I arrived on the banks of Lake Victoria on a bright sunny afternoon in January, while I was waiting for my friend Walter to pick me up, I met an American pharmacology Fulbright scholar studying at Makerere who’s friend didn’t show up and rode along with us on the long and chaotic route to Kampala.

Walter was my boyfriend when I spent a semester in Uganda on a Dal program. I guess I should say fiancé…he was the captain of the basketball team where we studied at Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST) and we hit it off right away with his open and funny personality and my gung ho tomyboyishness of which he had never encountered. Walter would cook spaghetti dinners for me in his little shared room under a coffee tree, we would walk down to the river and share a fresh papaya and talk about politics and then walk to campus to watch soccer with friends under a mango tree or study together near the basketball court. He took me to visit his parents and brothers when they were in Kampala visiting last time 3 years ago, his father was the Nebbi District Chairman, and they were very traditional although they were happy that Walter and I wanted to get married, eventually in the future when his 5 older brothers were married first (so I knew I had time!) his parents insisted that all of their children attended post-secondary and they did. 

We stayed in a different flat than the one where we had visited his parents. This flat was ‘the unmarried children flat’ with one room for the girls and one room for the boys. The building itself was built by the Idi Amin administration for bureaucrats as an entitlement and I’m sure it had seen better days. By the time I arrived as a guest the building looked like it had been looted and set on fire (multiple times), it was basically a poured concrete, multi level, multi-family structure with no glass in the windows, no running water or electricity most of the time and occasionally someone would put up newspaper or magazine articles about English premiership as wallpaper. There was a ‘housegirl’ (a relative from Nebbi) in the flat who would bring up water and make cooking fires in the kitchen. There were doors but these were no match for the giant cockroaches who could come and go through the various flats. When I first saw one of these in the girls bedroom, which overlooked the trash heap being picked over by towering Marabou storks, I let out an involuntary shriek at which Walter and his brother Eric laughed and exclaimed “you cant be worried about cockroaches, they run away from you, it’s the rats who will run towards you!” Needless to say, sleeping in the girls room all alone close to the glassless window, I tucked in every mm of that mosquito net and stayed cocooned in my sleeping bag aware of every rat-like noise throughout the duration of the darkest nights I had ever encountered in a city without electricity.

The daytime consisted of listening to 90s R&B and election news on the wind up radio and reading while the guys were out at work. Apparently the electricity shortage was a Museveni power play to coerce the city into voting him in again, since the contracts for electricity provision were in his name and would not be transferred over to any other President.

Walter and I took the bus back down to Mbarara where we first met, munching on sticks of nyama choma sold through the window when traffic was slow, he introduced me as his wife to everyone we met and we stayed with our old friends from MUST, Henry and Angela who we partied all night with at our old spot, Vision Empire – a completely dark dancehall (and Céline Dion) themed club with multiple floors and boiled potatoes with intestines for that 5am food binge. We also took boda bodas out to the school I taught at to visit the growing students who miraculously remembered me. I promised the head and founder of the school Enid Kanyanyeyo, that I would be back to take over the school when she was ready to retire as promised in the emails we exchanged quite frequently.

Omdurman

I can remember walking out of the airport and into the warm night air with no wind and nothing but inky black sky and highway as far as the eye could see and only $10 US left until my first pay check in 12 days. A strange British man (my new boss, James) recognized me and pulled me out of the slow moving, sleepy crowd while directing his driver to grab my suitcase. 

Blogging was illegal in Sudan at the time, so I was sure to set one up right away!

Here was my first entry:

“Well, I have now been in Sudan for about a week. Life is pretty tough here, the weather is warm, everything is clean, they have pizza and the best shistaooks and ice cream I have had in a while. The cost of living is a bit higher than it is in Uganda, but still a lot lower than in Canada. There are UN sanctions (think oil for food program) here so it is difficult to get some foriegn things, or to send money abroad, but people seem to find a way around it. The African Union Summit was held here last week so we got a three day holiday, there was also a curfew in Khartoum, fortunately for me I live across the river in Omdurman. The city is ancient (re: battle of Omdurman with Gordon), and not densely populated which is great. The people are oh so friendly and very willing to help me learn Arabic in exchange for English tutoring... I think the year will be fantastic, inshallah. Trivia Question of the day: Who is the infamous person who used to live in a part of Khartoum now called Riyadh??”

