prices of South Sudan Express, are unconcerned and pile up their rubbish in old oil drums to be burned come sunset. Finally, after what seems like hours, we head up the Yei road.The truck is rented from an Eritrean company, and our driver is also Eritrean; part of a vast force of East Africans who provide most of the labour in Africa’s newest state. We pass the government dump, which two weeks after I visited it is still closed, and head another forty kilometres up the road. This dump we finally arrive at is not new – a broken South Sudan Express truck testifies to its long use. Like the other government dump, there were the same smouldering fires, the same smell of an industrial plant.The only difference was the people: hundreds of them, waiting for the arrival of the truck, and then, as it gradually tipped up, scattering the waste on the ground, they poured over it, finding aubergines, needles, pineapples; searching bottles for water and alcohol; taking note of the position of scrap metal. As I walk through the dump the people mill around me. One man, a high school graduate, asks me: ‘Give me something, anything, it is not right that I have to live here’. He had returned from an internally displaced people’s camp to find his village transformed; a harbinger of the city that Juba is becoming. ‘Please’, he said,‘give me something’. And I gave him a cigarette. n
You can read the modern history of Juba in the rubbish; a future spied, not in tea leaves, but in whiskey bottles, in piles of horns and hides that did not find their way to the factory, and in USAID rice sacks that we trample underfoot, ripped and discarded. There are shacks lining the side of the road. Not quite dwellings; bare skeletons of sticks, wreathed in simple skins of tattered blue plastic. In this barren landscape, we finally meet someone. A man walks towards us, wearing a tattered blue shirt. He carries a machete, and accompanies us to the dump. His village, he tells us, is but three kilometres from here. During the war he was displaced to a camp and then worked in Khartoum. After 2005, he returned home only to find that it had become a rubbish dump. Rather than return to farming sorghum, he farms the rubbish, planting seeds of fire and harvesting the scrap metal. When we finally arrive at the dump, it is little more than a continuation of the road – a shallow pit, barely two metres deep and largely indistinguishable from the area surrounding it. It doesn’t smell like the rubbish dumps I have visited elsewhere in Africa.There is nothing rotting, nothing foetid: here, everything burns. It smells like an industrial plant and is the uniform grey of Soviet architecture in Warsaw. I find a scrap of colour: some Japanese toothpaste, crushed into the earth, staining the ash red. ‘These companies’, Lukudu complains, referring to the waste disposal trucks,‘have no training, no instruction, they don’t know what a rubbish dump is’. We walk back to the car; he tells me that if there wasn’t a barrier up on the road and the dump was functioning, there would be 500 people here, going through the new rubbish. Back at the car, I see a rubbish truck roar past us. Now the dump is closed where will they dump their rubbish? ‘Oh’, Lukudu replies,‘just further up the Yei road’. ‘And what’, I ask,‘will happen when the rubbish reaches Yei?’ Lukudu looks concerned, as if he suspects I might be slightly soft in the head.‘Don’t worry’, he tells me,‘Yei is very far away’. 4 After I got back to Juba, I phoned the Kenyan man who had rented me one of his cars. We chatted amiably about the difficulty of doing business in Sudan, and the great opportunities to be found here. Finally, he asked me where I had been. ‘Oh’, I replied,‘I went to the rubbish dump’. ‘Which one?’ he asked me.
‘Which one? The dump on the Yei road.’ ‘Yes’, he said,‘of course, but which one?’
I hesitated.‘The dump next to the UN compound’, I said, in a tone that sat somewhere between statement and question. This made him confused. ‘Why’, he asked,‘didn’t you visit the big dump? You are writer; you should see these things. If you talk to the Ministry of Public Health in Juba, I am sure you can arrange a visit.’
25
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator