I was able to have more sleep this morning, that was a real treat. I had been running on empty for the past few days and all the sugary supplements in the world couldn’t bring my energy levels back up. I’m waking up in the morning with the feeling that I have a head cold, but I think it’s just a combination of the dust and the prop plane air conditioning running in the room. Met Carlo for breakfast at 10, we were in the office by 11 and I was working on the stats reports for a change and Carlo went to train the Shuwak staff.

We broke for lunch at about 1:00 and headed to a great chicken place that one of the guys knew. When we stopped the car it was in one of the areas that we had driven through a number of times. It was a run down place with cracked windows and tiled from wall to wall in an off-cream colour. We sat down and the waiter came across and suggested the roast chicken to all of us (in Arabic), so we all had the Roast Chicken with a side order of bread and Pepsi. The Chicken was good, real good, very spicy and very tasty. Throughout the meal Carlo and I were chatting with the guys from Shuwak about Sudan and our perceptions of what we expected when we arrived… One responded with “Were you expecting war everywhere?” laughing heartily, well yeah I was to be honest, something different to what we are seeing. He pointed out that the news in the west likes to make everything so big, “yes there are problems in my country, but most of the time life is normal”. “In the cities it is like any other city, except we have no money”, I asked why? “Well the country is meant to be rich, but our government spends so much money on the army Generals for the wars in the South, the east and the west.” We talked around the fact that the only place in Sudan where things grow easily is in the south, this is more of a swamp land than desert and this is one of the issues that is causing war. Because it is agriculturally more profitable there is a movement in the south that wants to split this part of Sudan into its own independent state, currently a peace agreement is being discussed to stop this civil war from continuing.

We discussed this for some time and then moved onto how Khartoum and Sudan were populated. One thing I have noticed is that Khartoum is a real mixing pot of cultures for the locals, much like in Dubai, but without the false impression of prosperity for all. He estimated there are some 600,000 refugees in Sudan from all parts of Africa and the Middle East. We continued the discussion moving onto how the country was financially separated and it appears that people form the north are considered to be more prosperous and there is some resentment from the people in the south about the people in the north. The people in the north have the “contacts” to get jobs easily and the people in the south are agricultural and want their independence so they are no longer dependant on the rest of Sudan.

We paid for lunch and headed back to the office, on the way it was decided we should stop for tea before we get back. So we pulled over at the side of the road by one of the ladies with the boxes covered with jars of tea’s and coffees. I ordered Turkish for a change and we continued our discussion, this time focusing on “The Identity of Sudan”. It appears this is a bone of contention within Sudanese culture. The people in government and in the upper ranks of society enforce Arabic culture into the system and yet if you look at the majority of the people in the country they are African and as far as Salaam was concerned he was African and spoke Arabic as many countries do. His feeling was that this was to create closer ties with the Middle East and to ensure the prosperity of the country, but unfortunately this was prosperity that would stay at the very top of society.

What is written above was from the opinion of one man, he seemed like a balanced man all the same, but you shouldn’t form your opinions or understandings of the country based upon what I have written. The InterWeb, UN Website especially and the “media” have information around the issues that Sudan faces internally and externally. I just wrote what I heard because I thought it was a useful insight, but as ever you need to look at all available sources and find a middle ground and there somewhere is the truth…

Whilst talking to Salaam, I thought to myself, hmmm I wonder if he knows anything about the slow lingering death from the snake bite. I told him what we had heard the previous night about the snake bite in Shuwak (no it’s not a part of your body) and he immediately started laughing. He said, “Yes he was bitten, but he died much later and it wasn’t related to the bite.” “Perhaps it was the boredom of Shuwak that took him”. The next piece of information was reassuring, he had been trained by the UN on how to deal with snake bites and they had a field hospital out there. Then from personal experience (he had been bitten himself), he told how to deal with a snake bite, “Just don’t care that you have been bitten”, I replied “Sorry?” “You see my friend, when a snake bites you, it affects the heart and adrenalin, you will only make it worse if you worry about it”, “When I was bitten, I just looked and shrugged, all was fine”. From more detail of the conversation it seems that snakes aren’t that big a problem in the compound, there are no scorpions that he has seen, but there are a large contingent of black beetles. The key thing to watch for is making it past the first hour if you are bitten, just relax and all will be good, don’t panic and chill… hmmm I still think I would run around screaming like running screaming thing.

The rest of the day was stats reports again, then back to the hotel. On the cab ride back to the hotel the taxi driver had good English and was explaining all the different buildings we were seeing. “The Train Station, which had closed and was no longer used”, “The hospital” this reminded me of a block of flats in one of the less prosperous area’s of England. The stairs were on the outside of the building and a walkway for each of the floors which ran across the front of the building with the doorways to the rooms, most of them open. There were people milling around on the balconies and standing looking on to the street. “Malaria Hospital”, this was building to the immediate left of the main hospital, it looked very different. Whether this was to seclude the malaria sufferers from the rest of the world to minimise the spread or just that the building was built at a different time I’m not sure. But there were no real visible windows in the building, almost looking like an enclosed NCP car park. I did wonder what the conditions would be like inside such a place?

That reminds me, I saw my first mosquito today, I looked down on my arm and there it was. Hmmm I studied it for a second before dispatching it back to which ever hellish place it came from. It was small, really small, much smaller than I imagine. I think by now you know what my imagination is like, so you can guess that I had imagined something about the size of a seagull landing on your arm and being clearly visible, but no, it was tiny. That’s what imagination does for you.

Abdulla hadn’t been in the office today, so we had made no arrangements to meet up for the Sufi. I didn’t mind though, I was happy of an evening of rest and the opportunity to get an early night.

So, this is me, signing off… g’night.