Here are some other details, I shared a flat with 2 other teachers; Liverpool Valerie and Macedonian Elena who were lovers who met in Indonesia a decade ago and were not happy to share their place with me. They turn out to not be very nice at all, invited me to parties with them and then ditching me at the last minute, leaving any room that I walk into that they are already in. Besides James, there is another boss, Christine with her son Zach who appears to be older than 5 and younger than 16 (I was really not good at kids ages at this time in my life). They all advised me to only sign a 6 month contract, besides that I met a South African journalist on the flight from Entebbe who gave me the contacts of some of her UNICEF friends in Khartoum, so I should get my dream job any day now…

I do have to do my own grocery shopping, so I learn Arabic about 3 words at a time to request olives, bananas, pasta, bread and tomatoes from a small shop on the corner. Eventually, I will wander out further to souk Omdurman to buy things but I have to walk the 1km distance because I don’t speak enough Arabic to hire a rickshaw, nor do I know how to explain where I live because there are no street names. It all seems a bit risky considering James took my passport and I don’t have a cellphone or even any spare cash. On payday James will drive me across to Khartoum for more European grocery selection, but the rest of my time is spent walking back and forth to the school and the flat, teaching 2 classes, reading Jane Austen and pretending not to be hungry. My snot is black from all the dust in the era and I have had diarrhea since Uganda. Omdurman is a beautifully unique place where little has changed for centuries. Giant women swish by in colorful tobes, teetering on high heeled sandals in their henneaed feet. From my bedroom I can hear the bells of the public girls school across the street and see the small blue camouflage bodies with black scarves flowing behind them as they walk to and fro. The other sounds include the constant barking of feral dogs and so many converging live (not pre-recorded) calls to prayer, so many different chirping birds. On the corner of the street is a special constable who’s job is to catch any Sudanese people breaking sharia law while in the company of us foreigners, he is a surprisingly friendly guy.

Eventually I start making friends, first with one of the office staff at school, Romaisa, who wants help with English vocabulary like ‘sandblast’, ‘ancestor’, and ‘flashback’ and she helps me with useless Arabic vocabulary as I sit with them in the cool air-conditioned office when the lovers kick me out of the apartment so they can grind to “Tempted to Touch” privately on their ghetto blaster. Yassir, one of the Sudanese Teaching Assistants, a proud Communist recently freed from compulsory military service, notices my isolation and pounces- inviting me to hang out at the grassy patch on the bank of the Nile where we talk about mostly traditions, studying literature in Canada and politics. Sometimes we even take these conversations to a rickety fishing boat and watch some guy fish while we sit on his boat, not helping at all as the big dramatic sunset unfolds. I realize much later that Yassir thinks and announces that we are dating, despite my assertion that we are not. In the meantime, he takes me on fabulous tours of ht Mahdi’s tomb, the Khalifa’s house (both just down the street from the school) we hit every market (and tea/juice stall) in town and when the Coummnist party brings the 73 year old pan-African legend, Miriam Makeba to town during the African Union Summit, Yassir has his comrades arrange a front row seat for us.

Shabab

Inshallah means God willing. It is a beautiful word that easily rolls of the tongue. Having said that, I have discovered that there are many not so beautiful words which don't roll off my tongue as I have just struck a deal for Arabic lessons with a student at the college here. He is a great teacher and very patient, everyone has said that my printing of Arabic script is beautiful and always congratulate when I use a new word!

The students for the most part are great- and it is very obvious when they don't understand something, which was something I was worried about. I often feel as if I am reciting a soliloquy wrong, cause I am up there at the front of the class performing like a jack-ass with absolutely no response. But that doesn't happen most of the time, and thankfully my 2 beginners classes have been handed over to Sudanese teachers. I end up going to a lot of concerts and arts events with them including performers from southern Sudan portraying pastoralism and war. Yassir brings me to the female side of one of the oldest Sufi mosques in Omdurman, where the teach me how to wear a hijab and the rhythm of jumping , bowing and pronunciation for this very dynamic afternoon prayer followed by Pepsi and snacks.

Everyday I teach a class at El Niliain (that means the convergence of the two Niles) University in the Computer Science Faculty, it is in Khartoum so I get to see the Nile twice every day. The guy who drives me is super shy so he never says anything, which is fine cause I am usually tired of talking by that time. I do know that he is a big Janet Jackson fan though... He drops me off in front of the Heavily guarded/fenced US Embassy, so that everyone probably thinks I am American (if they don't already)! I suppose it is worse to be Danish right now anyway, I just hope Stevie Harper minds his manners while I am here. There are sooo many stray dogs that sleep outside the embassy, yesterday I counted 8 altogether puppies and big dogs all in a big gross flea infested pile! At least they aren't mangy or rabid. I always walk very carefully around them, although I almost stepped on one yesterday we all know it is best to let sleeping dogs lie....

The other thing that keeps me busy is the informal conversation English Club, which takes place in the evenings so professionals can attend. The English is more advanced in this group so we can have conversations – I love these sessions. In one we watch and discuss Brendan Fraser chopping down ‘Arab hordes’ in the movie “The Mummy,” while the harmony of the muezzins add to the soundtrack.  When I am not there I am usually in the student cafeteria helping whoever stops by earlier or stays late with vocab and pronunciation or just talking about their lives and helping them write foreign university and international NGO job applications

I finally spent the day in a Sudanese home. It was a great day filled with warm family, delicious food, bumping Ethiopian beats and broken conversation. One of the Sudanese teachers at the school invited me to meet his family so I seized the opportunity. Two of his sisters live at home while their husbands are off working in Saudia Arabia, while one of his sisters is a divorced lawyer and she took me to get my hands hennaed at a local beauty shop. It took about an hour, she is so nice she told me I am now her sister, next week we are going to the market together. When we arrived back at the house the other 4 sisters insisted on dressing me up like a Sudanese bride and taking tonnes of pictures! I felt like a doll- hold your hands like this, now like this, do this... It was fun. The catch is only married women can have their feet hennaed. I am told it lasts for about 2 weeks and then you have it redone. It is one of the things the Sudanese are famous for, well that and defeating the British.

