Woke up late this morning (Doh!), had a shower, had to skip breakfast blah, blah, blah… still haven’t got a razor and forgot to ask at reception if they could get me one. But I have decided that I am going to try shaving holding the blade in my finger tips, if I have any catastrophic slips of the hand I will send piccies for you all to see… 🙂 I rushed to the lift and hammered the button, the lift arrived and I jumped in hitting the “0”, then turned to see Günter from WFO (World Food Organisation) on the boundary of stepping into the lift … the doors were like “Madame Guillotine” slamming on him as he was neither in the lift nor out. They pushed him into the side of the lift… and then again and again, they didn’t stop, it was like watching a human pinball machine. It seemed like a lifetime between me seeing what was happening, starting to laugh out loud at the visual feast and me hitting the “open the doors of death” button. I eventually managed through the laughter to open the lift doors and all was good… but for the rest of the journey in the lift I apologised, then laughed, then apologised, then laughing again and then apologising… I was glad when the long journey from the 5th to the ground floor was finally over…
This morning Carlo and I went for tea outside the compound, sitting with the refugee’s and asylum seekers. It was around 8:30 in the morning and the offices didn’t open for registrations until 9:30, but people had already started to gather outside. It was a very friendly atmosphere with lots of eye contact, nodding and smiling. At that time it was mainly men waiting outside, I would have guessed the majority were coming for further consultations without the rest of their families based upon what I now know about the registration process. A husband and wife (I assume) were sat together with their little daughter (2 years old maybe) tottering around near them. The little girl bent down to look at something on the floor then rubbed her face and started crying, she was holding the eye she had just rubbed. I’m not sure whether she rubbed something into her eye or after inspecting everything around her she realised her eye was hurting. Her father stood up immediately and to the tap under the shade of the bamboo poles covering the outside waiting area. He proceeded to wash her face and eye with the water and to try and clear whatever was causing her pain. All the time he was doing this she just kept looking back between fathers legs to her mother. Eventually, mum came across and repeated the same actions as dad had, he had obviously lost patience with the situation and went to sit back down. As soon as mum started washing her face she stopped crying and looked up with a smile. I guess that shows that wherever you are around the world, sometimes we all need our mum’s attention and this was obviously what this little one needed. As ever Mum makes everything better.
Something to point out about the little girl was that at this time of the morning it was around 22 degrees and getting warmer, yet the little girl was dressed in what I can only describe as a chenille romper suit. I’m surprised she wasn’t crying because of that alone, I know that I would have been because of the heat. I mean, for me it’s been at least a week since I wore my chenille romper suit and even with the central heating down at around 15 degrees I was working up a bit of a sweat, but that my friends is a story for another day…
Anyway, we finished our drinks headed back inside. As we wandered back to the IT rooms I was stopped in the corridor by Claas (the guy from the flight to Khartoum). He apologised for not being around this weekend because his mission times had changed (we were planning a bit of sight seeing, apparently there are small pyramids just outside of Khartoum and also a trip on the Blue Nile). Over the past 3 days he has been waiting for a German Minister to be coming out to Khartoum… as it turned out the German Minister had problems with getting his visa (hmmm familiar) and had had to cancel his flight 3 times (Stuck in a time loop?) and had finally decided that it was too much hassle to sort out the visa and really didn’t have the time to come to Sudan anyway. Claas had been waiting on the minister arriving since Saturday and this means that the mission he was on had completely collapsed, “Does this mean you will be heading back to Europe?” Claas responded, “nope, just waiting for my security clearance so that I can jump on a WFO flight and head to Darfur”. As I had learnt on the flight with Claas, he was going to Darfur to asses some of the camps out there and ensures that the refugee’s were being looked after. I did ask “if he needed someone to carry his bags?” He explained that unfortunately I wouldn’t be able to get the security clearance, but in my opinion it was well worth a shot. Having said that, given the plight out there, even if it had been an option I would have definitely thought twice about it.
I also learnt today that we wouldn’t be able to go to Shuwak, they have decided that the implementation for the sub station will have to done locally (Khartoum) so the guy’s from the substation are bringing the data to Khartoum due to time constraints and the amount of data we are having to migrate from the current database. The travelling itself will take approximately 2 days so we wouldn’t be able to fit everything we need to into our time frame. Have to admit I feel a bit gutted about that, it would have been great to step outside of the city even if it is just sand, sand and more sand from what I have been told.
For lunch I decided to be a bit daring and decided to go to the usual haunt for lunch, but that wasn’t the daring bit or perhaps partially. My stomach isn’t feeling too good, but the Imodium hasn’t made a showing as yet, fingers and legs crossed on this one. Anyway, I decided to take the camera out with us, Carlo and I set off on foot up to get a chicken Shuwarma from the local kebab shop which was only 10 minutes up the road. As we were walking along I was really surprised by the responses of people to me having a camera in hand, they were actually asking me if I wanted to take pictures of them? Ahem, I’m sure I was told that this was dangerous, but the locals were more than happy to oblige… I had people waving at me from across the street gesturing “Take pictures of us” and it was really quite fun, a lot of smiles and laughter because they were the subjects of my
So… with Claas not being around for the weekend and no trip to Shuwak I was wondering what would be happening over the weekend? When we got back to the office Abdulla approached Carlo and me, asking if we fancied a BBQ on the banks of the Blue Nile on Friday afternoon /evening? Sounded like a perfect opportunity to test whether the malaria tablets are working properly and felt it would be rude not to. Abdulla mentioned that he would make sure we have “Special Tea” available, for this I was grateful
Had a meal in the restaurant in the hotel tonight and talked through the day’s events, there is more work to do this evening when I get back to the room, but its going well, we completed the first database and started working on the others… I looked over my shoulder and saw the lift travelling up with Günter inside, I waved (trying to hold back the laughter from the visuals this morning), he waved… Rob said “Oh you met Günter?” I just replied, yeah we met in the lift and laughed to myself…
Anyway its 11pm already and I am definitely getting an early night tonight, don’t want to wake up late again and would like to try and get some sunrise pictures from the rooftop…
G’night Y’all…
BTW: I know that some of my blogs are written and read really badly, I hope you can make sense of my ramblings, I will tidy them up when I get back, but I am just trying to brain dump as much as possible while I remember it…
PS: I have updated the photos with some from today… hope you are enjoying them…
PPS: I notice people are afraid of leaving comments, feel free to critique or at least insult me… I’m not feeling a lot of love…
PPSS: I’ve had over 300 hits on the blog since I started, wow, keep hitting those refresh buttons, make me feel all important.