Wedding Planning as My Vice: Life as an Aid Worker in South Sudan

Escaping the trauma through the healthiest means I can

Twenty-four days into my engagement I had my first wedding-stress dream. In the dream I went into a tiny shop for flowers. I knew I wanted to just buy a few on the cheap to throw together into a bouquet (as I’m planning to do in real life) and then the florist pressured me into buying an expensive flower package, in the midst of which, I realized my wedding is actually today and I’d forgotten! I grabbed the flowers I hadn’t wanted and spent too much on, and rushed home. There I found my fiancé and family members all sitting around, dressed up and waiting for me. “You guys, I majorly screwed up. I forgot the wedding was today. I thought I had more time.” They chuckled and murmured, but no one seemed to get that this was a crisis. “You don’t understand!” I screamed at them. “I’m supposed to get married today and I don’t have a dress yet!” Then another thing hits me, “I don’t even have a marriage license! We can’t get married!”

At that point I woke up.

As my brain fuzzily started to function, I sorted out what was real. Yes, I am getting married, but the wedding is not until August and this is still April. I have time to get a wedding dress, I have time to get a marriage license, and I am not worried about my ability to stand up to any florist.

My fiancé (or “engagement buddy” as we like to call each other) and I live and work in South Sudan. This is where we met and became friends almost three years ago. It is where both of us have gone through the trials and challenges that come from working far away from home in an active conflict zone that is also one of the poorest countries in the word. Physical hardships, physical insecurity, cultural dissonance, secondary trauma, isolation, family tragedy, the list goes on. It made us raw, and real, and by the time we’d seen each other through the worst of it, we were well on our way to being in love. South Sudan is also where he proposed, and now it is where we are doing our wedding planning until we wrap up our work contracts and move back to the U.S. at the beginning of June.

At work this week we dealt with a report of a woman abducted by armed actors outside of what was supposed to be a protected area for civilians, and her dead six-month old baby found at the scene. We are trying to figure out how to distribute food for 36,000 people in the middle of the bush without forcing women to make the terrible choice of walking to get the food through a corridor where they regularly get raped or letting their families go hungry. So yes, I am thrilled to be getting married. There is no doubt in my mind or heart that I want to be married to this man. It cannot happen soon enough, and every so often it hits me just how much fun we are going to have being together the rest of our lives and I have to give him another high-five. But I am also sad and stressed, even depressed, and so. so. tired.

The best escape I’ve found from my current reality is making wedding plans, or doing wedding research, or talking about my wedding plans and wedding research to patient friends. I live in a world of 115°F heat broken up by torrential rains, where the experiences of war and poverty are in my face everyday, new stories but always the same old tragic story, striving to make a difference, but failing on so many levels all the time, finally being broken by the little inevitable frustrations in life like running out of soap. Expat humanitarian workers in these situations are known for using vices as coping mechanisms. Usually it’s alcohol, cigarettes, over-work, casual sex.

The fact that my vice of choice here in the final stretch is wedding planning, puts me in the healthier segment of this sub-population. The hitch is that I am so far away and I can only scratch this itch so much using the Internet. I can’t visit venues, or try on dresses, or start massive, ill-advised DIY projects to occupy my mind and hands. My engagement buddy does not find hyper-wedding planning to be the outlet that I do, and therefore does not want to make decisions that we don’t have to at this point. So I stay awake until the wee small hours every night tweaking our email invitation draft, writing ridiculous bios for us on our wedding website, and obsessively checking my email inbox wondering how long I should reasonably wait before getting my mom to call the restaurants who haven’t responded yet to my email enquiries about brunch (probably longer than one weekend day), and of course reading articles on APW until they all start to blur together. There is not enough that I can do from here at this stage to meet my constant need for a wedding planning fix.

Everyday is a battle. The wedding is shaping up slowly, or so it feels to me, but it is progressing and each day brings us closer to when we get to leave. This is good as we’ve given all we have to give to this place for the time being. We have to hold out just a little longer until we get to fallback, regroup, and find new strength by joining together into one familial unit. We will get through this time of enduring, as we have gotten through all the rest of it, together. Bring it on. Because come hell or high water, both of which we have seen come to South Sudan in our time here, we are getting married this August.

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