Generally girls (unmarried women) here aren't really permitted by their families to go out past 9pm so yeah, most of my friends are male just because we share the same freedom. I have engineering friends who take classes with Val, they pick me up in a lit up, fur lined mini van to wildly cruise the streets looking for cakes for tea parties on a dark and deserted beach along the Nile or to an amusement park with newly wedded honeymooning couples from the country( they wanted to have their pictures taken with me! which makes me feel like a freak and a celebrity at the same time). It was a very nice evening with kids playing (nicely) everywhere, ice cream and unsafe Conklin style rides. Saif, Omer, Hasieb, Izzat, Ahmed, Weil, Ahmed and I become a philosophy club shula over time. 

There is also my friend Hitham, a computer science professor at AL Nilain who I go on long walks with listening to how he grew up on a military base in UAE. Hitham introduces me to Ibrahim who is a cameraman for Al Jazeera and claims through a mischievous smile that he filmed John Garang’s last flight. We met at Ibrahim’s girlfriends wedding, which is quite common in a country where your family picks your spouse and you pick your secret lover. Everyone insists on keeping public life and private life separately.

Dr. Omer is a friend of my friends, Romaisa and Husam and we are introduced at one of the many weddings we attend. He is completely multilingual (Arabic, English and Romanian) tall, dark, handsome, funny and magnetic.

I start working on an English course for employees of the Ministry of International Cooperation development/NGO English, what a fantastic opportunity to get into development work! In the meantime the philosophy shula topics have broadened  to human rights, the Holocaust and Darfur, since the Shula are either from Darfur or were sent to Darfur or the southern part of the country as part of their mandatory military service.

The first South Sudanese person I do meet is a street kid, they are called ‘sun children’ and are mostly refugees with no place to go. This kid was high on glue as he slowly stopped near me sneering khwajia as he asks for money in English. With all the friendliness and generosity of my friends from Darfur, Kordofan, Dongola, Khartoum and Omdurman it is hard to imagine that these ‘two Sudans’ exist side by side.

I visited my friend Husam's chicken farm because I am a thrill seeker- apparently there is bird flu in Egypt and Ethiopia but not in Sudan so I had to visit it before it arrives. The farm is a really nice and peaceful place just on the outskirts of the city in a place called Shambat. Where his sister, who works for the Ministry of Agriculture as a veterinarian lives, she is the first person I have met so far who has travelled to Canada.

Visiting friends and their families, holding cute babies- every time I visit someone they insist on feeding me several courses of food and drinks, it really saves me money on groceries, because people are always inviting me to visit. The down side, as I keep telling everyone is that I am running the risk of getting very fat along with massive cavity counts- they eat dessert before AND after meals here (something my stepdad would LOVE). I will risk it anyway.

I experienced my first Haboob this week, and then the second and then the third... It is a dust storm, much like a Canadian snow storm but with dirt instead of nice clean snow. The dust gets EVERYWHERE. 

Hitham and Ibrahim will pick me up after work at 9pm and we will go crusiing through graveyards in Bahry to a beautiful beach where we stand in the warm water and listen to the traditional music playing in the distance from the near and distant wedding celebrations that are shut down due to curfew by 11am. Then we grab some Syrian sweets and vanilla flavoured milk in old fashioned bottles to sip on the way home stopping to look at the city from the stadium bridge. Or we go smoke sheesha in the swanky din of the Hilton and play pool with Dr. Omer and his sidekick Sadiq who happens to be Romaisa’s secret boyfriend. One of these nights ends when we get pulled over by an enthusiastic member of the morality police who makes some insulations about lewdness. Ibrahim tears him a new one and this scraggly looking 19 year old pulls us over again, this time extending a rose to me in the backseat to apologize for making me nervous. I have no idea what the conversation was between them but Ibrahim and Hitham think the whole thing is hilarious.

When I’m not with the Shula or working I sometimes help students and their families with immigration paperwork and studying for the Green card interview. Because Sudan is so locked out of the US sphere of influence, there are a lot of references they just don’t know about, side from the whole English thing.

Sebaloga means waterfall, but I didn't see any. Tonnes of fun- campfire cooking, boating, climbing "mountains," it was like camping in Canada- even the weather was like Lethbridge in August. The drive there- not so Canadian, there is only a paved road for part of the 2hour journey. We were stopped at a military roadblock where one of the shula tells them I am their sister, so nothing immoral is going on. Since the UN meeting in New York a couple of months ago where President Bashir was restricted to a 5 mile radius of the UN headquarters, he applied the same rules to all foreigners in Khartoum.  I was sure we were going to get lost cause it was in the middle of NOWHERE and I kept saying to myself I should have brought water...

