Maggie in Africa

My customers included the Christians of Faith (COF) organization in Omaha. I audited their books every three months, a job of 3 or 4 days for which they paid me one thousand dollars plus the cost of a modest hotel room. By the standards of the small town in Kansas where I lived with my husband, an evangelical preacher, that was good money.

I was working my way through the accounts one afternoon when my phone rang. It was John Bright, the President of COF in Washington, D.C.

"Margaret," he began. "You've done good work for us and I have an opportunity which may interest you. You may find it a bit strange. Are you sitting down?"

I was intrigued. "Yes, Mr. Bright, but call me Maggie."

"Okay, Maggie it is. Call me John. We thought of you because you helped with that successful women's visit to Greece two years ago. With your international experience we thought of you for a temporary job we need to fill immediately."

I was intrigued. "Tell me more." I almost laughed. "International experience?" My international experience was a two-week visit to Greece. The thought of that trip brought back memories that made me twitch with pleasure.

"To give you some background, the United Nations is distributing food and medicine to starving people in southern Sudan. The base for the operation is in Lokichogio, a town in Kenya near the border with Sudan. Every day transport aircraft take off from Loki and deliver food, medicine, and other emergency goods to airports carved out of the bush and scattered all over southern Sudan."

He continued. "We're one of the NGOs, that's non-governmental organization in UN speak, contracted to distribute the food and medicine. The UN pays us for our work, and it's an important source of revenue for us. Frankly, our program is a mess due to incompetent management. The UN is going to cancel our contract if we don't get our program straightened out. We need an accountant out there. Quickly. A good accountant. And you're good."

"How long would you need me?"

"We estimate three months." He rushed on. "I know you're married and are blessed with two children, but I'm told they are in college and not living at home. So, if you could see your way to helping us..."

"Well, it sounds interesting, but..."

"We'll pay you six thousand dollars a month, plus free housing, a car and driver, and medical care if that should become necessary. You won't have many expenses, so you can save a good part of that money. Would you like for me to give you more details about the job?"

"Yes, please." Six thousand dollars a month plus expenses was a lot of money for me. (This happened in 2001.)

"One warning," he said. "Our UN contract prohibits religious proselytizing. You'll be fired and sent home if you do it. I don't want to offend you, but our mission is to feed hungry people, not to tell them about Jesus. This is a secular project. Is that clear?"

"Yes," I answered. "It won't be a problem for me." I had the impression that John Bright did not have a high opinion of enthusiastic, evangelical Christians. He seemed to be one of those liberal Christians so deplored by preachers such as my husband.

"I'm sorry to be so blunt, but the person you would replace thought it was her job to distribute bibles rather than food."

"I understand. Tell me more about the job." I was both terrified and terribly interested in what would be so far out of my life experience.

***

I persuaded myself and my husband that I should take the job, and ten days later I arrived in Lokichogio on a propeller-driven airplane from Nairobi, the capital of Kenya.

The airport at Lokichogio was hot and dusty. Half a dozen battered cargo planes, some of them painted in military greens and grays were sitting around the far side of the tarmac. Sacks of grain were being loaded on two of them. African workers clustered in the narrow-shade offered by the wings of the airplanes. Several small one-engine planes -- four, six, and eight seaters -- were clustered around the one-room, whitewashed concrete building that served as a terminal.

I looked around. The land was flat, but several rocky outcrops interrupted the desert horizon. It was green, the rainy season. Outside the mesh fence around the airport were a dozen tall, slender women with intensely black skin and wearing ragged clay-colored cloaks tied over a shoulder. Each of them wore a dozen metal rings around her throat, stretching her neck to an unnatural length. Several of them carried babies in slings.

An African man from COF met me on the tarmac with a Toyota Land Cruiser. His name was Joseph. I liked him. He had a big, jolly smile. As we drove by the women he nodded in disapproval, "Turkanas. Very primitive. Bandits and beggars."

The UN compound was adjacent to the airport. A guard opened a gate to let us inside. The driver parked in front of a thatched roof building with open sides.

