goodwoodenship

Advice received from my sister this morning: "don’t type -fever khartoum- into google, the first two articles describe an
outbreak of ebola virus in the 1970s"

Woke up this morning at 5am feeling both hot and cold, a state that temporarily confused me into turning up the fan and wrapping myself in a woollen blanket before I surrendered to the state and indulged in morose musings as to which of the terminal diseases I had contracted in my consumption of Jibna (sudanese roadside coffee made with soaked coffee beans, ginger and cardamom and which is both lethally strong and addictive) and grapefruit juice (prepared at most roadside cafes and is perfect for the heat here, only sometimes they put in tap water). When I still hadn’t expired at 9am I began to regret the several texts I had sent out bequeathing my skirts and stapler to office mates (I was slightly feverish) and asking for my in-tray to be my headstone.

Instead I curled up with several bottles of water (brought at 8am with a grapefruit by one of the greek family that own this hotel and treat everyone like family friends) and started reading Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari, (bought in a train terminal because it covers his trip across Africa through Sudan). It’s very weird reading someone’s experiences that almost mirror your own, you start sublimating your opinions into theirs, or at least in my case you do if you’re not sure what you think and are temporarily uncertain of reality and think there may be chocolate lasagnes under your bed (a sort of waking dream I had at around 7am). He stayed at the same hotel as me and was describing his visit to the whirling dervishes and the Omdurman souk (market), something I had done on Friday.

The difference was that in his experience the whole trip had been lacking in other tourists — he had gone while the civil war was still ongoing. My experience of the whirling dervishes on the other hand was punctuated with sights of fat (pardon the cliche but they were the ones who fulfilled it) american woman in sandals, baseball caps and bulging t-shirts being shooed with a stick out of the faithful inner circle by an irate huge man in a green robe and dreadlocks. The female tourist stood passively looking at him as if at some museum exhibit that had stepped out of place and displayed animation. "I guess it’s only the faithful allowed in the middle" commented her friend lazily beside her as they both looked affably at him "Should have worn my cross then" she replied, before finally rolling back an inch on her haunches.

The sufi spectacle itself was interesting if a little bizarre. I’m used to religion being a matter of newsreels or lengthy school assemblies but I’ve never been to a session where it’s contained elements of both party and pantomime. The Sufi dervishes created a circle around a sandy  patch between two mosques situated in the middle of a cemetery. You are surrounded by large mounds that make no pretence of being anything other than bodies under dirt, and in turn you surround an ever expanding circle of men who are chanting/singing and rocking in time to the music from the drums and instruments at one end of the inner arena. Among the crowd of onlookers the sufi woman stand on the edges chanting, leading to the sound of music both in front and behind, first recorded invention of surround sound. In the very middle are some children, apprentices of a sort, and the high level dervishes. These men are dressed in all manner of robes, they carry canes and sometimes are draped in beads and wear inventive variations of pointed hats, most patchworked with different materials and colours, most however tending towards the sufi green. For the life of me I couldn’t work out if this was the original source of the concept of a wizard or if the sufi style had had some sort of revelation from the release of Harry Potter.

The dervishes in the middle to all intents and purposes conduct and control the chants, some focus solely on building up momentum to spin in some manner though only one did the endless rotation associated with whirling. Stand on one leg and hop around rhythmically half dancing dervishes probably doesn’t have the same ring though. The whole thing went on til sunset, they had several sets, the gig wasn’t ticketed and no t-shirts were handed out. Those in the inner circle seemed to be having great fun, some would stop to greet old friends, most had huge grins on their faces, a group of four across the circle from me started dancing just to a four year old who had wandered into their midsts, they swooped down on him on the chant of Allah Akhbar and then leant back and threw their arms back with them on the off beat in between chants. He in turn tried to hit them with a stick he had taken off another dervish.

At one point a family of three tourists — husband, wife, mother in law –  clad in khaki safari gear, draped front and back in various makes of camera equipment, adorned with money belts equipped with extra pouches sized for passports, credit cards and film reels respectively — turned up. The mother and wife were standing slightly to the left and right of the kneeling spouse almost in perfect formation to repulse any sudden attack from Mahdi tribes had their cameras been Remingtons (I’ve also been reading about Gordan in Khartoum) — instead however they were enthusiastically taking multiple photos with their three identical highly sophisticated digital manual focus cameras from the same spot with angle differences of 5 degrees from each other. " Their holiday slideshow should be a blast" muttered Angus my companion, and then "in any country, anywhere in the world, place those three on a street and you have the universal symbol for ‘mug me’".