When we arrived we set up camp. All the guys suggested I should start cooking- I say "I don't know a thing about making Sudanese camp food!" So one of the guys calls up his wife and asks her how we should cook all this food they bought! I was placed on stirring duty, while we sip juice, play cards, listen to music and talk about Sudanese politics in the middle of the desert in the shade of an ancient iron mountain.

I get a stomach infection from drinking the river water, there was a rotting piece of flesh floating in it, so this is to be expected really. But that doesn’t stop me from heading down to the fish market with the Shula to welcome our new member Hijo, the fundamentalist with the gorgeous smile and Bob Marley addiction. He explains that in the town where he grew up the Muslim brotherhood offered to take care of his family after his mother was widowed when the government wouldn’t. The hot fish sitting in the warming lights makes my stomach infection worse, so its another round of cipro but I ended up in bed for about a few days until Hitham and Ibrahim come check on me with supplies for life and tidy my room.

On another trip I am invited to Tutti island, a rural idyll in the middle of the Nile. We take a little boat there, more like a canoe, walk through the fields and onto a pristine beach where we all swim full clothed. The only places you are allowed to swim in a bathing suit are at the foreign hotels or the Greek Club.

Through negotiation and another competing job offer to teach, I have recently acquired a new flat- huge, no cockroaches and by myself!, thanks to Valerie and Elena and their committed disdain for my presence. Yesterday I had my extra "fortnightly" day off. The morning was spent buying dishes for my new (original) flat, when the two former roommates vacated they took many of the dishes with them... I have now moved 4 times since I arrived! Buying dishes in the souq is certainly an adventure and not something I would try to do on my own! I had some friends over for tea and then we went to Souq-a-naga for lunch. Naga means camel, so guess what this kindly butcher chopped up for us? Yup, camel. The first course we (my friends -no raw meat for me since the stomach infection) had raw camel livers with onions, salad and roasted camel meat. It is really tasty- similar to goat but leaner, I could eat it everyday! Second course was mutton, which isn't as tasty and really chewy. Here is the process- the market is huge, so you go around to different vendors and buy meat and vegetables then you bring it to a cooking station where an unhygienic lady who just finished picking her nose will cook ( or not cook in the case of livers) and prepare salad and everything for you then you eat it with bread and wipe your greasy mouth with your hand/arm ( thats just me). As delicious and fun as this is as per usual there are not a lot of women there besides the ones who are working.

Afterwards we went to the beach near the presidential villas, which are oversized condos, built for the sole purpose of housing presidents and thier overbloated entourage during the African and Arab summits- a huge waste of money. It makes me ill looking at it...

Last Friday I went boating with some new friends to a place called crocodile island in the middle of nowhere. Whilst on the boat I remarked to one of my female co-passengers "say, is that a bathing suit you are wearing under your clothes?" she confirmed my suspicion whilst I silently wished I had thought to wear mine. Long story short, I ended up going swimming in my underwear risking possible arrest but it sure was worth it.

After about one hour of sleep the night before I headed out to see the Pyramids in Merowe. Amazing! You would have to be a fool to see them in Egypt when these ones are cheap, untouched and tourist free! We were pretty much left to our own devices to roam around the place accompanied by a local 14 year old solider acting as a tour guide. The "tour" was in Arabic so I was only privy to the few scraps of translated info my friends decided to occasionally toss my way. It is about 10 degrees hotter there so I'm guessing 56ish- like standing on the surface of the sun! Because I was wearing flip flops I actually had to pull down my jeans a bit so the legs would cover my feet...

There has been a dust storm here for the last week, fun stuff. If I had a quarter for every grain of sand crammed in my sinuses, I'd be rich...

Despite being incredibly tired after 9 hours of working yesterday, I went to a local restaurant(remember kids no pubs here) to watch Argentina v. Cote D'Ivore while enjoying an alcohol free guava juice. The match was shown on an incredibly small tv (which actually cut out a few times) with Arabic announcers. The place was pretty crowded and I couldn't help noticing that I was I was the only Argentina fan present (although I do harbour great affection for Drogba) - so I muffled my cheers as they went on to win. I was also the only woman present, a situation I have come to accept since women don’t really get to enjoy weekend activities in the daytime hours here due to household work loads.

Many Khartoum Sudanese are "funny" this way; they pretty much seem to claim an Arab identity when it comes to anything (culture, dress, language, religion, etc.)- except football (soccer). During World Cup everyone here is supporting the continent an odd brotherhood of convenience forged perhaps because they know Senegal has a far better shot at the Cup than Saudi Arabia does.

Because sometimes it gets lonely living on your own and I never had time go find things in the souk and then cook, one of my Business English students and now my friend Rna has invited me to stay with her family a couple of times every week. Her mother has initiated the idea to help her 2 daughters learn English faster and to help me, as an act of charity. On those nights she would pick me up from the school and we drove around downtown Khartoum for entertainment, which usually includes sitting in cars by the Nile eating shistaook with our illegal boyfriends. When we get home, we go up to the fourth floor, where her mother is drinking coffee and talking on the phone. Rna’s mother is also half Morroccan and half Darfuri, her ancestors are nomadic Sahel traders; she is always sprawled across the red satin cushions on the floor at this hour where Rana reports the days transactions as she gives her mother a foot massage.   There are usually visitors, business associates and always her brother, Uncle Jamal, who does all the male stuff for the house that his sister isn’t allowed to do because of Sharia Law. She has been divorced three times, divorce is very easy and common in Sudan, which was a surprise to me.

