Letter from Rumbek/Rob Crilly: Jobs are growing on trees in the capital of New Sudan.
Yellowing notices pinned to the thick-trunked mango trees around Freedom Square offer employment as anything from judges and civil engineers to field managers with aid agencies.
This is a place on the up.
Welcome to Rumbek, the world's least likely capital city.
In fact it is more of a capital village. Its brick buildings were destroyed in the 21-year civil war that ravaged southern Sudan and its 100,000 residents live in tukuls - mud roundels with thatched roofs.
There is no piped water, electricity or paved roads. It lacks everything it takes to forge an independent country - except the AK47s.
But things are changing. This week international donors met in Oslo to pledge $4.5 billion to kick-start development in southern Sudan.
An air of optimism has hung over Rumbek since January, when the southern rebels of Sudan People's Liberation Army signed a peace deal with the Khartoum government.
The former rebels, who now form part of a transitional government, picked the ramshackle town as temporary capital of their New Sudan.
Billions of dollars in aid and oil money is expected to flow through the administration's coffers and its war-weary residents are ready to dream.
Maker Aliap, a tobacco seller with a stall in the town's market, says: "We want a city that is like London, but we don't have the human resources to build it yet.
"Until then it is just a dream - but it is our dream to see Rumbek become a proper city, with our people returning to build businesses and skyscrapers."
The claim seems fanciful amid the dust and goats of Rumbek 2005, where the detritus of war has never been cleared away. Shallow trenches run alongside the red dirt roads and a couple of tanks lie rusting where they were halted by rebels. But the dream seems fractionally less unlikely when Sudan's vast oil wealth is brought into the equation.
The former rebels were granted a 50 per cent share of oil revenue under the terms of the peace agreement. Back-of-the- envelope calculations by United Nations officials suggest as much as $50 million a month will flow to southern government.
The money is badly needed. Social indicators are among the lowest in the world. Average life expectancy at birth is 42 years, and 90 per cent of the population earn less than a dollar a day. Many basic services are non-existent or simply limp along.
Justice Ruben Madol Arol, a high court judge, spells out the problems facing the justice system as he puffs on a cigarette in the open-sided tukul that serves as the appeal court.
Legal officials calculate that 749 judges are needed to administer justice in the whole of the south. Today, Justice Arol says, there are 29. "We don't have stationery for running of these courts, much less reference material," he says. "You cannot run the court as a professional judge by remembering your law or using common sense."
Things, however, are not as bad as they were, according to Deng Mayom de Bior.
He saw the horrors of war close up, fighting as a child soldier from the age of 11. At 13 he fled over the border into Kenya, returning at the start of this year as a reporter for the Sudan Mirror newspaper.
"Go to the market and you can see it," he says. "People are building - not just repairs like they used to do, but building from scratch. People are hopeful.
"They can't believe we have peace but realise that we have do something with it."
There are plenty of challenges ahead. The civil war was more complicated than the north versus south, Muslim versus Christian, Arab versus African caricature. Several rebel groups have not signed up to peace and ethnic clashes continue.
Meanwhile, the crucial issue of oil rights may not have been resolved. Both the former rebels in the south and ministers in Khartoum claim to have sold rights to the same oil exploration block.
Thousands of refugees are still fleeing over the border to Kenya. This time their fear is hunger rather than war. All of which means commentators believe the money promised by this week's donor conference is crucial to delivering stability and providing a basic level of services that will persuade the Sudanese diaspora to return and rebuild their shattered country.
However, with almost no infrastructure left after the civil war, the south Sudanese are going to be hard pushed to even spend the $4.5 billion raised.
As Jon Bennett, of the UN task force that drew up the funding request, says: "There is a limitation of the absorptive capacity in the south. In other words, no matter how much money they've got, they actually cannot spend it. They have a problem with being able to spend large amounts of money in a short period of time. They don't have the basic infrastructure - the administration and government bodies in place - to be able to absorb these great quantities of money."
The gleaming skyscrapers and the modern capital will have to stay on hold for now.