I walked into the thatched hut. A bulletin board at the entrance posted news and announcements. Under the roof was a reception desk and a cafeteria with steam tables, metal trays, wicker tables and plastic chairs scattered around a cement floor. A book shelf in one corner was crowded with well-worn paperback novels. Like Joseph, my driver, the African at the reception desk wore a brilliantly white shirt and greeted me with a big smile. "Ah, yes. Mrs. Sanders. We have a very nice place for you to live."

I signed the register. "How do I pay for this?" I asked.

"Your NGO will pay the bill."

"This way, madam," Joseph said. He carried my bags and kept up a running line of chatter as we walked toward my new home. "This is bar, here," he said, as we left the reception. It was another open-sided thatched roof hut with a circular bar surrounded by high chairs and a few tables. Several men were drinking beer and smoking. "Pilots," the driver said. "Canadian, American, Swiss, Swede, Dutch, Russian -- many pilots. Also, expats from forty NGOs and six UN agencies live here." "Expat" was UN shorthand for foreigners, mostly Europeans, employed in Loki and the Sudan.

Before them stretched a long lines of tents spaced evenly along wide sandy paths outlined by whitewashed rocks and shaded by a few acacia trees. The sun was intensely bright and hot. "Shower building for women, And bathrooms." said Joseph, pointing at a concrete block building with a corrugated metal roof. Beside it was another identical building. "Shower building and bathrooms for men. Sometimes not enough water," he laughed.

Joseph led me to a tent. "Number 158. You remember number on sign. Easy to get lost. All tents the same."

The tent had a wooden door and eaves that shaded out the rays of the sun. The driver unlocked the door and handed me the key. I stepped inside. My "home" in Lokichogio was about ten feet by ten feet in size and had a wooden plank floor. A single bed was against one canvas wall and a small chest of drawers was against another along with a dressing table and a chair. A bare light bulb hung from the ceiling and a small lamp was on a table beside the bed. I switched on the lamp. No response. "Electricity from six to eleven every night," Joseph said.

The closet was a pole strung between two straps hanging from the ceiling. It was hot in the tent. Joseph opened up mesh windows in the sides and roof to let in air. "Safe here, but you leave money and passport locked in COF office."

"Where is the COF office?"

"Just outside the gate of UN compound. You look for sign."

"Thank you, Joseph. I'll come by the office after I unpack and freshen up a bit."

"Yes, madam. Welcome to Loki."

***

I suffered ups and down those first few weeks. I was lonely. I missed my children -- but not my husband. I had the feeling that the other expats living in the tent community were shunning me. My NGO had the reputation of being holier-than-thou. I had no romantic or sex life. Given my employment with a religious organization, I felt I should live up to its strict and fundamentalist principles.

Mostly I worked. Seven days a week, many hours each day I crouched over the account books, trying to make sense of them and get my organization back in the good graces of the United Nations. For a change, I went to the airport every day for a couple of hours and became adept at bossing the work gangs of Africans who shouldered bags of wheat and boxes of medicine and loaded them on airplanes. They called me "Memsahib."

To beat the heat, I bought myself a new wardrobe in the small shops along the dirt street that comprised the town of Lokichogio. Two flowery, wrap-around, knee-length skirts of the thinnest cotton, two loosely-woven, cotton blouses with short square-cut bottoms, and a pair of leather sandals met my needs. The total cost was thirty dollars.

I also bought bras and panties of the lightest possible material. The bras consisted of an elastic strip around my body just under my breasts, a triangle-shaped piece of cloth to cover each breast, and thin straps that went over my shoulders. That was it: no wires, no supports, and no padding. Wearing the bra I felt flat as a pancake, but the bra covered my nipples when I bent over to inventory sacks of grain, which I did many times daily.

The panties were also of the thinnest of cotton with no lining. The hair of my pubic area showed through the thin cloth, but with a skirt on top of them I did not feel immodest.

I quit wearing makeup. It was uncomfortable in the heat, so I used moisturizer and nothing else. I didn't fuss with my hair. I kept it washed and clean when there was water in the showers, ran a comb through it in the morning, and tied it into a pony-tail. I liked my no-nonsense look, complete with wrinkles and crows-feet which signified that I was a mature woman, 39 years of age.

I liked my body in my new clothes -- the swish of the flimsy cotton skirt, the sun shining through the skirt and showing the outline of my legs, the airy mesh of the loose blouse, barely reaching to my midriff, the suggestion of a cleft between my breasts, often emphasized with a rivulet of sweat. Why would anybody need more clothing? I was becoming a "disaster junkie" - as humanitarian relief workers derisively called themselves.