On Friday everyone* in Sudan sleeps until noon, because it is the only day off. Our breakfast was 5 more cups of incredibly strong Ethiopian coffee and traditional Sudanese food I can’t write in English, but very tasty- one is garlicky porridge and the other sugary couscous. At around 6 we would go to one of Rna's mother's beauty shops with the blacked out windows so no male can see inside (she owns 5 and a logistics company that brings stuff from Ethiopia) and I get my hair done (extensions) and hands hennaed and then back for "lunch" at 9pm.

The process of henna- 1st, you stick your hands in a pit of smoldering cedar for 30 minutes for the ink to absorb better, they call it a sauna, my hands smell like a (forbidden) tasty smoked ham by the end! Secondly, the expert draws an amazingly inspired design she seems to pull out of thin air. It takes over an hour to dry and you can't move your hands at all, but there are Greek and Egyptian soap operas on the TV to help past the time. When it dries you pick off all the remnants and wash your hands for 15 minutes. It lasts about 3 weeks. The shop is amazing and  they speak Arabic really fast so it is hard to catch anything of what people say but most things can be caught in observation as women come in to get their skin lightened and Somali students come in from the nearby women’s college to relax without their burqa’s, one girl has the skimpiest night dress underneath! By Saturday evening the place is like a nightclub locker room with music and dancing led by the divorced female employees and clients.

In the summer it is too hot to eat or sleep. The electricity isn’t consistent enough to keep the A/C on in one room where Rna, her sister and I share a bed and her clothes; although clothes seem absurd, especially long pants and shirts! Even the water that comes out of the taps of the shower is near the boiling point, as the pipes run across the roof. We start sleeping on rope beds outside on the top of the building where that no one can see us in our house dresses, but we can look down and see the neighbors sleeping in their compound. The temperature on the roof at night is still about 30 degrees with no wind but cooler than inside the house. Once the sun rises at 6am, it feels like a laser burning through your body as you lay in that rope bed – I have never felt the sun be so intensely hot so early in the morning. I have recently made new terms for my friendships- any plans we make together have to include cold juice and air conditioning!

Rna’s mother has an in-house diviner and Aljazeera on her phone to help her make business decisions. I recently got caught up in one of Daniel’s shell readings even though I am usually quietly sipping gawa in the corner observing. Daniel is one of the many Eritrian/Ethiopian refugees in Sudan who were denied Ethiopian Nationality when Eretria became a nation because only the father’s nationality is passed down to children. 

Daniel looks at me and tells me I have a pain in my stomach that I cant get rid of with antibiotics (this is true, I have finished 2 rounds given to me by doctor colleagues of Omer)and that the pain is caused by the evil eye. He also told me that my brother had died, my parents were divorced and that my mother was mentally unwell and tired, that my father would remarry and have a boy and a girl (his current girlfriend has both of these and the soon moved into together). He told me my current boyfriend is jealous and if I go to Ethiopia I will find a job but if I stay here I would get a promotion and a car (this does happen, I start to drive a little Atoz that constantly needs coolant to run in the unforgiving desert). He then tells me I will have a Sudanese baby soon and that I will be moving to a country very far from Sudan. When I tell this to Omer he agrees that the evil eye seems to be the best explanation for the relentless stomach infection I’ve had and tells me all the cases he knows of including twins and beautiful babies, this is why Sudanese people will try and deflect compliments by butting a mark on a babies face or separating twins in public because anyone can give you the evil eye unknowingly through jealousy or envy. Now, I am not one to believe in such stuff but based on the aforementioned information he had, I was nearly worked up into a frenzy. I didn't sleep for most of the night thinking about this damn evil eye, and the next day I promptly set to researching how to rid myself of it. I ended up going to the souq and buying a chain with a hamza caffe on it to protect me from future damage. However, it does not get rid of the old evil eye. I have to get some black seeds for that. Within a week the stomach infection is gone.

Media 

There is an ad in the English language newspaper for a part-time copy editor and I apply. It’s a little extra cash, funded by the American National Endowment for Democracy, and I get to work on war stories. I went to visit a radio station, modest yet uncluttered and efficient. All the staff were surprisingly welcoming, I think they were eager to show off the project. The station is guarded by 2 dozy soldiers in flipflops. Afterwards one of the staff insists that I meet his family, I was reluctant since it was after midnight and sure enough we wake up his grandfather, whose colostomy bag along with god knows what else in plain view having escaped from his tangled jalaibyea, along with 2 uncles just so they could enthusiastically meet an English teacher! This was something embarrassing that happened quite often with older people who wanted the British to stay on in Sudan rather than gain independence in 1956. These are some of the only people who learned English in colonial schools and my presence represents a kind of nostalgia cut off for them once Arabization became the official mandate.

