I woke up this morning when reception called me with my wakeup call at 7:30 in the morning, luckily I wasn’t feeling quite so itchy as when I went to bed. Had shower and again wished I had toothbrush, my mouth was at maximum fur, I’d called reception last night in the chance that they might have one, but unfortunately I was out of luck… Anyway, I went to get my shower and no sooner had I turned on the water than there was a knock, knock, I went to the door and there was a smiling man with a toothbrush and toothpaste, I could have kissed him, but that would have probably ended at having my lips or head cut off so thanked him with a few dollars instead… Got myself freshened up and cleaned my teeth, heaven is a toothbrush when you have thoughts of being without one for 2 weeks… J Anyway, I went down to have breakfast with Rob (the project lead). Had a good chat him and discovered the true nightmare we are facing with getting into with this data migration and upgrade, the server that was to be used still hasn’t been released by customs after 7 days, the data to be migrated was from no less than 50 database and there are a stack of reports which they need to be generated. So a busy time is ahead of us… good, good… Rob stated that he was really pleased that the driver had turned up last night, apparently the reliability isn’t that high and I might have ended up having to get a cab to a place that no one would really know where it was… err yeah so was I Rob, thanks for telling me… 🙂
Anyway, we got a cab to the UN Offices and the journey was a visual feast, the roads looked even worse than in the dark and there were a lot more cars on the road, hordes of people travelling around the city to their places of work I assume. As we drove there was a mild wind blowing, you could see the sand travelling across the road in front of the car, most attire was almost the same colour as the sand, very subtle colours, but every now and then a woman would come into view wearing brightly coloured clothes, this really stood out against the sand subtle colours, like a single poppy growing in the middle of a field. We arrived at the UNHCR Offices, the compound was surrounded by 10 foot walls and had security maintaining the gates. We entered the compound and the inside was very sparse, with the majority of the inside being filled with more UN Jeeps. The building itself is in a state of disrepair as is the rest of the city, we entered the building and it reminded me of the 1970’s, there was teak effect wood panelling everywhere. There were lots of smiling faces as we entered and I was surprised by the number of people that greeted me “Hello Mr Paul”, it seemed that my story of getting the Visa had become quite popular around the offices, but as I soon learned the turnaround on the Visa was a good one, for without a UN passport it is indeed very difficult to acquire a Visa for entry into the country. I would guess there are around 70 people working in the offices in Khartoum, the vast majority being Sudanese, but the remainder were a mix of all nationalities, but American being quite. We were escorted to the “Computer Room” and I was introduced to the two IT staff that run the IT show in the compound Abdulla and Abdul Bassit. After unpacking my laptop and setting everything up I was to join the Rob in the morning’s training to familiarise myself with ProGres and help with any issues in training.
The training was pretty straight forward, a basic .Net application which captures all of the details about a given individual seeking asylum which tracks their progression through the various stages to either acquiring refugee status or being denied this status. The process involved is to identify whether the person seeking asylum actually has the right to request this status, if they do fail to get a asylum they can appeal this, but depending on the government in question they may be able to try many times or just once and then they can no longer request an appeal. If they do get approved with refugee status and approved for asylum status this can result in a number of things happening, being relocated to another country (America, Sweden and Australia being in the top 3) or alternatively they can get local status and end up as a resident in the country they have moved into. During the training for the application we were reviewing the “Reasons for Asylum” and some of these were quite unbelievable (that it actually happens) but in my opinion if any person was being subjected to any them they deserved to be away from the harm and danger they had the potential to be in.
After lunch (a chicken Shwarmi) it was on with a bit of coding and data migration and trying to get my laptop working on their Novell network, on the whole that went pretty well quite a bit of data munging to do, but the database itself was quite disturbing, each record had a picture of a person or a family in there and the details of why they were requesting asylum, this was too much, the pictures in every record pretty much told the story and I won’t into any details. During the break times we searched for Abdul Bassit who seemed to be on a perpetual cigarette break, constantly trying to track him down in one of the many smoking area’s was a task in itself. Carlo asked if I fancied a cup of tea, oh yeah for sure I answered, we headed through the compound in a different direction to a door that had a sign saying “this door must be closed at all time”, what awaited me on the other side of the door kind of floored me. The door opened and we were in a secure area, there were guards lining the walls and another door on the other side of the room with a gate, behind the gate was a waiting room, filled with what I can only describe as empty souls, all the people there were waiting there turn to see a UN representative to either plea Asylum or continue their case for requesting Asylum. We walked through the to the other side of the waiting room into a 10×10 courtyard, there was Abdul Bassit with some of the people calmly sitting on the floor and told Carlo he would get around to sorting out the disk soon, then to my right, with yet another gate and a new sight caught my eye, there must have been a further 40 people outside the gates waiting their turn to enter the waiting room, we went out the other side of the gates to where there was a lady sat in the shade of a tree with a mixture of tea’s and other drinks on a small stall she had setup. She was obviously a regular to the compound and this is how she made her living, providing refreshment to those in need.
When we had the end of day meeting with Rob there was talk of going to Shuwak (5 hours east of Khartoum) to one of the UNHCR Outpost, I was completely up for this, but Carlo didn’t seem too keen to experience the opportunity. I really do hope his is something we can do, getting the opportunity to travel across country would be a fantastic experience, hope this comes off…
The day ended at around 5:30 and we waited for a UN driver to turn up at the compound, after 30 minutes we decided to take a cab instead, as Rob had described the drivers weren’t the most reliable people. We waited outside and eventually hailed down cab and he persuaded us that the he knew the way, when I say persuaded, we said things and he said yes, no matter what we said he said yes… I mean someone who is that eager to please is bound to be able to take us to the hotel… as luck would have it he did know the way, he took us on an almost direct route through some of the busiest parts of Khartoum and again it was quite a journey, people milling at the sides of the road sitting on the roofs of parked cars passing the time of day, laying and sleeping (what seems to be a favourite past time in the heat of the day and returning from their working day. I managed to take a few snaps on the way back, but because of the overall reaction to camera’s in the country (no one pretty much likes them) you have to be very careful with the snapping, I’ll try to get something on the blog site, but I’m not overly happy with any of them as yet because they were taken whilst on the move, hopefully I will be able to get a few select ones which I am happy with.
We got back to the room and relaxed for an hour before going down to dinner, I had rice with a side order of Shish Kebab, it was quite tasty, not sure whether it was beef or not, but what the heck, my bowels are still in a good state and the Imodium hasn’t made a showing yet. There was more chat with Rob and Carlo over dinner, Carlo left university two years ago and this is the first real opportunity he has had to travel with UNHCR with the rollout of ProGres, whereas Rob has been with UNHCR for over 16 years and had a many stories to tell about travel to many countries around the world on standard UNHCR missions and emergency missions where war has broken out. I am amazed by the things that he has done and the places that he has been, I don’t think that anyone could have lead a more complete life…
Notes:
The hotel has freshly squeezed grapefruit juice, but they don’t have any grapefruits if you ask for them.
Don’t ask for Tea if you expect to have milk in it, the milk is powdered.
Turkish coffee has sediment in the bottom, don’t gulp it own, you get a mouth full of grit.
“Inshallah” means god willing, if you ask someone to do something and they say “yes” followed by Inshallah it probably means it isn’t going to happen…
Arabic action movies are funny, somebody went to the Chuck Norris movie academy then came home and said I have a great idea.