Things got quite chaotic in north Sudan around March 4th when about 16 of the biggest NGO's, including Save the Children-US for whom I was working, were expelled from the region in response the the International Criminal Court indictment of the President, al-Bashir, for war crimes in Darfur. It got quite nasty as Sudanese security forces occupied the offices of the NGO's, seized assets like computers, cell phones, vehicles, bank accounts... and then gave them 48 hours to get all ex-pats out of the country. For some, including us, this was impossible: we employ over 50 ex-pats who live in the field and had no way of gathering their shit and getting to Khartoum in that time; and nearly 3000 nationals, some of whom have working for Save for over 25 years (Save has been in Sudan for 30), who are now unemployed.
The security forces came to the guest house where I was living and treated us like criminals. We weren't allowed to leave the building until they searched our belongings and deleted our computers and treated our every move and utterance with contempt. There were moments when things almost reduced to punching. They wouldn't let our Country Director go to the hospital for a much needed appointment. I had already heard stories about them taking people's personal property if they decided it had something to do with Darfur: laptops, cell phones, hard disc and flash drives, cameras, even iPods! So I hid all my valuables inside my window air conditioner!
They demanded to confiscate everyone's laptops but our CD negotiated a deal whereby they would search through the computers in our presence. So they did a search for "Darfur" and "Save the Children" and then deleted anything that came up. I managed to back everything up so I told them to delete away. They even went through all my personal photos, remarking how beautiful my children were!
During this whole "occupation" people at first were very on edge often shouting at each other as the security guys were literally thugs who who seemed to enjoy flexing their power. I had brought a huge, huge bag of lollipops with me from the states to take to schools, so I brought it down from my room and gave them out. The thugs gleefully took huge handfuls and then suddenly all was quiet: everyone had a lollipop in their mouth!
They were like big babies!
Most of the ex-pat staff managed to make it to Khartoum and I must say it was an honor and a pleasure to have met them. The night before people began to depart for their home countries...Ethiopia, Kenya, Burundi, Guinea, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Pakistan, India, Canada, the US...we all gathered at a restaurant in Khartoum and the devastation of what was happening began to sink in. It was like being at a funeral: where all these people who are aware of each other, like a family spread out across the globe connected by stories and email, finally meet each other in person, but under unfortunate circumstances. It's was almost too much to think about what the impact will be on the people of Darfur and Nuba Mountains in the absence of these organizations. Notwithstanding the criticism international NGO's and their staffs endure, it was clear that many people are going suffer severely in their absence.
Instead, individual and sometimes hilarious stories about their experiences were shared as all their hard work and commitments lay there like a white elephant lying in a coffin in the middle of the long dinner table. Peter told the story of how a Janjaweed militia carjacked a Save the Children land cruiser and all the personal belongings of the staff inside. So the next day, he went and found the hijackers in their camp and negotiated the return of the stolen items in exchange for being allowed to access food aid: they were starving too. From then on Peter was the liason between Janjaweed and Darfurian; he was even invited to proceed over Janjaweed weddings.
Another told of how she crouched under her bed in El Geneina, West Darfur while a robbery took place in the building next to her, most likely by Chadian rebels who targeted NGO worker compounds to steal computers, cell phones, and vehicles. She heard shots and upon fearing the worst realized it was the Sudanese police firing in the air in front of her building, warning the rebels of their arrival: the police and rebels were in cahoots...
~~~
Anyway, Save was now helping the ex-pats to get out of Sudan. I went to Mombasa, Kenya; I spent four absolutely fabulous days on the beach in a cheap little cottage, swimming and snorkeling and being lazy. The irony...
Now I am in the deepest bush in southern Sudan, in a village called Luonyaker (lawn-yuh-care), accent on the last, about 100km northeast of Wau. It's almost impossible to do anything between 11am and 5pm it's so hot. It's the latter part of the dry season but it's relatively green, tons of trees and grass...and snakes and scorpions.
Got here by the seat of my pants: I ran out of cash getting myself to Juba from Nairobi (no ATM's in Sudan and cash-only transactions). Juba is a large crazy shit-hole of a place, the capital of the South, and probably one of the most expensive cities on earth. A modest meal costs $50 and a tent costs $150 a night!! So I ended up meeting this French pilot at a bar and I bought him drinks with the rest of my cash in exchange for him smuggling me on his 15-seater plane to Wau; he happened to be flying there the next day. We got very drunk and he let me sleep on the floor of this tiny room built into the corner of a shipping container dropped seemingly willy-nilly behind a hotel. Luckilly, I always have my therma-rest and sleeping bag.
I managed to send an SMS about my impending arrival to the one sat-phone in Luonyaker and the message miraculously got to one of the teachers I would be working with. He and some NGO co-workers picked me up at the Wau air strip, not before meeting a nurse and a paramedic on the plane on their way from Slovakia: turns out they live less than 50 miles from where my grandmother and great-grandparents grew up!