I may have to admit defeat, after bitterly denying the grey hollow incantations of expat Sybils as they spoke from inside their ancient cans of beer, safely cradled in the hollows of embassy walls for pilgrims to come ask them for wisdom, I have emerged from the other side of my first month feeling as predicted, exhausted and thus slightly pessimistic.

The exhaustion is not really, as the oracles said, so much to do with the inevitability of Sudan, though it has it’s fair share of pressures, a simple one being making a common social outlet a source of tension and worry, e.g. the arrest and violence against UN workers in Darfur because they were having a party, or the raid yesterday on the UN de-mining offices in Khartoum on the premise alcohol was there. (Basically some sort of signal is being sent to foreigners, either pressure to leave or simply an ideological one, I don’t know, I’ve simply not been here long enough to gauge.)  It’s mostly because work has become some sort of cyclical nightmare where everything is urgent but nothing gets finished. Rumours circulate around the office as to who is sabotaging whom and which staff member is truly crazy, people wander the corridors in packs and armed with staplers to prevent against predatorial bosses with new, more complex and Escherian style tasks to do.

Unfortunately I forgot my stapler yesterday and have not yet managed to blend into the pack. I’ve been given 5 different reports, quantitative monitoring, summaries etc, to be completed in the next week, none of which I can start without someone else’s input. They won’t be able to give me the input until after the deadline but I still have to have it ready before then. In response I’ve put up the complimentary DHL poster on my office wall and have started to scrape a tunnel behind it. Work is slow going since I am using a spoon I made out of the paper clips that arrived yesterday from Washington DC, (our friendly local stationary cupboard), it’s not very durable but it’s better than the only other spare piece of office equipment I had last week. I am currently digging in the soft patch left by a week’s worth of liberal application of green highlighter on plaster.

…I just got back from a meeting discussing donors and pledges to projects. In the middle of it a text came through to one of our staff members saying that a plane has been highjacked in Khartoum and diverted to Chad. The weird thing was she read out the text message which asked if any staff members had been on the plane, then seamlessly went back into what documents were required for which meetings. I don’t know why I find such practicality strange, I think I’m just used to public school assemblies where you mark these things with a one minute silence where you pretend to absorb and assimilate the information, only then do you go on to hymn no. 52. http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L24200666.htm

The heads of the UN bodies came to visit today, they floated round the table using rhetoric to propel themselves from one end of the room to the other whilst outside their bodies ran into the windows attempting to dance a waltz.

All very poetic.

This week has been find a flat in Sudan week. Hoardes of ex-pats are locked in a cardboard container, given 10 times the annual salary of the average Sudanese, are then spun in a circle blindfold and then released and given one week to find a flat or die. There are only 10 ex pats to one flat, they’re forced to wear clown size shoes just for the amusement of nations of tv viewers, and are released into a vicious market full of live pitfalls that eat the cash out of their hands and flights of steps that they have to walk up backwards while waving their passports in time to the national anthem.

With great business aplomb and guided by the wisdom of my years I have signed a lease to a flat which doesn’t exist yet. In the process I have met the silliest group of people in Sudan and thus made some firm friends. I will be living with a Moroccan woman called Aisha who is incredibly strong minded and good natured, who loves to haggle irregardless of what it is we are talking about, "I think we should paint it white" "We’ll paint half of it…" and carefully contemplates jokes before laughing at them.

We’ll be renting, on seperate tenant agreements (this is where being in Sudan gets things horribly complicated) from her work colleague Fadi, who is half Sudanese half British seems quiet until he either breaks out into song or a viciously accurate imitation of his friends (which usually start (in a proper London accent) with "You are such a dickhead, yani I mean, can you believe this guy this is what he says…"). His imitations are usually triggered by Nassir (Sudanese), the extrovert of the group, who has long curly hair that he curls round his fingers when distracted (which seems to be always) and says that once he curled it so much he couldn’t get his finger out of his hair.

