PaanLuel Wël Media Ltd – South Sudan

"We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, with so little, for so long, we are now qualified to do anything, with nothing" By Konstantin Josef Jireček, a Czech historian, diplomat and slavist.

My visual aptitude at work

2 min read

By Atok Dan

Under a balamite tree, I’m a designer at work

I do peruse over my design

A makeshift of my blueprint

I curve it out of modernity

When I twig

I realized I’m a chip off the old block

I represent the African ancestors

They molded me into who am I

Even my design still traces its concept to them

Under a balamite tree, my psyche battles over alternatives

my eyes believe in appearances of work,

yet couldn’t delve on components

I built its concept on seeing,

people who reside around me called it beauty of my mental absurdity

truly I’m a poor designer though I still design

it is my a chip of stick and I at work,

ground is place board for storage

It keeps my work that I could not retrieve after it rains

I do design my sleeping byre with cows,

It is smoked with dried cow-dung,

Insects find it no more a place

My nose and eyes rain with sweat like a baker

hoping for profit in the bakery

Mine is none of a profit,

It is habitual, we keep cows

My toes and nails bear the print of hooves

Cows do step on bare toes,

My nails do complains but I heed much on cows’ complains

Even goats and sheep are less weighty on my toes

I was a herd boy

They are more of a life but life itself,

Their milk used to straighten wrinkles on my emaciated buttocks

Hides make the best of my royal form mattress

Needless do I buy matchbox

Dung do store fire

With my stomach faced on of lit kiln of cow dung,

Blankets don’t come my way in a cold

Even a litter of calf urine washes my hands for milking

In winter, I cover with ashes

In a pool, I do water with my cows

We were inseparable

I was in a cattle camp of South Sudan

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