The old Store

"Few things have as much importance in Sudan during the dry season as water when you're thirsty, lights when it's dark, and a fan when it's hot. For hose living at the center in Juba, all three are supplied through the electricity of our generator..."

This is a quote from the February 1985 edition of this branch's Prayer and Praise bulliten. We've uncovered all sorts of things as we're clearing out the store rooms so they can be converted into offices. When everyone was evacuated from here in the 1980's, everyone just packed their bits and pieces into this big store house. While some people have collected some of their more valuable things through the years, there's an awful lot of stuff still in that store! And since it used to be an actual store that imported goods from as far away as the States in order to sell to expats from other organizations, there were all sorts of things in there! We found a huge crate full of brand new, never opened jars of spices - allspice, basil, dried chives... of course, they're all over 20 years old, and no longer any good :(

I've been having a lot of fun going through the files and papers that have been left there - everything from the prayer and praise bullitens to reciepts for the work that was done on the old cars. This place used to be such a busy center - people coming and going from all corners of the country, using this as their base. There were workshops to fix the cars, the store to buy all the supplies, and in an era when computers weren't too common, a whole container full of computers on which to enter linguistic data and type up hand-written translations! Somehow, it must be quite sad for folks to come back here and see how it's really just a shadow of what it once was... and knowing that it probably will never be the same again, since we work in such a different way than we used to in those days.

And yet, from the quote that I copied above, it seems like some things never change!