Nassir, as far as I can tell, is unable to get past 2 minutes of a conversation without either commenting on himself or others "I’m like Humpty Dumpty aren’t I, You’re creative aren’t you etc" or finding something in the conversation or surroundings uproarously funny. He has a huge belly laugh that is punctuated by his long curly hair bouncing as he rocks. He talks all the time to the detriment of conversation with his brother Mohamed, who is a complete gadget freak and cannot sit down without ranging them in front of him as if worried he might forget the existence of one of them.

These three have adopted me and Aisha and are currently doing up a flat that belongs to Fadi and that, over the last three years, he never got round to finishing. There is absolutely no reason why we should be renting this flat, there are plenty of furnished finished flats to live in, it’s just that something about this project and the idiotic time we’ve been having with these guys has led to this being what we are doing. We’ve advanced rent and they’re trying to finish the flat (to our specifications) asap before Aisha has to move out of her current flat and I have to vacate my hotel - i.e. in approximately two weeks time.

In other words the worst possible scenario but bizarrely these last couple of days of oh god how can this be done insanity have been some of the funniest and most relaxing days I’ve had here.

Which possibly says a lot about Sudan, me, or my sanity, I’m not sure.

As for Khartoum, I’m beginning to get the rhythm of things here, bizarrely it’s one of the safest friendliest places I’ve lived in. It’s probably the most optimistic place to be in Sudan, this is the place where all the growth is happening, unfortunately to the detriment of other states and areas. As soon as I can manage it I’m going to go visit the south etc. Darfur is still not an option though there have been talks of possible steps towards peace in Darfur here but ask anyone about it and they’ll say "that’s what people say but I’m not holding my breath. Yani, can you imagine it? I might end up like obelix in Asterix in Spain".  (Or they would if they had read it, I’m allowing myself poetic license here)

A last word, the huge birds that fight over the streets and that you can see perching on all the highest buildings here are eagles. I’m trying to persuade Nassir to help me tame one to keep on the roof of the flat - I may have to start looking into acquiring vast swathes of raw meat. Did you ever know that you’re my hero?…

Yesterday I walked from work to a girl called Susannah’s house who was introduced to me on email by a friend in DC. Whilst sitting in her living room trying to make friends with her flatmates I kept getting irritated by a mosquito that was checking me out as a potential docking spot. Irritated I tried several times to kill it but my depth perception has been screwed up by exhaustion and jet lag (my expert analysis) and I kept missing. Eventually I decided on another tactic, when it landed I’d swot it. Less room for error that way. In the middle of a story Susannah was telling it landed, on my forehead. At which point I hit myself in the face.

The mosquito got away but I did manage to completely annihilate my dignity.

Today  I was asked to take minutes for a series of one hour high level meetings between the visiting Vice President and Donors, the VP and UN representatives etc. In the donors meeting the tensions between diff ambassadors and their opinions was incredible. And amusing. At one point one guy started tapping his foot, then shaking his head, then he put his head in his hands, then he turned to his neighbour and whispered something - like in some well written play he built the tension up to the point where you were desperate for him to speak, I almost stopped the others to say "but wait what you’re saying must be wrong - HE has something to say".

Eventually to the relief of the room, he finally snapped and decided to speak. He started with "The obvious point that you are all missing is…" which immediately won over his audience. By the end of his analysis the conversation went like this: Him: "Were you there? I didn’t see you there…" the other guy: "I’m just saying that he can’t have said that" "Oh really so you weren’t there but you know do you? Strange, because I was there" "He works for me on this topic and I know his position and he can’t have said that because it is the opposite of our policy" "OK I must have imagined that he said that, I must have gotten it completely wrong" "All I’m saying is…" etc Shortly after this exchange he got up in the middle of someone else talking and left.

I felt quite smug about finally feeling more mature than someone despite being in a setting where the average punter was some sort of director or high level diplomat, over 40 and male. Throughout the meetings I kept finding myself making eye contact with a various different people. I’d smile, they’d give me a strange smile back and then look away in that embarassed way you do when in a meeting and unable to support visual contact with verbal. I started daydreaming that maybe they thought I was someone important or were trying to work out where I fit in in all the politics at the table. Maybe they were just impressed by my efficiency and speed at taking the minutes. I sat up a little straighter and tried to look very professional and competent, my mind raced ahead to being entrusted with all the projects they were discussing and single handedly being able to sort out the politics that cobbles all attempts at a peace process here. At the end of three meetings like this someone eventually came up to me and said, "excuse me do you know you have a little ink on your face?"

