Not going through the breakfast thing again, you know I sleep, you know I eat and drink coffee in the morning, that is now a given. Ok, I’m going to take us back in time before I tell the next bit. The night I arrived in Khartoum, they were going to put me on the 1st floor with Rob, he said “cmon, give him a room on the 5th floor, give him a room with a view”. The hotel receptionist obliged, I was quite happy with that, wow a room with a view. I asked what Rob could see and as it turned out, outside his “Window” is the next building, which happens to be 4 feet away from the hotel and Carlo had the same view but from one floor below. I’ve been goading Rob and Carlo a little about the fact that I get daylight in my room and what a lovely view I have. I know that deep inside they are happy for me, but on the outside I can see them grating their teeth. J So, this morning when at breakfast I told them that I had a new experience on the 5th floor which the delightful smell of sewage, as you can imagine they looked so sad. I asked if they wanted a room with a view but they declined. When I discovered the sewage smell on the 5th floor I thought geez, I can’t wait to get into my room. I got into my room and nice fresh air, opened the door to the bathroom and thought someone had died in there. I decided to phone reception and let them know about the smell in my room and the phone was dead. Hmmm, what else is going to happen on the 5th floor, in Sudan is the 5th floor the equivalent of the 13th? I decided to see whether I could identify the problem. I pulled the bed away from the wall and could see that the phone was connected to the wall with two wires pushed into the hatch on the wall socket. Time to visit reception instead, I had no idea how this was configured and didn’t want to just jab the loose cable into the socket in case I damaged it permanently. I took the lift of doom to the ground floor and informed them of the broken phone and of the “interesting smell”. The acknowledged the smell on the 5th floor and that the problem was being sorted out… Inshallah and that someone would be up to my room to fix the phone… Inshallah. That’s the kind of commitment that I like!
No sooner had I got back to my room than the there was a knock on the door. Opened the door and there was a man there (the man who I had given the $20 tip to on arrival), he was here to fix the phone, as it turned out “Allah did will It” today. He moved the bed as I had done and looked at the wire that was hanging out of the wall with a slightly perplexed look on his face, he crouched down and proceeded to poke the wire into the socket, doing the one thing that I didn’t want to do. I was listening on the phone to tell him when to stop poking in the wall and I could hear the dial tone come and go, he never managed to stop at the right point. I figured at this point that my skills of poking surpassed his and informed him that it was ok, it could wait. He nodded his approval and left. I poked for about a minute and then had what I wanted, a dial tone. In celebration of this I called reception to tell them that everything was ok and ordered a coffee to my room!
Work started at 8:30 and the continuation of the reports, I was pleased this morning that I had a major breakthrough on the most complex stat report for refugee resettlement. I figured that I would take Abdulla up his offer of a trip to the old town for lunch. It is North Khartoum and would be about a 20 minute drive, but the back had been broken on the reporting database as a lot of the others would be based on this one report. Carlo was in the middle of migrating yet more data and didn’t have time to join us, but there was nothing I could do as my part on the image side of things had been completed. We headed out to lunch at around 1:00 and North West to cross the Nile into North Khartoum. This section of Khartoum is where the original city stood and also the Market place, the central hub of Khartoum.
On the way to Old Khartoum I started asking about how he viewed the country and whether the situation was improving in terms of standards of living. It seemed that even in the past 10 years there had been significant improvements in the standards of living in the country and to his eyes the country is “richer” than he had seen in the past and more lenient. He talked about the “Taliban Rule” which had fallen over the country at one time, where carrying something as simple as $1 in your pocket would result in death as this was seen to undermine the stability of the country (I’m sure that killing people for carrying $1 did more damage than that). He went to how moving out of the country was difficult as well, if you wanted to leave the country for a week, you would have to get an exit Visa which would have to be approved by 7-8 different ministries. You could only take a certain amount of money with you and you would be thoroughly search on exiting the country. The list of obscurities grew as we talked, it made me realise that in truth things had definitely improved, but there was still a lot of room for improvement.