The other English editor is a Kiwi named Wendy and we become friends, I mostly realize because she really wants to find a boyfriend through me. The newspaper is run by a former BBC media journalist from South Sudan, Alfred Taban, and we discuss politics south of Khartoum whenever he is in the office, including the components of the new Comprehensive Peace Agreement to hold the country together. Some of the other staff are also from other marginalized areas of Sudan, the East, Darfur, Nuba, Kordofan, and they encourage me to head out to these areas to report with my impenetrable Canadian passport, a suggestion I decline knowing full well that the consular warned me when I registered, they would not be able to help me if I did get in trouble.  During this time I also meet up with my friend Madut’s sister who is studying in Khartoum and it is so wonderful to pass on news of how well he is doing in Canada.

On Canada Day there is a party being hosted at the Canadian High Commission in Khartoum. By now I know enough Arabic to get myself there in a taxi.

I have never been to a Canadian Embassy before. There is a pool in this one and I am nervous about meeting other Canadians but shouldn’t have been. When I walk in the gate the ratio of men to women is about 8 to 1 and I am the only woman under 30. The counselor’s wife from Saskatchewan is the closest in geography and age to me. There is a little formal ceremony for those who are government employees from Nova Scotia and their presence is mandatory including the RCMP trainers and the mechanics from Mississauga brought in for the maintenance of the Canadian Beechcraft for the UN, as well as 2 spies who claim they work with the embassy ‘reading newspapers.’ Those of us who are at the event for entertainment are myself and quite a few Indian military officers heading the UN mission who just like Canada and there was nothing else going on.

Once the High Commissioner leaves, the party gets crazy and we all end up in the forbidden pool in our underwear while the Canadian Club flows like water. I was definitely an oddity at this party with hennaed hands and feet, living and hanging out with mostly Sudanese people. The UN people get a signal about a pool party at the nearby Dutch Embassy heating up so we head over and get folded into the American Embassy staff upon arrival since the Europeans have long ago disrobed once the party pills hit hours ago.

The beginning of the end for me in Sudan starts here in September. The English school where I work stops paying local staff so I try to get the other foreign teachers to stage a walkout and the boss fights back by threatening to never return our passports (I refused to hand mine over when I arrived). I get a new job as a Travel Agent with a Sudanese company that wants me to book holidays for UN employees because they are more likely to buy holiday packages from a Khawadjia. Most of my job entails going to foreigner parties and letting people know I can put together any kind of holiday they are looking for – I have a few in my pitch deck including the Egyptian pyramids, Kenyan safaris, Ghanaian beaches and South African culture.

 I’m sitting at the front desk of the shiny new office in Khartoum when a super friendly (Australian?) guy sits down across from me to inquire about a ticket home to South Africa. When I tell him the price, he invites me for dinner which I accept with no intentions other than friendship and tell him I am currently dating someone. After a few dates with this focused, sincere, attentive and sweet guy we end up dating and spending time at the UN contractor compound he lives in, swimming in the pool, watching rugby and drinking castle with the European and South African staff, enjoying buffet meals made by a chef. This is the most time I’ve spent with white people since I arrived in January and I feel a bit of culture shock to be honest and always look forward to the all day news and coffee rituals with the scents of homemade perfume and spiced meat on a charcoal grill at Rna’s feminist stronghold as I leave the compound before morning prayer to get back into her house so that the neighbors won’t report Rna’s mother to the police for having a foreign woman at their place. Although this does eventually happen, Rna’s mother is accused of operating a brothel and is even held at the police station! And let me tell you, I feel sorry for whatever skinny simp had to try and contain Aliwea.

Jobs

The way work permits work in Sudan (and most countries in the world) is that the company that brought you to the country is responsible for you so your permit is tied to them, like a parent. In order to switch jobs and my corresponding negative HIV results and corresponding intel file from the Interior Ministry, a new company has to ask for permission to ‘adopt me.’

The Travel agent job networking leads me into more traditional NGO territory as I meet a lot of them at the various Embassy and UN parties. One Australian woman working as a graphic designer for UNICEF tells me the way she got her job was drinking and dancing, this does happen for me at one point where a tipsy European man offered me a flight planning job in Malakal if I come to his place n the morning to discuss the contract, I decline. Another British woman advises me that the UN is a good place to end your career but not to start it because it will rob you of any idealism you may have in your 20s.

I also have a few job prospects from Sudanese friends including one from Indian friends working in hospitality jobs to support the South Asian contingent of UN personnel locked out of European opportunities and Rna’s great-uncle Taha who offers me a UN job in Juba as a favour with Rna and her mother helping to negotiate the contract. When Taha includes the stipulation that I date him into the contract, the deal is off, Aliwea is furious and tries to find something else.

The something else is a construction job in the north with friends of the family Abu Grace the mechanical Engineer and his niece Manahil, an Architectural Engineer and I am invited to drive with them to the project site the next day. The 11am journey began at 5pm with Manahil’s sister coming with us and making ‘lunch’ in the backseat of the Volkswagen and we arrive in Ad-Dāmar around 9pm and everyone gets busy cooking dinner in the dark and washing in the chocolate milk looking water. While our hosts (Shampoo, Yassir and Caro- more cousins, and Osama, Mai’s fiance) welcome us It is so much hotter than Khartoum is, even at night so I try lying on a rope bed, staring at the stars, listening to donkeys and wedding drums in the distance without moving to keep myself cooler. 