After spending most of the afternoon gathering supplies in Wau, we headed east and then north along a packed dirt road at good pace. But after 45 minutes the road gave out to a winding bumpy track cut through by dry creek and river beds and hidden in many places by bushes and tall thatches of grass. After an hour and a half of crawling, we finally made it to town and the sun had already hidden itself under the horizon while a merciful breeze soothed my dusty frame.
I am now living in a tiny stucco hut in the World Vision compound in Luonyaker, a large international NGO known for their emphatic Christian proselytizing alongside their water, school, and road construction projects. They have a loose relationship with the school who invited me here in the first place. I start teacher training for this and a few other government schools here on Monday. School starts on April 6th.
I walked into the market yesterday to practice my Dinka and all the children would point at me yelling Kuwaja! Kuwaja! which means white person in Arabic. Then they were shocked to hear me use the few words of Dinka I knew and the adults would come out and laugh and laugh and teach me more. Or they would hold out their palms asking for money. I ducked into a tukul, the circular hut made from mud and a thatch roof spiraling up to a sharp point which dot the landscape here, to buy a soda. I sat with some teenagers and older men lounging inside and practiced more Dinka and they practiced their English which was quite good: it's the standard language of instruction in south Sudan. I plan to visit the market daily so they get used to me.
No cell phone reception here, but the Internet in the compound is decent...can skype.
I am hoping to be done with all my data collecting for my research by July so I can come home soon; I am getting quite home sick.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Blink
The hazy white orb blinked and
just for a split second the pupil-less
eye could not see the brightly
colored muslin of orange and green
drift like a sail along the narrow
passages of mud and straw and reach
out to the water gaucho, plunge her
midnight skin into the terrible truth.
The droplets soaked into the
miles of muted ocher which melted away
to reveal a borderless world.
Minarets of watermelon noticed
too and yawned their scarlet flesh
gnashed their brown bits of teeth
and dribbled their sugar into
fields of limbs and ash and cracked earth.
The crutches returned to the donors
the roofs of grass spiraled again
there was enough for the maize
and the camels, bending down into the
messy rose colored wind to
breastfeed the infants of tyranny.
Hip hop rhythms of monotone Semitic
tongues shorted the bullhorns and
unwrapped themselves from the necks
of warriors and in that split-second blink
sang an aria whose gospel revealed
the many faces of truth, unshaven mugs
inhaling the oxygen of kindness
exhaling the carbon of generosity
catalyzing the uranium of anger
into the helium of peace.
But when the eye opened again and could
see possibility, all contracted in fear and
went about their melancholy business, only
trading brief glances of affection for each
other but under the table they played
a passionate game of footsie.
just for a split second the pupil-less
eye could not see the brightly
colored muslin of orange and green
drift like a sail along the narrow
passages of mud and straw and reach
out to the water gaucho, plunge her
midnight skin into the terrible truth.
The droplets soaked into the
miles of muted ocher which melted away
to reveal a borderless world.
Minarets of watermelon noticed
too and yawned their scarlet flesh
gnashed their brown bits of teeth
and dribbled their sugar into
fields of limbs and ash and cracked earth.
The crutches returned to the donors
the roofs of grass spiraled again
there was enough for the maize
and the camels, bending down into the
messy rose colored wind to
breastfeed the infants of tyranny.
Hip hop rhythms of monotone Semitic
tongues shorted the bullhorns and
unwrapped themselves from the necks
of warriors and in that split-second blink
sang an aria whose gospel revealed
the many faces of truth, unshaven mugs
inhaling the oxygen of kindness
exhaling the carbon of generosity
catalyzing the uranium of anger
into the helium of peace.
But when the eye opened again and could
see possibility, all contracted in fear and
went about their melancholy business, only
trading brief glances of affection for each
other but under the table they played
a passionate game of footsie.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Mud and Dust
The dust settled over Khartoum like a thick fog. I am still picking dust out of my ears.
My travel permit to Darfur was denied by the government again, the second time in a week my travel has been restricted, and so my boss offered to take me out for a sympathy coffee. As we emerged from the office, the sky was a blur of yellow haze and the sun struggled to burn through it, a bright white orb sinking into an smoggy mire. But this was no smog; it was dust, invisible and tactile.
We drove over to the banks of the Nile and sat in an outdoor café with a nicely groomed courtyard framed by cashew trees. As our coffees arrived, so did the wind. I wondered if a haboob was imminent, the famed dust storm of Sudan. These however arrive on a perfectly clear day like an orange wall of dust and sand. The streets would be deserted. I thus felt reassured by a few groups of people who lingered on the patio while the staff continued to hustle around in their silk vests balancing trays of tea, coffee, and hot dog pizza.
Yes, hot dog pizza; an American ex-pat’s wet nightmare. But I digress…
Almost immediately, I could feel a thin film of dust wrap itself around my arms and face. In close range the dust in the air was invisible and my eyes were unbothered. Surprisingly, it felt good; a combination of dead sea spa treatment and the feeling I get after three days of backpacking when I become one with the dirt, and all inhibitions associated with clean civilized living melt away.