I’ve looked it up on google and a little ink in Sudan actually means a large circular smudge on the cheek, one line across the forehead that breaks and then continues down the opposite cheek to the smudge and to finish off the visage a perfect beauty spot of blue on the chin.

The weekend here is Friday and Saturday. ‘Yes’, you say, ‘I know, because I am bright like that and know these things about muslim countries. When my boss talks about working on a Sunday I don’t feel like he’s stolen a precious day of rest from me’, you say, ‘no I know full well that I will be sleeping in on the Friday and Saturday, happy and safe under my blissful relief bringing ceiling fan’. At which point I’d interrupt you with a "ha!" and a "no!" and "You’d think that wouldn’t you, if you were a sane and logical person, yes you’d think that" and another bitter "ha" before I’d lapse into a moody silence and dig into the complimentary lemon sorbet from the hotel, all the time pointedly chewing (even though it’s sorbet) in time to "Here comes the Hotstepper" playing in the background.

‘So what’ you finally say after an awkward silence ‘is the problem?’

And then I’d tell you.

Sod’s law and years of merciless mocking of friends who had to work weekends in DC has finally blossomed together in a job that had me at work at 8am on the day I arrived on a 4am flight and where I have worked late every day and haven’t had a full day off since. Which actually is the only thing I have to complain about and I’m only mentioning it because that, combined with a slightly dysfunctional camping trip yesterday, has left me feeling a little disorientated, wild eyed and wired today.

Tues, Weds and Thurs have all been learning exercises in the layout of two rooms. My hotel room and my office in the world bank building in Khartoum II (there are regions in Khartoum, they are many. And I, with my idiot less of the savant grasp of directions and names can name but one and a half correctly). The one day I had decided enough was enough and that I would see more of Khartoum and had planned to go walking after work to find a coffee house and challenge the first willing person to backgammon I passed out on my bed whilst trying to work out where I’d packed my socks.

All wasn’t lost though. I’d been invited to a Friday camping trip by a friend of a friend in DC. Hopes of seeing the outside world, so briefly soaring, were temporarily dashed by my boss asking me to come in and work instead. Luckily at 8.30 am when I got to the office, it turned out he wasn’t there and hadn’t really needed me after all.

The journey to the camping site took, I think, about 2 to 3 hours. I’m not sure, time became a miasma left behind in the wake of buses precariously overtaking us at 140 miles an hour on the endless tarmac through the desert. Sometimes in the face of oncoming traffic, and, on one delightful occasion, in the face of another bus doing the same thing, (traffic here seems to be mostly one big game of chicken, bizarrely pedestrians seem to be pretty good at it)

There were twenty of us in 8 off-road vehicles, we drove like a presidential convoy in perfect harmony, distracted only by the occasional breakdown, toilet break and insult throwing match between the last two cars — me and three others versus three ex military types who had already started drinking and who, shortly after one particularly lively exchange through rolled down windows, ran over a small tree.

They didn’t notice.

(So in a way very much like a certain sort of presidential convey)

About an hour and a half in, after passing endless stalls of watermelons, distant minarets, swathes of plastic bags running free in their natural habitat and the occasional group of goats, we swung off the road into proper desert and starting driving like maniacs through the sand dunes (hence the tree incident). It seems incumbent on me now to point out for those of you looking for some sort of higher analysis in this mental drivel I am spilling out, that the desert isn’t what I’d imagined it to be.

One I wasn’t riding a camel, sword drawn, about to engage in battle. Two there were no mirages and endless vast plains of shimmering golden sand. It’s full of stuff: thorn trees; mules (that appear leisurely sitting in your path through the temporary gap in the sand thrown up by the vehicle in front); dogs; rocks; goats; goats that look like rocks; people; an oil refinery; the ocassional ruin or building; again, plastic bags; and even, in the mornings, a group of six kids who tell you they’ve come from the village on the other side of the hill you camped next to in full belief that you were in the middle of nowhere and truly getting drunk with nature, sorry, one with nature.

