I get up, shower, have a couple of cups of coffee, check my emails, read some blogs, and then think about tackling my workload. This is invariable followed by more coffee, more blogs and eventually I get around to making a to-do list, most of which will remain unaccomplished by the end of the day, and end up on tomorrow’ to do list. How does your day start?
A woman’s work is never done
If you’re a Sudanese woman like Jamba Besta or any of her 6-woman team, you put on your bombproof gear, and the plastic face shield that prevents you from even drinking water and start your 45-minute shift. Creeping slowly down a thin alley in the waist- high grass, you pour water on the sun-baked soil to soften it. Then you gently probe for suspicious objects that may indicate a left over landmine, explosive or any other sinister and potentially life-threatening debris that serves as a legacy of your country’s 22-year civil war.
The team’s members say they work better as an all-woman team: they have no problems with drinking and fighting and that solidarity in the long weeks away from home comes naturally because they’re all female. As does rejecting critical comments that de-mining is work only for a man.
Anything you can do, I can do just as well
“It shows those people who think that women can’t do jobs like this that they are wrong.” says Jamba, in an interview with the BBC. She is working alongside her team for Norwegian People’s Aid in Bungu, a small settlement 30 miles from the southern Sudanese capital of Juba. Bungu was a northern government outpost on a key rebel supply line from neighbouring Uganda.
The unexploded ordnance that could be hidden anywhere beneath the grass and bushes is a throwback from the battles between North and South. Northern soldiers ringed the outpost with mines to deflect the southern guerrilla forces. Some of these bombs and mines were designed to injure people; others are strong enough to take out an armoured tank.
One day, once the land is declared safe, the Bungu community want to rebuild a school that was abandoned during the war. This means checking the ground virtually an inch at a time. As the metal detectors sweep the land, the teams listen acutely for a solid squeaking that indicates hidden metal.
Girl Power
Although this is Sudan’s first all-woman de-mining team, such teams also work elsewhere, including Kosovo and Cambodia.
“Some say it is dangerous for a woman, but they are jealous because we are doing the same job as the men,” says Jamba Besta, with a laugh. Now approaching the later stages of a pregnancy, she has been assigned to logistic duties, although she led the team in the fields through the early months of gestation, and no doubt will again.
How’s that for girl power?
I’m going to go make some more coffee…