We were both happy to be out of the office, so despite the wind and dust, we lingered, talking about the slings and arrows of humanitarian worker life and the difficult ethical terrain in which they operate. From the unreality of a manicured garden on the Nile or a graduate school classroom, humanitarian and development aid is an easy target, often shot through with accusations of imperialism or colonialism dressed in contemporary clothes; or how the world de-politicizes the role of international balances of power in exacerbating and even creating humanitarian disasters in the first place while aid organizations focus only on the country’s (or culture’s) internal problems, treating symptoms and ignoring the disease; or how the delivery of aid creates dependence on aid; or how international organizations and their donors manipulate the provision of food and services like health clinics or schools to move so-called aid dependant people from one crappy place to another and back; or the way aid and development organizations use the failure of their own programs to justify more aid and development.
Yet it remains that people are suffering for reasons preventable and seemingly solvable. Maybe asking people what they want, “participatory development” it’s called, might be the answer. But where does one begin to answer this question if all you have is the shirt on your back. So we create participatory structures to help people articulate their needs, like say, Parent-Teacher Associations…OK fine, a little American style, but hey it kinda works until you attend a PTA meeting only to find out that the religious leaders and opinionated men are the one’s running the show. So then we start talking about women’s participation and while we’re at it, girls access to schooling, which means we not only need the will of parents to send their girls to school, but we’ll need a separate and private latrine with “locally appropriate” menstruation aids. See we’re being sensitive to local ways of doing things!
But then we find that many kids can hardly learn because they’re hungry, so we start a school feeding program and then HIV/AIDS education because a third of the adults are infected or dead, and oh, there all these AIDS orphans so we’ll build a dorm at the school, and the classrooms need to be handicap accessible because, after all there was a war and there are (US made) land mines all over the place, and we’ve got some missing limbs and so we can’t spend the money on teacher salaries so they’ll show up because that’s the government’s job, yes the same government that took all those limbs from your kids, but we need ramps! Well actually it’s this really well meaning donor that wants ramps and they can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want them too. See schools can be the center of solving everyone’s problems, and the community can participate!
So we’ll help you administer all this aid money and do it the local way except that you have to make financial reports the way the Office of Management and Budget wants it and oh you have to conduct quarterly evaluations because we need to know if this is working and you need Land Rovers to get around because there’s no roads and satellite phones because there’s no cell towers and so you need to find people with finance degrees, and management experience, IT expertise, and security expertise, and you’ll need to hire consultants from western countries to write the grants and do the evaluations the way the western donors like it and ultimately, we’ll teach you how to participate OUR WAY...hey wait…where’s the local women?
The alternatives, however, tend a little too close toward a kind of cultural relativism. The reasoning used to justify a more “culturally sensitive” or “participatory” approach to aid is not far from the same reasoning that can be used to deny antiretroviral drugs for the treatment of HIV/AIDS to communities in Africa because “those people” prefer their shamans or medicine men. This line of reasoning would have us face female genital mutilation and look the other way so as to accept multiple value systems in our world. It justifies neutrality in the face of genocide. It romanticizes subsistence economies, turns the world into a museum, and invents imaginary pasts.
Gandhi, I think, once remarked that if we remain neutral in the fight between the hawk and the mouse, we are by default on the side of the hawk. Are we to be so sensitive about doing no harm that we end up doing no good?
So we flail around looking for the middle ground, and most professional humanitarian aid workers worth their salt know this and carry on. It seems to come down to two things, in my humble and relatively inexperienced opinion: 1. Doing nothing is ultimately worse than doing something because we are seduced by our capacity to learn from our mistakes and do better, and 2. A willing workforce; there are plenty of people who love the life of the humanitarian aid or international development professional as well as the life of those who scrutinize their impact.
As one who aspires mostly to the latter while, for the time being, supporting myself doing the former, I can tell you, do-gooders we are not; the ground is muddy.
Literally.
Just the other day, I supervised a team of data collectors visiting three schools in the Mayo IDP camp just outside Khartoum; the camp is literally a city of mud. Pits of dry dirt and sand are dug, filled with water, and stirred with large hoes. Globs of the resulting mud are scooped out of the pits, poured into molds formed by whatever is around; sticks, metal sheets, bottles, crates…and left in the sun to dry. The bricks are stacked between tall tree branches gathered miles away; they poke out in all directions forming the walls and roof, a rebar forest, and used as the reinforcement to construct huts of about 6 x 6 meters. Finally they are frosted on all sides by mud and straw around a brightly colored steel door. Some are wrapped in burlap. On average, two adults and six children live in one of these houses.
200,000 people live in Mayo; 16,000 households of mud.
The effect is a city of mud huts and narrow avenues of dirt as far as the eye can see broken by thin lines of electrical wire and television antenna; nary a tree, a bush, nor a patch of grass. Interrupting the monotonous brown cubes are brightly colored and textured wraps of muslin drifting across the sandy pathway; they hide a Dinka woman who hustles a gaggle of children to school dressed in their home sewn green and blue school uniforms. She’s probably lived this camp for 17 years, the average length of time an IDP or refugee lives encamped in exile.