The morning arrives like a laser, with the grittiest tea I’ve ever had in this drought worn place as I try to limit my movements in 50 degree heat, feeling like a World Vision ad as I do not have the energy to raise my arm to swat away the flies that have travelled from the chunk of flesh on the table to the only place on my face with moisture, my eyes. The Nile runs through the city but barely at a trickle and people have to sieve out all the sediment to get any water out of it. This is not a great situation for those of us menstruating as it is impossible to get clean bucket bathing in the pit latrine. The day is spent first heading into Atbara, the site of the British defeat by the Mahdists to one of the oldest Camel markets on the continent. Since the Ja'aliya tribe that mostly frequents it forbid their own women from attending, I am a double ticket side show, riding in the back of a pick up with my new pal Shampoo and a man’s scarf wrapped around my head to keep the various sizes of sand/dust out. We later head to the construction site for afternoon tea in a sliver of indifferent shade while we watch the workers imported from South Sudan labour in the unbearable heat. I don’t know how to ask the questions about how they got here and if they are being paid because often work for IDPs is paid in kind with room and board. Instead I sit politely and nod with as little effort as I can to not tempt more sweat or exertion of any kind. I definitely cannot work on this project. Nothing grows or is really imported here, we eat meat, yogurt and a type of flat bread washed down with Pepsi for every meal. On the way back to our accommodation we head to the desolate Nubian part of town to pick up a housekeeper from her hut made of straw and dust held together with camel urine, she left her malnourished brood of children behind. Nubians are very dark and mostly Coptic Christians, so it is easy to mistake them for South Sudanese when in Khartoum. She is very sweet and curious about me but we have to rely on made up sign language as she neither speaks Arabic or English, I do however decline to share her soft drink, I just cannot get another round of diarrhea here – I would surely die of dehydration in this place that rain doesn’t touch.

When we get back to Khartoum, I am busy planning a big event to launch the partnership between the travel agency I work at and Cathay Pacific, we are hosting a bunch of dignitaries from Sudan and Bahrain with secret whisky bottles at the Syrian Club to mark the occasion. One of the dignitaries who has taken a keen interest in me is a former Military Intelligence Officer for Bashir and a relative of my South Sudanese colleague, Peter, who warns me that he is a ruthless murderer. I thwart his advances with my practiced polite flakiness. The travel agent job is great, they send me for a week of training with IATA, which happens to be only in Arabic, but I imagine to follow along enough to be certified as an official travel agent in a program called Amadeus. Besides this I get an opportunity to travel to Cairo for the biggest tourism expo in the Middle East and it is amazing! However this trip is in lieu of me getting a paycheck so I live it up in the freedom and flirtatiousness of Egypt before I look for another job.

Ramadan starts and the office is getting increasingly tense as so many people have quit all their ‘bad’ habits at once, cold turkey. One of my coworkers strangles another as an argument escalates and this chain smoker has no distraction from violence anymore. The water coolers are removed, the Eritrean and Bangladeshi “tea boys” are sent to their tarp shelter in the back of the compound and traffic is an angry confused mess by 4pm as people rush to get home or to mosque to pray. By the time I get home to Rna’s, she has already been cooking, supervising house staff and working all day at the salon to prepare for the midnight feast that starts with apricot soup and then works its way up through all kinds of salads, yoghurts, juices then meats and rice, acidah, sauces, so many sweets with endless amounts of coffee and sheesha. I am also invited to a few iftars at work but restaurants are closed unless you have a foreign passport or have ID to prove you are not Muslim, which my South Sudanese colleague, Peter does. 

For the Eid holiday I return to Uganda but spend most of the trip 4 hours away by bus at the old school teaching and helping with admin tasks in Mbarara while Walter stays in Kampala at his new border agent job.

Expats

At this point I have also moved into a flat with a Filipino couple and their 13 year old daughter, whom I met at a party they hosted for the ‘other’ foreigners who are not a) UN employees or b) White Expats, and offered me a wonderful space in the flat his (Denis) communication infrastructure company pays for. The other foreigners at these rooftop karaoke bashes include mostly Filipinos working in the service industry, journalists on assignment who are tasked with reporting on the wars without ever leaving Khartoum with a smattering of Irish, Turkish and Jordanian businessmen wit their mostly Ethiopian girlfriends. Denis’s wife Cherie works as an assistant to the Consular of Finland, another Sudanese returnee with a Swiss passport who invites us over for pigeon adobe. I love staying with Rna and her family but things with her neighbors have become more tense since Ramadan and I don’t want to get her mother into more trouble, so staying within the same neighborhood with the Reyes is a great compromise.

