Beyond the Vapour Trail

by Brett Pierce

  I asked him about the LRA. He indicated a ruined building over my right shoulder, about fifty metres behind me, and said that the LRA had killed twenty to thirty people inside that church just a few years ago. More were killed on the other side of the village. The effects on this community had been profound. Families fled. Many were too afraid to plant on their land and be caught unawares again. Some left their children with relatives while they tried to start their farms again. Many children had lost their parents. But with the local militia and all the UN troops around, he said, the general feeling was that the LRA would be unlikely to attack here again.

  What he didn’t know at the time was that the LRA was about to attack. This very village. Less than two weeks after we thanked him, got into our vehicle and drove away, they raided Ezo.

  We left Ezo and headed towards our northernmost overnight stay at Tambura. You can drive for hours and see very little. Occasionally you might see someone offering bush meat for sale, monkey or other unidentifiable things. Some of the creatures were freshly caught, like pheasants, and passed into our car window for inspection, still blinking at us with their legs tied. A giant monitor lizard, nearly two metres long, was offered tied to a stick with a noose around its neck. One man was trying to sell an indescribable long, crooked shape, a driedblood-black mess with a furry toe on the end. It was a leg from something. I couldn’t begin to guess what animal it was. It had clearly been dead for many days. I think he realised offering it to us was little more than blind optimism.

  A little later a tyre burst, the third for our vehicle on this trip. This gave us time to stretch our legs. We were, by all appearances, well away from any settlement. But at the bottom of the hill, an old lady, dressed in a long skirt and a rag-like singlet, was walking along with the help of a stick. Quite a few minutes later she arrived and put her hand up to beg. Samar asked me how I responded to beggars, and I told her Tom’s philosophy that I had adopted. I give when I feel like it. I gave the old lady a South Sudan pound, the world’s newest currency. So did Samar. The old lady held the money with a sense of relief. Shaking, she fell to her knees, and then sat down at the side of the road, overcome with emotion. She stayed there a long time, with one hand to her head, with body language that read like someone who had walked through desperation. One of our other staff took her a drink.

  At the end of that day the various people in our assessment team reunited and stayed in Tambura, but we had arrived late and there was limited accommodation, so we ended up being sent off to a Catholic institution.

  We drove to the edge of the town in the dark until we reached a high gate. A young robed priest met us. There was no electricity. Unfamiliar buildings you encounter in pitch darkness are difficult to comprehend. We washed in cold water with portable lamps. I crawled into my makeshift bed and used the last of my phone battery to capture some thoughts for my wife, strange insects crawling around me, in a far-flung corner of the world. I wouldn’t be able to send my message until I found connectivity at one of our projects, but I typed away. Then the battery failed. Darkness.

  … after we finish I fly to the capital again, UN plane, then have an exit meeting, but still some work tomorrow before I start the journey home to you.

  Love you.

  Back in Yambio we processed all the information we had gathered. The conclusions were starting to emerge slowly, like photo images in an old darkroom. It seemed like we might be able to commence the programming. It was borderline, it was going to be incredibly challenging, but the moral imperative of the children’s needs meant we had to make it work if we could. We still needed the conclusions from our security team. Aid funding from other sources was drying up. The people were tired of war and wanted to build their lives. We could help them.

  Just a few weeks later the civil war began. The fighting seemed to erupt out of nowhere. All our plans were put on hold. I had arrived home and Samar was in lockdown in the capital for several days under the sound of gunfire and the uncertainty of what the next moment could bring.

  It became the world’s most fragile and most failed state, with more than a million displaced by the civil war, so our work there continues to respond to immediate needs in South Sudan. All our plans for long-term development funding are on indefinite hold. The children will have to wait. Under the trees, or wherever they have fled.

