A Week in Sudan 9 August , 2008

 

 

Well this last week has been a great journey.  Someone once told me that the best way to evaluate where you are at any given point is based on these three questions:  Are you giving?  Are you learning?  Are you having fun?

 

I feel this past week definitely fulfilled the three quotas.  A World Faith Chapter is starting with great support in Khartoum, I learned tons about the history and current issues that Sudan is facing, and I met great people who both further inspired me and made the trip enjoyable.

 

First of all, there is something a bit ironic about meeting anyone from Sudan… They are the most peaceful and amicable people as a culture that I have found in my travels in some 20 countries now.  It is damn near impossible to imagine these same people, whether from the north or south, Port Sudan or from Darfur, as capable of what we hear on in the western media, which at time is misleading (I plan on writing another post just on this subject).  As arrived on the tarmac this irony became apparent, as the warm smiles greeted me as I arrived, with pieces of Sudan Air wreckage in the background. 

 

I spent my first few days in Omdurman, being hosted by Gihad Abunafeesa, now the Regional Director of Sudan for World Faith.  Gihad’s family took great care of me, as I as staying the male side of their gender-separated home, which I shared with her cousin Midu, who is suffering from Sickle-Celled Anemia, and an old Darfurian Sheikh who was deaf, neither of which spoke English.  Because of the extreme heat, us three slept outside every night, in the guys’ courtyard, while a light breeze would cool me off.

 

I met with students from Gihad’s university, Ahfad University, where she is her fourth year as a medical student.  I worked from there most days, ironically sticking out as a tall white guy in an all-girls school in Africa.  I met many young people interested in the World Faith chapter, and things really solidified when Gihad introduced me to the awesome people of Cafa, a local organization that works on a grassroots level to address issues in Sudan such as AIDS education,  peace-building with IDP camps, and training volunteers who are placed in humanitarian projects.  After a meeting with Cafa’s Director Yassir Ibrahim, Cafa agreed to host a World Faith Chapter, and has a four-person committee working on how to develop the project, while I am working on promoting the volunteer base.   

 

I feel like I am missing so much but it was one of those experiences, which has some many details, such as my new Sudanese friends, one of which runs an ad agency and I went into a meeting with him, when I should I stayed quiet I instead proposed that this construction company think big, using buildsudan.com (which they bought that day).  Or the wedding I went to, where I spent an entire afternoon learning the 50 words necessary to greet a Sudanese person properly (the greetings go on and on, it’s great!).  Too much occurred in this period to full articulate, so I guess this is just an ambiguous post…

 

In other news, I am 3 weeks away from returning to the states.  Unless we get funding between now and then, I will have to begin jobhunting… time to start preparing my resumé.  L  

On My Way Out 30 July , 2008

I delayed the release of this post so it wouldn’t post until I am on the plane to Sudan.  I did that as I was getting a lot of concerned people writing, calling, etc, and I needed to pray and think about this one on my own.  I appreciate everyone’s concern, but I hope that you all trust that I have planned accordingly and will put safety first in my decision making.  Furthermore, the fact that I am going is not a sign of disrespect to those of you who have dissented.  Let’s all pray that I have God’s protection throughout.

 

So now for the story of what it takes to get a Sudanese visa…  While I watched a Swedish couple get their visa in a few hours last week, I applied two weeks ago.  Starting last Thursday, I have spent anywhere from one to three hours each day at the Sudanese Consulate just to find out if my application has been approved (supposedly by the Sudanese President al-Bashir himself, though I question if that actually happens).  Finally yesterday I just stayed around for four hours harassing the consulate guy, Yassir, who has been on a first-name basis with me for nearly a week now.  After these four hours he led me to a room in the back of the consulate where a older Sudanese man in a brown tailored suit sat, staring at his computer screen.  After a minute of silence (and only a vague acknowledgement of my existence), he fumbled with his printer mumbling, “busy, what?”  Turning to me he asked if knew anything about printers.

 

Seeing that he hadn’t even touched my application, I thought I would take advantage of this moment to pick up some points.  A minute later I’m sitting at his desk going through is peripheral settings for his computer and he’s on his cell phone talking to his wife.  That’s when Yassir walks back in to find me at the Consulate General’s desk and the CG standing up beside me like nothings out of place.  Yassir burst with laughter.

 

After printing out some sheets I noticed they were blueprints for a house.  “My house” he announced with a touch of both hope and pride.  Looking over the plans I saw some basic issues caused some dead space in the design (most of  you don’t know this, but before I moved to New York I worked summers and weekends/evenings for a few years in construction, saving up for NYU… that was a life-time ago).  I respectfully told him, “you know, if you move this wall and this wall, and extended these rooms and move these doors, you could get rid of this dead space and make the whole place more space-efficient.”  He bought it.  He got so excited that he brought me back over to his computer to show me the location of his house on Google Earth.  After buttering him up he began the questioning:   “What do you know about Sudan?”

 

Though I wasn’t sure what the right answer was, I was pretty sure it wasn’t, “well the same government that helps you pay for this house is also sponsoring a genocide.”  Irony plays out when for the first time that I could remember, I was trying to be the dumb American.  He continued his propagandist remarks about how Sudanese are better than Egyptians, and how Sudan is “the safest country in Africa.” Right.  But with childlike naivety I led him to believe that this was great input, and that I had no idea about the country’s history or current dilemmas.  “Don’t listen to Western media, Sudanese are the nicest people in the world.”   So I responded with, “boy I do wish to get to see that inshallah.”   

 

APPROVED

 

After that, everything fell into place within a day.  More to report from the other side.