Anyway to the point, we built a fire, set up camp, which consisted of a number of cots provided by others, firewood brought all the way from Khartoum (by others), food for twenty people, chairs, a grill, electric lamps, music, drinks and ice buckets (all brought by others), and (my contribution) a backgammon board and a game of scrabble.

At about 2am we started falling asleep, (not before a bizarre incident where one of the insult throwing opponents, in a quiet moment, threw my hat in the fire - I watched it burn, thought "that was odd", and then went star gazing), at this point the desert was very much what I thought it would be. One it was very very cold, mostly because of a persistent dry wind that finds all chinks in your sleeping bag armour. I was fully dressed with a coat and a sleeping bag and still it was cold enough to trigger people to start wondering who they could become friendly with to get warm. Two it was insanely beautiful. It’s a cliche but currently it’s my cliche and I’m going to tell it, I saw the most stars I’ve ever seen out there, the sky is completely crowded with them. It’s breathtaking and peaceful.

‘So’, you ask, (a little impatiently I might add), ‘What was dysfunctional about that? Apart from the hat it sounds lovely.’

"Well", I say, after leaning forward with a dramatic flourish of my sorbet spoon, "at that point it was, apart from the hat as you say, lovely"… I fell asleep to the sound of nothing but the wind and the vision of nothing but the stars falling endlessly backwards towards me. Bliss. About ten minutes after that the sound of nothing but the desert wind turned began to be punctuated by a series of irregular, heartfelt, and slightly disconcerting groans. I can’t do them justice but they went something like this: "aaaaah" (pause) "ah ah arrrrr, oh god" (longer pause) "aaaaaaAAAh" (pause again - at which point you’d think they had stopped) "aaar" and then "Oh god…. arrrrrrggh". After about thirty minutes I finally cracked and said "does anyone else hear that?", "it’s probably one of the guys" came the sleepy reply "being sick". I can’t imagine what that person had eaten or how painfully it was coming up but those groans could have been used as sound effects for Dante.

About an hour later I adapted and fell asleep again. Ten minutes after this I was woken again by someone using my wrist and the friction a small section of my flesh provided as it pinched against the metal frame of the cot, as a prop as they pulled themselves up from under it. (A place from which they had passed out earlier).  "Ow" I murmured, to no reply, and turned over. Two seconds later a rhythmic rustling started coming from the edge of my cot, fearing something truly dodgy I rolled over to see someone rocking back and forth, both hands clutching their head, obviously still asleep, on their knees. Every rock back brought them against the edge of my cot.

I’ve been told, and I wasn’t about to test this, that it can be dodgy to wake someone up when they’re sleepwalking. So after contemplating the rocking figure for a few disturbed breath-holding minutes, I pulled myself together, turned my back and lay there, listening to the rhythmic rustle of the guy rocking against me, a lullaby interrupted only by the occasional wistful "argh" echoing out from behind the bushes.

Like I said, slightly dysfunctional, but beautiful all the same.

Things I appreciate from this week:

Having packed lunch made for me by the hotel I’m staying at. Something about packed lunch makes you feel like you’re at home with your mother who’s annoyed you didn’t tidy your room but still took the time to put in a kit kat.

Reading an email to the top dogs in dc from my boss which featured the line "I am just pooped"

Getting into work on Friday (the weekend here is Friday Saturday) only to find no-one here not even my boss who said he would need me to work today.

Grapefruits

Playing the final game of backgammon with what had been a complete stranger in the early hours of the morning and not losing 6-2 as had been predicted but instead losing 5-4 due to a random run of doubles and luck. 6-2 would have been humiliating. 5-4 can be avenged.

Working late on jet lag, delightful.

The upcoming trip to the desert, when asked where I’m going I am unable to tell people I can only say I am going and it’s the desert and I will be there. Me, Yoshi, in the desert, shooting at stars and ululating. The people I’m going with may not want to do that but that’s my agenda and I’m sticking to it.

Being helped out by relative strangers with everything, be it an inability to find shampoo to not knowing how to say "Sorry I don’t have much time I’ve overslept and I’m a complete mess today, actually sometimes I’m just a complete mess in general" in arabic.

The big huge birds that circle over every street here, they may be glorified crows, I don’t know, but they’re big and impressive and stage huge dogfights every now and then. For me. Me.

My friends. I miss them.