  CHAPTER 28

  Many Meals and a Few Last Suppers

  Some meals catch on memory like climbers’ pins gripping a crack in a rock face. The distinctive flavours in small villages or barrios, food prepared by local hands – sometimes in the heat of the day, sometimes by firelight or lantern. The moment. The people you are with. Being surprised by a congealed duck’s blood soup in Thailand or deep-fried spider in Cambodia.

  And sometimes you feel the moment take your full weight as you haul yourself to that ledge and stillness; or scrambling and slipping, you lose your grip.

  The following meals are a blend of all these.

  It’s at table that you really meet Georgians. In a small village in the republic of Georgia, we trudged through the snow across a running creek and entered a small wooden school building. Inside a cheerful young teacher met us, her small class of children sitting at their desks in coats. A little wood-burning stove sat snugly in the corner, out of reach of their cold hands. It was a tiny village school in the Caucasus. Morning coffee and conversation with the teachers in their cramped staffroom led to an unexpected realisation. These teachers were among the very few families in the village who had an income. Most people here lived a subsistence lifestyle – they ate what they grew, just as we see in Africa or isolated communities of Latin America. In the Soviet era, there were jokes about the wealthy Georgian farmers. Back then they could take free flights to Moscow and sell their fresh produce. Now cash was hard to come by; they lived hand to mouth.

  After lunch we met with farmers who were participating in our income generation activities. One man proudly showed us his beehives, a form of revolving loan that gave each family a cash product. When this farmer produced his third colony, he would pass the new hive on to a neighbour and teach him the skills, and so on. He invited us inside his home, although we were already running very late and still had a long drive ahead of us. Darkness came quickly at this time of year. But good manners meant that of course we would come inside and meet his family. And his whole family was there to greet us, proudly. They ushered us through to the most beautifully laden table you could imagine, like a Christmas feast laid out on a magnificent hand-tatted tablecloth, plates with every imaginable delight of meats, cheeses, breads, wine, liquor, and of course, honey. My colleague quietly whispered that the family probably borrowed from neighbours to express this level of hospitality. The women must have been preparing since yesterday.

  But we had already eaten. And we should have left the village hours ago.

  So we stayed long enough to try some of the beautiful food, and to be toasted by the head of the family. The meal was unforgettable in its heartfelt expression, the pride of providing hospitality to a guest, and my regret at having to take our leave so early. On other occasions, I experienced the full supra, the Georgian feast. As Pushkin said, ‘every Georgian dish is a poem’, and the poetry flows liberally, served with local wines, breads – especially the incomparable melt-in-your-mouth khachapuri. But it’s as the head of the feast stands and asks you to raise your glass that the moment is transformed. With each toast he speaks from the heart, and you realise that there is something running deep here – you now are touching the soul of the Georgian people.

  I visited Myanmar not long after the initial pro-democracy demonstrations of 1988 were so violently put down. More than ten thousand had been killed that year, and people were very tense, all over the country. We were only the second group of foreigners allowed back in, and only a few weeks before we arrived there were orders to shoot anyone seen out at night. They were no longer shooting on sight, but the curfew remained.

  One eve
ning we were being driven back to our hotel, running late, much too close to curfew. My friend Barry and I were riding in the open back of a utility-type vehicle. Suddenly the engine of our car spluttered and we came to a halt. Rather unfortunately, it rolled to a stop right beside a cache of armed soldiers, who looked up and stared at us. The young driver jumped out of the car and ran away, disappearing around the corner. We were stranded in the vehicle, not going anywhere, not knowing what was happening. The moments ticked by. We now were about ten minutes away from curfew and the soldiers continued to stare at us, so Barry and I sunk down in the shadows a little. I don’t think it helped. A few minutes later the driver came sprinting back with a Coke bottle full of petrol. He got the car running and dropped us at the hotel. He refused our offer to stay the night, though he seemed genuinely terrified.