On another lane, donkeys pulling long narrow tanks of water siphoned from a nearby black and white checkered water tower hee-haw as their riders spank the leathery haunches with canes. These water gauchos announce their arrival and wares through crackling loudspeakers attached to the carts. The monotone raps of Arabic rise and crescendo as they pass then fade into the labyrinth of mud.
The schools are constructed of mud and straw as well. In the mid-west of America, we have snow-days; here they have rain days. They are very few like our snow days, but when it rains, the walls soften, the structures lean, and the streets become impassable. One school we visited boasted a huge courtyard with both a church and a mosque. The teachers were proud of this, not a common thing in the north. Unfortunately, more common is the fact that at this school, there are 800 students and 7 teachers.
In one of the mud huts, the head teacher sat at his desk going through numbers with one of the surveyors. There is no electricity here, and of the nearly 200 schools I’ll be surveying across northern Sudan, not a single one will. All the names of the children are hand written in Arabic. Next to his record book were boxes of chalk, neatly arranged by color. A stack of rulers and triangles sat on another corner. Behind the chalk were five plastic flexible canes, about two feet long and a half-inch in diameter. I took one in my hands and whipped it around. I then whipped it across my forearm and pain shot upward into my chest. Most of the teachers carry these canes, and the crowds of children part like the red sea as they approach. Many of the parents will not consider them effective teachers if they do not carry the canes, a teacher tells me. How else to control and shush 125 students crowded into your classroom?
This teacher is from Unity State in the south. The long narrow scarring on his forehead gives his Dinka heritage away. He’s been living in the camp 13 years. He was educated in the camp as well, a high school diploma and three weeks of teacher training. I ask if he will ever go back. He says it’s unlikely. His compatriots think he is a northern spy. I looked down at the red line on my forearm, now rising into a welt. Why did I hit myself so hard?
Here on the Nile, the sun has finally relented and given up, surrendering to the dusty dark. There is dust in my ears, up my nose, under my finger nails, in my hair. The red cane line remains on my arm. I am supporting a project to make these canes obsolete, along with many other “improvements” to these schools. It seems so common sense; corporal punishment should be banned. Thinking back to my own classrooms, with at-risk kids, dangerous gang members, adjudicated and disinterested, I had an impact without the threat of force and pain. But I also had 20 kids in my class. I had computers and books and videos and art supplies. I no doubt would be lost in the Mayo school, surly no more effective than the mud and dust upon which the hopes and dreams of these children rest.
My travel permit to Darfur was denied by the government again, the second time in a week my travel has been restricted, and so my boss offered to take me out for a sympathy coffee. As we emerged from the office, the sky was a blur of yellow haze and the sun struggled to burn through it, a bright white orb sinking into an smoggy mire. But this was no smog; it was dust, invisible and tactile.
We drove over to the banks of the Nile and sat in an outdoor café with a nicely groomed courtyard framed by cashew trees. As our coffees arrived, so did the wind. I wondered if a haboob was imminent, the famed dust storm of Sudan. These however arrive on a perfectly clear day like an orange wall of dust and sand. The streets would be deserted. I thus felt reassured by a few groups of people who lingered on the patio while the staff continued to hustle around in their silk vests balancing trays of tea, coffee, and hot dog pizza.
Yes, hot dog pizza; an American ex-pat’s wet nightmare. But I digress…
Almost immediately, I could feel a thin film of dust wrap itself around my arms and face. In close range the dust in the air was invisible and my eyes were unbothered. Surprisingly, it felt good; a combination of dead sea spa treatment and the feeling I get after three days of backpacking when I become one with the dirt, and all inhibitions associated with clean civilized living melt away.
We were both happy to be out of the office, so despite the wind and dust, we lingered, talking about the slings and arrows of humanitarian worker life and the difficult ethical terrain in which they operate. From the unreality of a manicured garden on the Nile or a graduate school classroom, humanitarian and development aid is an easy target, often shot through with accusations of imperialism or colonialism dressed in contemporary clothes; or how the world de-politicizes the role of international balances of power in exacerbating and even creating humanitarian disasters in the first place while aid organizations focus only on the country’s (or culture’s) internal problems, treating symptoms and ignoring the disease; or how the delivery of aid creates dependence on aid; or how international organizations and their donors manipulate the provision of food and services like health clinics or schools to move so-called aid dependant people from one crappy place to another and back; or the way aid and development organizations use the failure of their own programs to justify more aid and development.