I had thought that downtown Khartoum was hustle and bustle, but this just didn’t compare to the sight that greeted me when we arrived. The Market itself was probably one square mile. It roughly split into different sections covering pretty much everything you could ever want to buy for daily life in Khartoum. The place was heaving with people, cars, Tuk Tuk’s, donkeys/horses and carts, all fighting for space to get to wherever they were travelling. We too fought for space, looking for a place to park, at one point sitting for 10 minutes while a donkey and cart had a stand off with a Tuk Tuk. Eventually found a space next to the spice area and decided to proceed on foot to see what was going on in there. As soon as I opened the door I was greeted by the intense heat of the day and the smell of the spices. It was quite a heady experience coming from the air conditioned neutral smelling car into a sensory overload. We walked for some time, milling through the market. The fish section was particularly inviting, from the looks of things with ever piece of fish you got 100 free flies, it was a bargain, but I had to refuse the price that was being offered. We wondered through stall after stall of toiletries, pots and pans, live chickens, “food stuff’s”, children’s toys, and man that sold almost anything electrical from the looks of what was outside his stall. I asked a few people if I could take their pictures and the younger generations were quite happy to do so, but if there were older people in the back ground they would cover their faces. I figured it would be best to holster the camera, I didn’t want to offend or upset anyone.
We returned to the car and Abdulla suggested there was a museum we could go to, I said “sound’s good”. We drove half a mile around the corner and Abdulla pointed out his parents house, I said it “looks nice, what does your father do”, “he was an investment banker, but he is retired now”. Then we pulled up on the road outside the house, I didn’t realise we were stopping, but it seemed it was part of the plan. He guided me into the courtyard and upstairs into the house, I was introduced to his father and invited to sit. I did so, then a house maid brought me a Pepsi, “Shokran” thanking her for bringing me the drink. We sat and talked to his father for a short time, the TV was running in the background and there was a Palestinian man on the television being interviewed, I was amazed by the huge differences between Arabic dialects. The Sudanese variant is very softly spoken and almost poetic in delivery where as the Palestinian dialect seemed much harsher in delivery. I asked Abdulla and he agreed on this matter, explaining that in some dialects it was as if the words were sung and not spoken. We finished our drinks and Abdulla guided me to the back of the house, obviously there was a back door which led onto the street and to the museum. But I was wrong, the museum wasn’t outside of the house, it was part of the house. I walked into what looked like a miniature “State Room” chairs all around the outside walls, quite lavish in design and having age to them. The room was quite impressive and I thought it was pretty cool that they had recreated a “State Room” inside of there house. His family obviously had a real feeling love of the heritage of the country because as I turned the corner what greeted me amazed me. It was like stepping back in time, it was a recreation of an old colonial office complete with portrait above the desk, an old phone where you tap the receiver repeatedly saying “hello, hello, hello” just like in the black and white movies. There was a type writer that looked like it definitely belonged in a museum and photos of a gentleman meeting various heads of state, hand drawings of both English and Sudanese military personnel wearing different uniforms. “Abdulla, this must have taken an age to collect all of these items, your father has a real passion for this, who is the man on the wall?”, Abdulla replied “Oh that is my grandfather, he was the President of Sudan until 1959”
As we drove back to the offices I asked whether I should call him “Sir” and curtsy when I see him, he laughed heartily and then said “Yes, that would be good” with a wry smile on his face.
In the evening it was a pretty simple one again, back to the hotel, down for dinner, I had Spaghetti Bolognese and a 10 year old Chateau Neuf Du Pape (It was a Pepsi, but I like to pretend). All in all it was pretty good, but the bouquet lacked something.
I am wondering who else is hiding in and around the UNHCR in Khartoum, Elvis Presley in the archive room, Lord Lucan making tea at the back of the Compound or perhaps guitarist that went missing from the Manic Street Preachers selling bread on the streets.
Who knows what tomorrow brings…