Tech support in the Swamp - Tales from the River (an Adventure)

Hi TFTS. In the comments section of my last tale u/Soos_R asked if I could share any tales from somewhere "more dangerous". The most dangerous place I've ever worked is South Sudan - and I was there for a year, so that's where more of my stories on TFTS took place. This story includes two short tech support tales and an adventure. It's totally true, as well as I can remember, although the exact sequence of events might be a little different, and I've done my best to make the other players anonymous. The re weren't so many of us working in the swamp, so it's hard to recount things exactly as they happened without giving away a lot of identifying information.

I'd been in South Sudan for about six months when we got the boat. I was managing logistics for a medium-sized NGO, with operations on both sides of the Nile falling into my remit. We had one very large base on the West side, shared with a whole bunch of other organisations, and a much smaller base on the East side. When I first arrived, the West base was in the middle of an ad hoc settlement of tens of thousands of people who had been displaced by fighting. Resources were extremely scarce: you couldn't buy even basic wooden furniture, beer, or vegetables. the East base was in a much more developed town, complete with restaurants, mechanic's shops, a hospital, even a bank and some hotels - but our project there was far smaller, reaching only a few thousand people.

We'd been moving between the two sites by helicopter, provided by the United Nations Air Transport Service (UNHAS). That's an expensive way to travel, and a surprisingly slow one. The helicopter sometimes ran direct between the bases, but more often it would go south to the capital on a Friday, and north again to the other side of the river after the weekend. One of our donors was providing a speedboat to take us from one side of the river to the other, and to increase our reach to the small island settlements that dotted the area. We would share it with all agencies in the area, for a small fuel donation.

And it had finally arrived.

We'd hired a local guy to drive the boat. He seemed to be pretty well known among the other drivers, and the fact that his shelter was set up right beside the 'port' - a small cove in the bank of the Nile sheltered by some tall plants - seemed to back up his river credentials. He didn't speak a single word of English, and the whole time I was there I never really picked up much of the local languages. But I had colleagues who could translate.

$Manager: "Hey $UrchinJoe, now that we have the boat let's go down the river to check out some of the islands this weekend, see what's going on, what people need. And let's get lunch in town!".

$UrchinJoe: "It's 5pm Friday, it might be too late for me to arrange staff to get the boat set up but I can ask. What time do you want to set off?"

$Manager: "Oh, we won't need staff, just make sure one of the drivers is free. We'll set off at 9 tomorrow!".

I'm not super happy about that; our trial runs getting the car loaded with the kit for the boat, transferring it over at the port, getting everyone on board and getting the engine started took about three hours. It would be useless in an evacuation. So I either need to give up a few hours of Friday night to get things prepared, wake up at six on Saturday, or more likely a bit of both. I whiz around packing life jackets and spare parts kits, and a couple of spare jerrycans of petrol, and head to bed.

Next morning we get down to the port and load up the boat. Our great security measure is to keep the fuel tank separate to the rest of the boat. The driver ($Driver) connects it all up, fills the tank, and turns the ignition.

There's some off-white smoke and a spluttering noise and not much else. We all stare for a minute. He tries again, then looks at me with incredible disappointment, dips a finger in the fuel, brings it to his nose, and shakes his head.

I've brought diesel to a petrol engine. I was very tired, and probably a little drunk, OK?

We do have spare, and it's easy enough to drain everything. Fifteen or thirty minutes later we're good to go. $Driver turns the key again. Literally nothing happens this time. Our passengers become restless. $Manager stats chatting to some people wading in the river, learns a local song, occasionally shakes her head at me.

$Driver dismantles the fuel tank and connections a few times, and finally I get a moment of redemption. There's an arrow on the bulb in the fuel line, it's definitely pointing the wrong way. I gesture wildly at it; $Driver takes my meaning, swaps it, and we're away.

---

Some time passes. We visit a couple of villages, learn that the cattle are dying, meet a kid who has made a motorised toy boat using an old can of vegetable oil and a battery. We take some photos; it's genuinely very beautiful on the river, and it's teeming with life. Mostly brightly coloured birds, but also snakes, cows, and crocodiles. The biggest are around four metres long.

After a while we head for town on the East bank. Their port is much bigger, but it's dwarfed by the four barges moored alongside today. Together they move 1,200 metric tons of food downstream into the worst conflict affected areas of the country. In charge of the barges is $Markus. He's a southern African ex-mercenary, and looks exactly like you're probably imagining. About six feet tall and slightly broader, bald head, Hawaiian shirt, booming voice.

$Markus: "HEY $URCHINJOE IS THAT YOUR NEW BOAT? THESE ARE MINE!"

$UrchinJoe: "Hey dude, it's not a competition, but, uh, I guess you win. When are you heading off?"

$Markus: "Tomorrow, but it's really bad down there at the moment."

$UrchinJoe: "Yeah? What's going on? I don't get the security briefing from outside my area"

$Markus: "Well put it this way, last time I went down river, I got stopped at a checkpoint on the first day. It's not official, it's just some local guys with guns. One of them says to me 'give me enough food to fill my pickup'. I say to him 'this is for starving people down river'. He points his gun at me, and says 'don't make me tell you again'. I said 'take what you need!".

$UrchinJoe: "Oh man, that's rough. You get to the project OK after that?"

$Markus: "No way! Those guys had satellite phones so they called ahead. Every few hours I got stopped. Sometimes they make me lie face down in the mud, always they point the guns at my head. When they did that I just said 'take what you need! But it was worse on the way back. We didn't have any more food so they made us give them our water. We had to drink from the river for two days. And they took my shirt and my trousers, too".

$UrchinJoe: "Wow, did you get a break when you got back?"

$Markus: "No! I got a phone call from HQ. They said 'why did you lose this food on the river'? I said 'hey - next time, you want to go yourself?'. They said 'good work' and hung up".

$Markus doesn't work in tech support, but he understands manglement as well as anyone.

---

So, we get some food. There's an eagle that lives in the tree above the restaurant; it swoops in during the meal and steals one of my colleagues chicken straight off his plate. That guy is having a bad day; it comes back a few minutes later to try to get his glasses. We drink a couple of beers and head back to the boat, and for home.

99% of the way home there's another boat sitting in the middle of the river. It's belching out white smoke and not moving anywhere. My colleague, he's pretty sure it's a ruse, but then, he was just attacked by an eagle a few minutes ago so maybe he's attuned a bit too highly to danger right now. I tell $Driver to pull past the boat by about fifty metres and wait.

Through a translator, I asked him if he recognised the boat, and the people in it. He nods. And are they good guys? He nods again. That's good enough for me; we'll help them. What's wrong with their boat? "Spark plugs".

$Manager "OK, so what can we do? Shall we head back to town and report that there's a boat stuck, or take one of them on board and get him to the market to buy the parts he needs?"

$UrchinJoe "No need for that, boss. I packed the kit last night while I was half asleep, so I just chucked all our spare parts in that big blue box you're sitting on. There's ten spark plugs in there".

We swung back around and gave them a couple of spark plugs. It was hard to get spare parts from the capital, but at the same time it was much more important to have good will of the people around us. Especially 'cos next time we might be the ones who got stuck, and need help from them.

Edit: a spelling mistake.