Yet it remains that people are suffering for reasons preventable and seemingly solvable. Maybe asking people what they want, “participatory development” it’s called, might be the answer. But where does one begin to answer this question if all you have is the shirt on your back. So we create participatory structures to help people articulate their needs, like say, Parent-Teacher Associations…OK fine, a little American style, but hey it kinda works until you attend a PTA meeting only to find out that the religious leaders and opinionated men are the one’s running the show. So then we start talking about women’s participation and while we’re at it, girls access to schooling, which means we not only need the will of parents to send their girls to school, but we’ll need a separate and private latrine with “locally appropriate” menstruation aids. See we’re being sensitive to local ways of doing things!
But then we find that many kids can hardly learn because they’re hungry, so we start a school feeding program and then HIV/AIDS education because a third of the adults are infected or dead, and oh, there all these AIDS orphans so we’ll build a dorm at the school, and the classrooms need to be handicap accessible because, after all there was a war and there are (US made) land mines all over the place, and we’ve got some missing limbs and so we can’t spend the money on teacher salaries so they’ll show up because that’s the government’s job, yes the same government that took all those limbs from your kids, but we need ramps! Well actually it’s this really well meaning donor that wants ramps and they can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want them too. See schools can be the center of solving everyone’s problems, and the community can participate!
So we’ll help you administer all this aid money and do it the local way except that you have to make financial reports the way the Office of Management and Budget wants it and oh you have to conduct quarterly evaluations because we need to know if this is working and you need Land Rovers to get around because there’s no roads and satellite phones because there’s no cell towers and so you need to find people with finance degrees, and management experience, IT expertise, and security expertise, and you’ll need to hire consultants from western countries to write the grants and do the evaluations the way the western donors like it and ultimately, we’ll teach you how to participate OUR WAY...hey wait…where’s the local women?
The alternatives, however, tend a little too close toward a kind of cultural relativism. The reasoning used to justify a more “culturally sensitive” or “participatory” approach to aid is not far from the same reasoning that can be used to deny antiretroviral drugs for the treatment of HIV/AIDS to communities in Africa because “those people” prefer their shamans or medicine men. This line of reasoning would have us face female genital mutilation and look the other way so as to accept multiple value systems in our world. It justifies neutrality in the face of genocide. It romanticizes subsistence economies, turns the world into a museum, and invents imaginary pasts.
Gandhi, I think, once remarked that if we remain neutral in the fight between the hawk and the mouse, we are by default on the side of the hawk. Are we to be so sensitive about doing no harm that we end up doing no good?
So we flail around looking for the middle ground, and most professional humanitarian aid workers worth their salt know this and carry on. It seems to come down to two things, in my humble and relatively inexperienced opinion: 1. Doing nothing is ultimately worse than doing something because we are seduced by our capacity to learn from our mistakes and do better, and 2. A willing workforce; there are plenty of people who love the life of the humanitarian aid or international development professional as well as the life of those who scrutinize their impact.
As one who aspires mostly to the latter while, for the time being, supporting myself doing the former, I can tell you, do-gooders we are not; the ground is muddy.
Literally.
Just the other day, I supervised a team of data collectors visiting three schools in the Mayo IDP camp just outside Khartoum; the camp is literally a city of mud. Pits of dry dirt and sand are dug, filled with water, and stirred with large hoes. Globs of the resulting mud are scooped out of the pits, poured into molds formed by whatever is around; sticks, metal sheets, bottles, crates…and left in the sun to dry. The bricks are stacked between tall tree branches gathered miles away; they poke out in all directions forming the walls and roof, a rebar forest, and used as the reinforcement to construct huts of about 6 x 6 meters. Finally they are frosted on all sides by mud and straw around a brightly colored steel door. Some are wrapped in burlap. On average, two adults and six children live in one of these houses.200,000 people live in Mayo; 16,000 households of mud.
The effect is a city of mud huts and narrow avenues of dirt as far as the eye can see broken by thin lines of electrical wire and television antenna; nary a tree, a bush, nor a patch of grass. Interrupting the monotonous brown cubes are brightly colored and textured wraps of muslin drifting across the sandy pathway; they hide a Dinka woman who hustles a gaggle of children to school dressed in their home sewn green and blue school uniforms. She’s probably lived this camp for 17 years, the average length of time an IDP or refugee lives encamped in exile.On another lane, donkeys pulling long narrow tanks of water siphoned from a nearby black and white checkered water tower hee-haw as their riders spank the leathery haunches with canes. These water gauchos announce their arrival and wares through crackling loudspeakers attached to the carts. The monotone raps of Arabic rise and crescendo as they pass then fade into the labyrinth of mud.
The schools are constructed of mud and straw as well. In the mid-west of America, we have snow-days; here they have rain days. They are very few like our snow days, but when it rains, the walls soften, the structures lean, and the streets become impassable. One school we visited boasted a huge courtyard with both a church and a mosque. The teachers were proud of this, not a common thing in the north. Unfortunately, more common is the fact that at this school, there are 800 students and 7 teachers.
