You Know You're In South Sudan When...

1) The kids affectionately call you Sister

2) Young children come to church alone in the dark (at 6:45am) for daily mass before school

3) Mass is occasionally interrupted by goats chasing each other through the church

4) You realize that donated clothes do actually make it to Africa

5) Kids bring you mangoes every day and try to trade them for balloons

6) You have bananas both as small as 4 inches and as long as 1 ½ feet

7) You have a blast playing Throw The Rock As Far As You Can with little kids for over an hour (it really is the simple things in life that are the best)

8) The kids’ favorite “toys” are motorbike tires, sticks with pieces of metal on the end, and cars made out of scrap metal or beer cans

     

9) It takes several hours to hand-wash your laundry, and your clothes still don’t come out particularly clean

10) Babies’ stomachs are distended from malnutrition, and “Sister, I’m hungry” is a sadly common phrase

11) You are horrified to hear someone beating and/or drowning a baby… then realize the noise is just a goat

12) The boys make bricks throughout their entire summer holidays, on the weekends, after school, and occasionally during school hours, and try to sell them in hopes of being able to earn money for their school fees

13) The kids have a very limited number of belongings, and when things rip or break (like their shoes), they just tie them back together.  They also make what they can’t afford to buy, like shoes made out of a car tire

   

14) Your goats make too much noise for one of the priests to sleep, so one by one you turn them into dinner

15) The Sisters BOSS UP on a daily basis

16) A baby owl shows up on your doorstep at the convent (because you are awesome and live in a convent) and you name her Olivia and become best friends.  Then you find her two brothers and become a Mama to all three.

17) A six-foot-long cobra also shows up at your doorstep and you have to chase it up a tree and kill it with rocks and sticks 

  

18) You freak out with excitement when new solar panels come and you are able to turn on the lights for the first time

19) You almost have a heart attack when you find out you can also use the fridge

20) At any given time, there are 20 kids around you engaged in kung fu reenactments

  

21) Football (soccer) is king

22) Kids’ wounds get seriously infected because are often unable to keep them clean/bandaged (thank God Gracie is here to nurse them back to health)

23) People pass around babies to whoever is willing to hold them (it really does “take a village to raise a child”)

24) You get to teach the Mamas in the community how to read and write

25) Women breastfeed everywhere and occasionally ‘forget’ to re-clothe themselves when they’re finished

26) People carry everything on their heads

     

27) A 10am meeting starts at 12:30 – “Africa time”

28) You use a tractor to take the kids places

29) You share the road with cars, motorbikes, pedestrians, dogs, goats, and cattle

    

30) You have to close the school for two weeks so the UN can de-mine your land

31) You have a steady stream of VIPs visiting you (Bishop,  Ministers of Education & Interior, Governor of the state, UN delegates, etc.)  because the work the Salesians are doing is vital to the community

32) The kids cultivate land that your community lets them use to help feed themselves

33) Hair plaiting (braiding) is a long and sometimes painful community affair, but absolutely necessary to do on a regular basis

  

34) Products have rip-off brand names like Adidona (Adidas), Cool Cola (Coke), Nice Cola, and Converge (Converse)

35) In a given day, students ask you to give them your pen 3,871 times

36) Ashes on Ash Wednesday are white

37) People love to dance, dance, and dance some more

38) The best conversations take place at the water-pump that the whole community shares… but you don’t understand any of it because you don’t speak Zande, the local tribal language

39) You get to be a part of major projects from their very beginnings – a new convent, new hospital, new great hall, and new school

40) Two people are buried in your front yard because you built your convent on land previously owned by villagers, and people sometimes bury their relatives next to their houses (and obviously, desecrating a grave is not kosher in the Christian faith)

41) The children provide a wonderful example of simple, exuberant love for Jesus

And the last way you know you’re in South Sudan is…
 You live a life that is happy, joyous, full of love, and intimately connected to Christ, and wouldn’t change a single moment of it for all the riches in the world.