  I was back in Myanmar in 2004 and visited a community down on the south-east coast, a small town near Dawei. Midmorning I took a break from our meeting in the village, and wandered out into the street. My interpreter, Dr Ivan, walked with me. A few doors down from our meeting, I glanced at four young women working on sewing machines. Dr Ivan told me that one of these girls had worked with our organisation. Thus I ended up in conversation with twenty-one-year-old Nwe Nwe.

  Just eighteen months earlier she had decided to leave the community, like so many of her friends had already done. She said that if she was going to survive, she would have to go to Thailand. Burmese workers are vulnerable there and often exploited. She knew this, but didn’t see any choice. Just around that time, we commenced an HIV/AIDS awareness project in her area, and she wanted to give something back to her community before she left. So she volunteered to be a community development volunteer.

  ‘Was the project successful, do you think?’

  ‘Yes.’ She seemed quite certain.

  ‘Why do you think it was successful?’

  ‘Well,’ she said with almost exaggerated exasperation, ‘because even in the middle of the night, people come to the house and wake us up asking for condoms!’

  OK, I thought. That’s a pretty good indicator of successful awareness-raising.

  She also had the opportunity to learn to make garments. Nwe Nwe and three friends took a loan of about fifty Australian dollars to buy sewing machines and started their own business. It was going well. On their own initiative they began to train other young people in garment manufacture to help them get an income, so they wouldn’t have to leave the village. On top of what she earned, Nwe Nwe was also making clothes for her whole family. And she was quietly giving financial help to some of the poorest children in the community to attend school.

  Ivan and I wandered back into our meeting and were served tea, along with a little snack. The snack looked like a set of hollow, crooked straws. I looked at Ivan.

  ‘What is it?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen it before.’

  He asked our host. Ivan didn’t blink or lose his smile as the answer came back.

  ‘Deep-fried sand worms,’ he informed me.

  ‘Oh. Good. OK … You go first,’ I suggested to him. He smiled even more, and then picked one up and tasted it.

  ‘How is it?’

  ‘Actually …’ he paused and looked thoughtful. ‘It isn’t bad. It would go well with a beer.’

  So I tried one. It was very hard and crunchy, exactly like something you might have with a beer. I began to wonder if almost anything, when deep-fried, starts to taste similar and will go splendidly with an ale. Oddly these haven’t caught on here in Australia.

  In Cambodia we stopped at a roadside market. Among the local delicacies on offer were some kind of shrivelled-up fried things. They looked a little like spiders. I asked the woman what they were, and she opened a container and pulled out a rather large spider, a species of tarantula. It was about the same size as her hand, and it crawled around and around as she turned her hand. So I took a photo of it. It was totally not on my agenda for snacks, but made a great picture.

  When we got back into the vehicle, Edwin, a colleague from Ghana, was excited. He held up a paper bag.

  ‘Who is going to try the fried spider with me?’

  ‘You … bought some? To eat?’

  ‘Yes, I bought a bag. Enough for everyone.’

  ‘You’re on your own, Edwin.’

  Edwin was not dismayed. He continued to try to convince us. Eventually, I agreed to try a leg. There were plenty to spare.

  At our hotel in Siem Reap, they reheated the snacks. I’m guessing they didn’t microwave them as they would probably explode. So true to my word, I only ate a leg. It was crunchy. And it tasted like pork crackling. Now … I happen to like pork crackling. The problem was, this experience forged a neural pathway between two parts of my brain that I didn’t want connected – my sense of taste, and every thought or image I’d ever had about spiders. The result of this was some kind of connection that meant I could still taste it in my mouth for days. Weeks. Edwin, of course, ate the whole thing. He said some parts were chewy and wondered if they were the spinnerets. This meal is memorable only insomuch as I haven’t managed to forget it yet.

  In 2005 I was in Santiago, Chile, evaluating our program with the urban poor of the barrio of Huamachuco. Our local partner was a women’s self-help group that had formed during the dictatorship of Pinochet. This group did needlework together, and importantly, supported each other through the difficult times. Many of the women or their husbands or children had been taken and tortured, or simply disappeared, forever.