***

A month after I arrived. I had unsnarled the account books and decided to take a trip to the field -- the field being southern Sudan which was about the size of Texas and had a population estimated at 10 million people I wanted to visit the places where employees of my organization were distributing food. Mostly, I was curious.

Travel to Sudan from Loki was only by airplane. The few roads were in miserable condition and they were plagued by shifta (bandits) who roamed the region. The UN aircraft were old and decrepit cargo planes which had outlived their lives in military air forces. There were no seats on the planes; passengers sat in fold-down canvas benches along the sides of the cargo bay. The planes were loaded with sacks of wheat, boxes of medicine, bicycles, farming equipment, and construction material -- every imaginable item needed by humanitarian aid organizations working in the African bush

There were no regular flights. You went down to the airport and inquired as to when a flight might be going to where you wanted to go, asked to hitch a ride, and climbed aboard. The pilots would drop you off at one of a hundred dirt landing strips in southern Sudan. You did your work and radioed Loki when you wished to leave. In due course, which might be a day or two, an airplane would land to pick you up, kicking up a cloud of red dust on the improvised runways.

Before planning a trip, all expats were in touch with the UN security officer to find out where they could go and where they shouldn't because of fighting between the army and rebels.

I spent a week traveling from one remote airstrip to another, wearing the same clothes every day, sleeping in charpoy beds in thatched huts, eating goat stew, wala-wala (boiled millet), and ful (fava beans). At each stop, I met with tall, slender black men and women who accompanied me to project sites where I witnessed the distribution of food to people whose livelihoods had been destroyed by many years of war.

I ended my visit in Rumbek, the center of UN relief operations in southern Sudan. It was a tent city, a smaller version of Lokichogio, with an airstrip, a cafeteria, a bar in an open-sided hut, electricity part of the night, and, mercifully, a small, square concrete building with showers and bathroom facilities. I would spend the night there before returning to Loki the next day.

It was late afternoon when I arrived in Rumbek. I took a shower and cleaned myself up, and headed for the cafeteria for something to eat. The bar was next to the cafeteria. The sight of expats sitting at the round bar drinking cold bottles of Tusker beer lured me. "To hell with all this religious pretense," I said to myself. "I haven't had a beer for a month. It's hotter than hell and I'm thirsty."

I sat on a stool beside a nice-looking young man, ordered a beer, drank it down, and ordered another, along with a bowl of roasted peanuts. I talked to the young man sitting beside me. He was English, just out of the University where he had studied Swahili and East African language and culture. He was polite to a fault. I almost kicked him when, on being introduced, he called me "ma'am."

"What's your name?" I asked him as I downed the last swallow of beer and ordered another bottle and more peanuts.

"Brian," he answered.

"I'm Maggie," I said. The crowd at the bar had cleared out. Bedtime was early in the Sudan. The mosquitoes buzzed around and the electricity went off at 10 p.m. I felt a familiar tingle as I talked to Brian. The thought of sex crept into my mind, but I dismissed it, mindful of the possible humiliation of being turned down by a boy who might look on me as impossibly old and unappealing.

The god of good luck intervened. Faye arrived, pulling up beside the bar in a Land Rover with a UN official named Mark. Faye lived in Loki, and I knew her slightly. She was a tall, willowy English girl, about 30 years old, a veteran of several years in Africa, and with the reputation of being a Loki slut with an affinity for tall, black Sudanese rebel leaders. Mark was also tall and slender, about 30 years old, and was impeccably dressed in matched shorts and bush shirt. Although he was Swiss, he spoke English with a plummy public school accent which contrasted with Faye's cockney twang.

Faye and Mark were dusty, sweat soaked, and haggard from a long day in the field. "What a trip," said Faye. "And now they tell us that all the tents are taken for the night." The UN tent camp at Rumbek was the only place for hundreds of miles with electricity and running water.

I said, "Faye, you could stay with me in my tent. And Mark, could stay with...what's your name again?"

"Brian."

"Mark could stay with Brian."

Faye whispered in my ear. "Why don't you stay with Brian? I've got a thing for Mark. And Brian is a cute boy."