In one of the mud huts, the head teacher sat at his desk going through numbers with one of the surveyors. There is no electricity here, and of the nearly 200 schools I’ll be surveying across northern Sudan, not a single one will. All the names of the children are hand written in Arabic. Next to his record book were boxes of chalk, neatly arranged by color. A stack of rulers and triangles sat on another corner. Behind the chalk were five plastic flexible canes, about two feet long and a half-inch in diameter. I took one in my hands and whipped it around. I then whipped it across my forearm and pain shot upward into my chest. Most of the teachers carry these canes, and the crowds of children part like the red sea as they approach. Many of the parents will not consider them effective teachers if they do not carry the canes, a teacher tells me. How else to control and shush 125 students crowded into your classroom?
This teacher is from Unity State in the south. The long narrow scarring on his forehead gives his Dinka heritage away. He’s been living in the camp 13 years. He was educated in the camp as well, a high school diploma and three weeks of teacher training. I ask if he will ever go back. He says it’s unlikely. His compatriots think he is a northern spy. I looked down at the red line on my forearm, now rising into a welt. Why did I hit myself so hard?
Here on the Nile, the sun has finally relented and given up, surrendering to the dusty dark. There is dust in my ears, up my nose, under my finger nails, in my hair. The red cane line remains on my arm. I am supporting a project to make these canes obsolete, along with many other “improvements” to these schools. It seems so common sense; corporal punishment should be banned. Thinking back to my own classrooms, with at-risk kids, dangerous gang members, adjudicated and disinterested, I had an impact without the threat of force and pain. But I also had 20 kids in my class. I had computers and books and videos and art supplies. I no doubt would be lost in the Mayo school, surly no more effective than the mud and dust upon which the hopes and dreams of these children rest.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Banjos in war zones
I brought my banjo to Sudan.
Actually, I temporarily swapped with a friend my very nice '89 Bart Reiter Grand Concert model for a Deering Goodtime open back; a very nice banjo for a very reasonable price (note to all you blokes just discovering your inner banjo). The great thing about the Goodtime is that you can detach the neck quite easily, which is what I did; I then stuck the neck and the pot in my duffel bag and reassembled it here in Khartoum.
Until last night, I'd been playing it by myself in my room, imagining that others staying in the guest house might float into the room on the sweet melodies, inquiring about the exotic sound wafting through their suites. I even stuck to modal tunings so it might resemble some of the local drone-like sufi chanting. But no audiences could I muster.
So, with a little bit of courage mustered after a long day of writing lesson plans, I grabbed the Goodtime and headed downstairs and out into the open air foyer of my building. Sitting there was Yusef, the doorman, smoking his Benson & Hedges Specials and listening to his ancient radio stuck, as far I've been able to tell over the last few days, on the same station (I've heard him roaming the dial to no avail) proffering emphatic lectures of screeching static.
Yusef is in his early forties with a deep raspy voice and a wide, if a bit droopy frame. But when he starts talking, his face flattens into an endearing smile as he asks how I am in a high pitched, gentle voice that exudes politeness. He would be a captive, if non-threatening audience.
Starry-eyed and excited for my first concert in Sudan, I pranced up next to him and said Ahlan, Yusef. He turned and, seeing the banjo in my hand, jerked forward like a hiccup, fumbled with his radio, and turned it off. What's this? he asked.
I told him and asked if I could play something for him. He made a nervous smile and nodded slowly. So I played the drony-ist version of Shady Grove I knew (I did not sing).
When I stopped he was not smiling. I shoved the banjo toward him, offering for him to hold it, and he took it hesitantly. In his hands, he laughed and held it as if it were the ugliest infant he'd ever seen. After plucking it once, he shoved it back and so I offered to play again. At this moment there seemed to be something lost in translation and so, thinking it polite and clever, I asked pointing, Banjo or Radio?
He chuckled for only a split second whereupon he emphatically said Radio!
I was crestfallen but I didn't show it. As I thanked him, he turned the radio back on, and a blast of peircing static serenaded my exit from the stage.
I thought maybe, just maybe, I could end wars, bring peace and brotherhood to the land from whence the banjo came, or at least bring a smile to a few people living in some of the harshest conditions on earth, with a little bit 'o clawhammer. This is going to be harder than I thought.
Actually, I temporarily swapped with a friend my very nice '89 Bart Reiter Grand Concert model for a Deering Goodtime open back; a very nice banjo for a very reasonable price (note to all you blokes just discovering your inner banjo). The great thing about the Goodtime is that you can detach the neck quite easily, which is what I did; I then stuck the neck and the pot in my duffel bag and reassembled it here in Khartoum.
Until last night, I'd been playing it by myself in my room, imagining that others staying in the guest house might float into the room on the sweet melodies, inquiring about the exotic sound wafting through their suites. I even stuck to modal tunings so it might resemble some of the local drone-like sufi chanting. But no audiences could I muster.
So, with a little bit of courage mustered after a long day of writing lesson plans, I grabbed the Goodtime and headed downstairs and out into the open air foyer of my building. Sitting there was Yusef, the doorman, smoking his Benson & Hedges Specials and listening to his ancient radio stuck, as far I've been able to tell over the last few days, on the same station (I've heard him roaming the dial to no avail) proffering emphatic lectures of screeching static.