The last job I ended up getting is with a Toronto based logistics company that manages fuel supplies for the African Union Mission in Darfur. This is the first time I work with Canadians and in the security contractor space. For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated and interested in Russian culture; before Africa replaced it at the forefront of my imagination when I first touched the ground in Entebbe. A funny fact about Sudan is that many professionals got their education for free in the USSR and this continued after its fall. So some doctors and engineers, after spending so much time abroad come back with Russian, Ukrainian or Romanian wives and I would sometimes meet them in someone’s compound chatting in Arabic, bent over a charcoal grill in a traditional tobe all hennaed up and paler than me!  My boss is another Sudanese- Canadian (a Coptic refugee from the 70s who has returned) and my closest colleague whom I introduce to the street breakfast special of ful in the office, which we all share, is Sascha, a Jewish Russian from Toronto who came here specifically to bridge the communication gap between the Antonov pilots from Russia and Ukraine and the boss. Sascha is such a breath of fresh air, we share so much in common with regards to books, music and travel, he is a great listener and we are able to have a lot of honest debriefs about living here while developing a deeply connected kinship. I sometimes go with Sasha to the big family house where all the 20 or so pilots and aircraft crew stay bunked up together, by pooling their meagre pay from the African Union they create extravagant feasts which they exchange with me for English lessons. On one of these visits, some of the pilots insist on holding a wedding for the 2 of us to liven things up and teach me some of their traditions while Sasha patiently translates. The evening started with backgammon and illegally procured Ugandan whisky sold in little plastic sachets, Sasha and I are placed together at the head of the table where we are served homemade cabbage salad, borscht and pilmini followed by a big roast beef that Sasha and I had procured over our lunch break since none of them can speak a word of Arabic. Following dinner, we are ushered to the balcony which happens to have a backdrop of a Sudanese wedding taking place, which the aircrew seizes upon to have us repeat an exchange of vows in Russian. The words are so hard and I dropped out of the Russian course in my undergrad so I mumble politburo, perestroika and glasnost as substitutes much to their amusement. One of the crew, who has made a couple of chess sets out of bottle caps, hands us 2 wedding rings  and we all raise a toast with our allotment of smuggled in vodka and a kiss. I stayed overnight because walking around drunk in Khartoum is never a good idea and because Sasha is leaving next week. So my new husband and I continue on our existential discussions about living and dying and loneliness and community and just enjoy each others company in this little Russian enclave until the first call to prayer sounds right before dawn and I head back to the Reyes house. 

Now here is the part where I am going to talk a little bit about SRH and ABCs. Sexual Reproductive Health (SRH) and the USAID policy of Abstinence Birth Control and Condoms. As you’ve read so far, although dating (sex before marriage) was illegal in Sudan it happened quite often. Dr. Omer, who I introduced earlier on told me that many women would come into to a private clinic his friend worked at it to stich their vaginas up before marriage – not all the way but enough that it would bleed on their wedding nights and be able to show this as proof to their new in laws that they were a virgin bride. When he worked in the ER, many pregnant women (and girls) would come in due to be unable to give birth naturally from Female Genital Mutilation that was so messy that a baby could not get out and sometimes both the mother and baby would die during childbirth. Other stories I heard involved women getting pregnant with someone who worked as house staff and then would tell their parents the man that they wanted to marry got them pregnant so that all marriage arrangements would be made quickly and quietly. In my case, I had a contract teaching English in Sudan for 6 months, but I managed to stay much longer with no access to birth control or condoms because they are illegal, but as soon as I felt something was off when I missed my period, I had no trouble finding a pregnancy test to confirm it. So as I looked at the stick trying to consider whether to tell my boyfriend and when, I also knew I had to get an abortion. At the time I was on a medication for my epilepsy called valproic acid which could lead to a very high outcome of spina bifida if this fetus turned into a baby, on top of that, Eugene was on some South African military grade anti-malarials that nothing but weird side effects I didn’t want to deal with. Abortion is illegal in Sudan but so is FGM, so someone was doing it somewhere and I found that someone through the help of one of my Indian military friends who knew of a Coptic doctor who would perform them in the basement of his clinic in the evening for $500, I just needed to bring a blood donor with me. The other option was a flight to India. As I was doing this arranging and thinking, my ever so sweet roommates found my discarded pregnancy test and loudly congratulated me over the phone while I was at the boyfriend’s place. He heard. At that moment in time he was interviewing for a job in Austria with the same helicopter logistics company that contracted for the UN here in Sudan and we were talking about our future. He proposed, it seemed like a good time for him to settle down and start a family in Austria. I agreed to discuss but insisted on an abortion due to the aforementioned health concerns so we made a plan that I would fly to Canada to get this abortion and then come back to Sudan, meet his parents in South Africa and then head to our new lives in Austria together.  Back at the house, the Reyes’ sat me down and laid out a proposal for me, they had wanted to have another child for the last 10 years but it hadn’t happened for them. Cherie’s mother was a midwife in the Philippines and they could fly her out to deliver this baby and hand it over to them. I felt for them but what if the baby did have spina bifida? They were willing to take the risk, but I wasn’t so I handed in my notice at the logistics company and booked a flight to Toronto where my old rugby/Uganda trip pal Carrie will meet me.