Juba to Aweil

Just after 6a.m. the second of William Deng's friends arrived at the Jajaj Inn and swept us up to drive us to the airport, just a few minutes away.  We weren’t the first ones there and a queue had already formed.  After a 20 minute wait Mr. Kush Air, of the ticket office the day before, arrived and told us all we were queuing in the wrong direction.  He lined us up again and an airport employee dragged a huge old scale out to the front with metallic screeches.  Our bags were weighed and the information passed to Mr. Kush Air.  He calculated our baggage fee and labeled the bags and handed us each a numbered (black Sharpie ringed numbers) boarding pass.  (We guessed this was his way of guaranteeing he didn’t have more passengers than seats, as he had possibly sold more seats than available in the week before. ) We then faced the bottleneck of ‘security’ again.   I walked through the metal detector with my backpack on and observed that no one was actually looking at the monitor for the security belt.   We were then asked to go through a second security point  where security personnel searched our hand luggage and passed us into the waiting room.  The room was charmingly filled with the  well worn living room furniture of several homes and plastic garden chairs.  We had quite a good crowd when our Aweil flight was announced.  Mr. Kush Air was back again and scuttled ahead of us onto the tarmac to collect in the numbered boarding passes.  The Focker, F-50 propeller plane was a bit noisy, but  did its job brilliantly and the pilot landed us smoothly on the single strip in Aweil.  The last flight I'd made over  South Sudan had been in a much smaller plane and we flew closer to the ground and could see far more of the countryside than we were able in the F-50.

The flight's arrival in Aweil's modest 'airport'  (two sheds by a tree) didn't create much attention.  There were half a dozen motorized rickshaw taxis and several vehicles waiting for passengers, as well as passengers for the return flight.  William Deng was patiently waiting for us, and as we have grown used to, he also knew and greeted more than half the passengers on the flight, including James, a Dinka PhD student at Amherst writing about developmental economics, who had flown in for some regional meetings.  James pointed out another fellow passenger, John Kudusay, a well known South Sudanese singer.  He adopted the name 'Kudusay' because when he introduced himself to foreigners they always asked him "Could you say that again, please?"  http://madingaweil.com/MadingAweil.com_John%20Kudusay.mp3  Given Bert's eclectic taste in music and my desire to have Dinka/South Sudanese music for whatever video material I put together, we now had a focus for our stroll through Aweil's market.

As far as we can make out, the rickshaw driver really was using a frying pan for a rearview mirror!