Yusef is in his early forties with a deep raspy voice and a wide, if a bit droopy frame. But when he starts talking, his face flattens into an endearing smile as he asks how I am in a high pitched, gentle voice that exudes politeness. He would be a captive, if non-threatening audience.
Starry-eyed and excited for my first concert in Sudan, I pranced up next to him and said Ahlan, Yusef. He turned and, seeing the banjo in my hand, jerked forward like a hiccup, fumbled with his radio, and turned it off. What's this? he asked.
I told him and asked if I could play something for him. He made a nervous smile and nodded slowly. So I played the drony-ist version of Shady Grove I knew (I did not sing).
When I stopped he was not smiling. I shoved the banjo toward him, offering for him to hold it, and he took it hesitantly. In his hands, he laughed and held it as if it were the ugliest infant he'd ever seen. After plucking it once, he shoved it back and so I offered to play again. At this moment there seemed to be something lost in translation and so, thinking it polite and clever, I asked pointing, Banjo or Radio?
He chuckled for only a split second whereupon he emphatically said Radio!
I was crestfallen but I didn't show it. As I thanked him, he turned the radio back on, and a blast of peircing static serenaded my exit from the stage.
I thought maybe, just maybe, I could end wars, bring peace and brotherhood to the land from whence the banjo came, or at least bring a smile to a few people living in some of the harshest conditions on earth, with a little bit 'o clawhammer. This is going to be harder than I thought.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Sudanese Breakfast
Each morning, around ten thirty, I go downstairs in the Save office and have futoor, or breakfast, with a few of the men. The women do theirs in another room. It has little to do with descrimination, someone says, it's just that the women chat so much they never end up eating anything.
It consists of small round loaves of bread, a lentil or fava bean stew sprinkled with feta cheese and olive oil, a salad of chopped tomatoes and parsley, and a very spicy sauce made from peanuts and chilies. There are no plates or silver wear. Keeping one's left hand out of the way, a piece of bread is deftly torn away with only the right hand and dunked in any combination of the foods described above. After a few times now, I've gotten good at using each finger as if it were a hand of its own, pressing with one, shaping with another, scooping with another, folding and so on, so that what arrives at my face is a little package, no longer dripping all over the place or rolling down my chin.
Thie first time I tried this I swear I looked like a happy 6 month old sitting at a hight chair eating oatmeal for the first time. Now, I'm talkin' politics with the big boys.
It consists of small round loaves of bread, a lentil or fava bean stew sprinkled with feta cheese and olive oil, a salad of chopped tomatoes and parsley, and a very spicy sauce made from peanuts and chilies. There are no plates or silver wear. Keeping one's left hand out of the way, a piece of bread is deftly torn away with only the right hand and dunked in any combination of the foods described above. After a few times now, I've gotten good at using each finger as if it were a hand of its own, pressing with one, shaping with another, scooping with another, folding and so on, so that what arrives at my face is a little package, no longer dripping all over the place or rolling down my chin.
Thie first time I tried this I swear I looked like a happy 6 month old sitting at a hight chair eating oatmeal for the first time. Now, I'm talkin' politics with the big boys.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Souq
You need a permit to take pictures in Sudan, so no pics yet, but soon; so says the permit bureaucracy. No alcohol in the north, so no stories of debaucherous NGO soirees soothing the sores of work with the poorest of the poor.
Khartoum is considered one of the safest cities in Africa, as long as us whities stay away from mass demonstrations against US or Zionist plots, which typically take place near the government buildings. I'm staying at the Save the Children-US guest house, a three story concrete cube with the occasional flourish...a little patio here, a little mosaic there...quite typical of the Middle East. I zigg-zagged through the nearby souq al merkaaz the other day, a chaotic and very loud flea and vegetable market. Despite the sensory overload, I felt quite safe and people were quite helpful. I bought a huge bag of tomatoes to make some tomato sauce (no canned sauce or even canned tomatoes, only paste in the supermarkets), along with a few eggplant, parsley, potatoes, garlic, limes, and mangoes. Every other vendor has a bull horn or ghetto blaster set to 10, hawking their goods or rockin' out to the latest in desert trance chanting.
I sat down at a makeshift tea cafe. It seemed to have staked out a sliver of sandy sidewalk with dusty plastic chairs and a table outfitted with Dr. Jekyl's pantry. The tea lady, draped in multi colored muslin, stole a burning ignot from beneath her kettle and dropped it into an insense bowl. The sandalwood wafted through the air just barely cutting through the stench of the fried fish vender about two meters away (I'm going metric). I saw her fill a small glass almost halfway with sugar, drop in a few springs of mint and leaves of bright red hibiscus and fill the rest with hot tea. It was so sweet, I was ready to run a marathon by the time I was finished. Children came up to me every now and then with hands out as I sat there sipping. I smiled at them and, taking my little soapy container from my bag, blew bubbles into their palms.