  And so these women told their stories through needle and thread. Because I took an interest they brought out some of their older arpilleras, the textile images that showed their poverty, the repression, the protests, the water cannons, the political prisoners and their solidarity. This is real art, I told them. They were flattered, but I knew I was in a gallery of the human spirit’s triumph through pain. They sold it to survive; they created it to express their anguish. Like so much art from Latin America, it wasn’t a conceptual statement; it was rooted in their human cry against injustice and powerlessness. Every needle they pushed through the material expressed their lives, their pain. It was stunning in the simplicity with which they captured the torment. They were still together, working with us to develop their small urban community, their later works telling stories of our work with children. In the cold mornings they shared with me mate, a local tea made of leaves from the yerba mate tree, served in a small gourd, often beautifully lined with silver, and drunk through a silver straw called a bombilla. The taste? It’s like a strong tea, with very strong tannins, but more green, as if someone has freshly cut the lawn and the aroma has reached you.

  Over a weekend co-workers Alejandro and Pamela took me to the deepwater port city of Valparaíso, along with their young daughters. We wandered along the waterfront with its ships and painted high-prowed boats with names like Doña Carmen Rosa or Acuario, and then two seals tumbled among the flickering reflections on the molten mirror of the waves. Pastel houses splattered colour up the hills in old Spanish architecture. We took the ascensor – a cable railway that rattled up the steep, steep hill. Narrow, winding and sometimes steep alleyways headed somewhere at times and sometimes nowhere. Nooks and crannies around each corner. Some of the world’s most outstanding street art was nested thoughtfully into corners, down steps, and blended into the buildings. Homes had hand-carved wooden details with a Spanish feel, but weathered, forgotten, splitting in the sun.

  They took me to the home of poet Pablo Neruda, a house much like the town, with steep winding stairs, full of beautiful old books and cosy nooks with sea views. The flowers were still blooming in his garden, as they had under the dictatorship of Pinochet. Podrán cortar todas las flores, pero no podrán detener la primavera – They can cut down all the flowers, but they cannot stop the spring. Neruda.

  Later in the day we all ducked from the now chilling air into the restaurant, a dark cafe with live acoustic music, decor
ated with quirkiness and decades of graffiti covering every imaginable surface. And famed for chorrillana. What is chorrillana? I had absolutely no idea, but apparently it’s what we had come for. So they brought out big plates of it. A generous pile of chips, topped with onions, diced steak and a fried egg on top. Piping hot. This was not a moment for health food. It was time for celebrating friendship with a huge plate that is always shared with at least one other person, and at least one cold beer. With the addition of some chorizo to my version, I now cook chorrillana at home for those nights that are about company and sharing a plate and not particularly giving a damn about healthy eating.

  Neruda wrote an ode to his colourful city:

  Valparaíso,

  how absurd

  you are …

  with your dishevelled hills

  you never

  finished combing your hair,

  you’ve never

  had time

  to get dressed,

  life has

  always

  surprised you,

  death has awoken you,

  in your nightshirt,

  in your long johns,

  flecked with colour …

  Death awakened Valparaíso in 1906, surprised the city in its nightshirt, in an earthquake that shook the place senseless, created a tsunami and caught everyone unawares, as earthquakes are wont to do.

  My low point was in 2005. When I began working in overseas aid the depression that had pulled my previous life asunder had simply followed me, as depression is wont to do. Fifteen years of chronic depression had carried with it an unconscious sense of falling. I was Icarus, nothing to cling to, nothing to grasp, waiting for the inevitable dull thud. Then in 2005, days before I got on a plane to Timor Leste, my marriage collapsed. I moved out of home into a cold motel room. With no time to process it, I simply got on the plane for the next trip. I arrived in Timor Leste to a hectic schedule in sweltering heat, with no space to stem the bleeding or comprehend what had just happened. Instead I just had to focus on the job at hand.