Faye turned to Brian. She was anything but shy. "Brian, dear, why don't you give Mark and I your tent and you stay with Maggie. She won't mind."

I hadn't said that I wouldn't mind -- but I wouldn't. The thought of having an attractive man near me, even without sex, appealed to me. I was lonely.

Brian blushed -- which made me feel even older - then smiled, and said, "Of course, if it's alright with you, Maggie."

It was, and we finished our beers and peanuts. Inconspicuously, I grabbed a handful of condoms from the bucket on a table in the bar and put them in my shoulder purse. The UN provided condoms at all its sites. "I'd better start carrying these with me again," I said to myself as the two of us left the bar and stumbled drunkenly through the lines of tents. My tent had little more in it than two narrow beds - more like cots -- an arm's length apart, each covered with mosquito netting, plus an electric lamp that would soon be turned off for the night. Brian left to retrieve his back pack from his former tent while I undressed for bed.

"What to wear?" I asked as I undressed. Usually my bedtime apparel was only a loose sleeveless t-shirt leaving my buttocks and pubic area bare. Anything more than that in the heat was uncomfortable. In the low light of the single light bulb, the t-shirt, I judged, was sufficiently modest and I put on panties to greet Brian when he returned. I could take them off once I was beneath the rough sheets on the bed.

Brian called through the flap of the tent. "Are you decent?"

"Yes, come in."

I am no stranger to men. There was my husband, of course, and over the past six years I had bedded a dozen men who were not my husband. (Being an accountant, I counted carefully.) All my affairs had been when I was traveling on my job. I didn't risk scandal by extra-marital sex in the small town where we lived - and to be frank the pickings in my small town were pretty slim.

My husband might have been suspicious about my activities, but he enjoyed the income I brought to our modest household too much to confront me, and I respected him and our marriage sufficiently to avoid a scandal that might cost him his job as a pastor of a small evangelical church.

Thousands of miles from home, the possibility of scandal was not on my mind, but there is always that awkward moment when a woman is alone with a man for the first time. This moment with Brian was particularly awkward, because I had no inkling whether are or not sex was a possibility.

I greeted Brian with a smile, facing him, not attempting to conceal my body under the skimpy t-shirt and panties. He gave me a nervous smile in return. "We have 15 minutes before lights-out. We can go to bed now, or sit and chat a bit. I have some more peanuts we can eat."

"Let's chat and eat peanuts. We never ate dinner." He sat down on the edge of his bed and I sat down on mine, facing him, our knees almost facing. I handed him a bag of peanuts and he took a handful and give the bag back to me. "It was so much fun talking to you," he added, "that I forgot all about dinner."

I relaxed a bit. At least he had some interest in me. "I need mosquito repellent on parts I can't reach on my back. Can you do me? And then I'll do you." I laughed nervously. "I'm worried about catching malaria. I slather on mosquito repellent and sleep under netting."

"That's wise." I handed him a tube of repellent. He took it and got up and sat down on my bed beside me. I turned away from him and pulled the back of my t-shirt up and he rubbed the repellent into my lower back. I straightened up and he rubbed the repellent into my shoulders, reaching inside the fabric to cover all my back and then he rubbed it into my neck and his hands extended down my chest toward my breasts. "Maybe I'd better stop there," he said, "Your turn." He pulled his shirt off. His chest was almost hairless. I liked that.

The single light bulb in the tent flickered and then went off while I was massaging the repellent into his bare chest. "Lights out," I said -- and we kissed in the darkness. I pecked him on the cheek first.- and he responded with a real kiss, and I leaned back to lie down and he followed me downward, wrapping his arms around me. I arched my back, and he pushed his groin against mine.

"Oops," I said, "I'm tangled up in the mosquito netting. Hold still or we'll tear it." I pulled the netting from under my back. "Life in the bush is difficult!" I laughed.

"This bed is awfully small." he said.

"I'm worried about it collapsing under our weight. Don't make any sudden movements."

"Shall we give it a go?" he asked.

"Does that mean what I think it does," I asked?

"Yes," he answered.

I paused for a long moment. "Don't appear too eager," I thought to myself. Finally, I said, "I think we should." Thus, I casually assented to sex. "My, God! He's so young," I thought.