The abundance of fresh food here in the capital city stands in stark contrast with the constant threat of starvation in the periphery of Sudan. Sudan is becoming one of Africa's biggest food exporters becasue of massive investment from Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia to develop millions of uncultivated arable land; these countries have little of their own. Meanwhile, millions of Sudanese go hungry every day. Before you get too uppity about this sorry state of affairs, remember that this is not endemic to Sudan; take a walk in the slum of the most expensive western city or the emergency room of the public hospital and you'll see the same thing. I have to look in the mirror before I can get too critical. The scope of the problem here, however, is astonishing. The lines of race and religion also stand in deep relief against the inauguration of America's first African-American grand-poobah.
The tonal scale of the Sudanese people is really long, from the very light-Turkish to the milk-chocolate Ethiopian to the darkest of the dark Dinka. And that's just the thing: the wars here pitting Muslim against Christian or Animist (North-South), African against Arab (Darfur), farmer against pastoralist (Dinka-Messeriya), have little to do with actual color of the skin because everyone here is black and each group boasts all shades. After all, the word Sudan derives from the Arabic word "sauod" which is one of many words meaning "black." The fact of the matter is that the wars are over resources...oil, grazing land, water...yet the conflicts get dressed up in the clothes of race and religion. It doesn't help that there are lot of weapons around.
Made a big pot of tomato sauce, some fried eggplant, and a salad last night. Made pasta with garlic and lime the night before. Getting into a routine, which is comforting. I'm eager to get out into the field though. I've just finished the whole proposal to survey nearly 100 schools and will present it to the Save leadership on Thursday.
I cried last night while eating my fried eggplant; CNN ran the entirety of MLK's 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial. So amazing...it's nice feel proud to be an American again.
Khartoum is considered one of the safest cities in Africa, as long as us whities stay away from mass demonstrations against US or Zionist plots, which typically take place near the government buildings. I'm staying at the Save the Children-US guest house, a three story concrete cube with the occasional flourish...a little patio here, a little mosaic there...quite typical of the Middle East. I zigg-zagged through the nearby souq al merkaaz the other day, a chaotic and very loud flea and vegetable market. Despite the sensory overload, I felt quite safe and people were quite helpful. I bought a huge bag of tomatoes to make some tomato sauce (no canned sauce or even canned tomatoes, only paste in the supermarkets), along with a few eggplant, parsley, potatoes, garlic, limes, and mangoes. Every other vendor has a bull horn or ghetto blaster set to 10, hawking their goods or rockin' out to the latest in desert trance chanting.
I sat down at a makeshift tea cafe. It seemed to have staked out a sliver of sandy sidewalk with dusty plastic chairs and a table outfitted with Dr. Jekyl's pantry. The tea lady, draped in multi colored muslin, stole a burning ignot from beneath her kettle and dropped it into an insense bowl. The sandalwood wafted through the air just barely cutting through the stench of the fried fish vender about two meters away (I'm going metric). I saw her fill a small glass almost halfway with sugar, drop in a few springs of mint and leaves of bright red hibiscus and fill the rest with hot tea. It was so sweet, I was ready to run a marathon by the time I was finished. Children came up to me every now and then with hands out as I sat there sipping. I smiled at them and, taking my little soapy container from my bag, blew bubbles into their palms.
The abundance of fresh food here in the capital city stands in stark contrast with the constant threat of starvation in the periphery of Sudan. Sudan is becoming one of Africa's biggest food exporters becasue of massive investment from Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia to develop millions of uncultivated arable land; these countries have little of their own. Meanwhile, millions of Sudanese go hungry every day. Before you get too uppity about this sorry state of affairs, remember that this is not endemic to Sudan; take a walk in the slum of the most expensive western city or the emergency room of the public hospital and you'll see the same thing. I have to look in the mirror before I can get too critical. The scope of the problem here, however, is astonishing. The lines of race and religion also stand in deep relief against the inauguration of America's first African-American grand-poobah.
The tonal scale of the Sudanese people is really long, from the very light-Turkish to the milk-chocolate Ethiopian to the darkest of the dark Dinka. And that's just the thing: the wars here pitting Muslim against Christian or Animist (North-South), African against Arab (Darfur), farmer against pastoralist (Dinka-Messeriya), have little to do with actual color of the skin because everyone here is black and each group boasts all shades. After all, the word Sudan derives from the Arabic word "sauod" which is one of many words meaning "black." The fact of the matter is that the wars are over resources...oil, grazing land, water...yet the conflicts get dressed up in the clothes of race and religion. It doesn't help that there are lot of weapons around.
Made a big pot of tomato sauce, some fried eggplant, and a salad last night. Made pasta with garlic and lime the night before. Getting into a routine, which is comforting. I'm eager to get out into the field though. I've just finished the whole proposal to survey nearly 100 schools and will present it to the Save leadership on Thursday.
I cried last night while eating my fried eggplant; CNN ran the entirety of MLK's 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial. So amazing...it's nice feel proud to be an American again.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
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