In case you’ve missed our summer episode, back in June Ginger Beer was offered a job in Chad. And being “our only man in N’djamena” at that. Not that we don’t like being in Sudan any more. As a matter of fact we enjoy it very much and we have come to know lots of lovely people whom we’ll be very sad to leave when the time comes, but our time is coming to an end and we have to start thinking about what happens next.
Before applying Ginger Beer had spent a few weeks trying to sell it to me. “There’s a big river”, he said. He didn’t seem to have noticed the Nile – sorry, two Niles – in Khartoum. “It’s much greener”, he then ventured. Chad is part of the Sahel, one of the driest regions in the world. Nice try. “It’s not as hot…” Admittedly, there may have been a couple of degrees in it. But since Khartoum is over 45 today, that’s not saying much. He wasn’t gonna fool me with that one either. “People speak French.” That almost worked, until he added that there were lots of French soldiers patrolling the city dressed in tight shorts. Not tempting. “You can have a beer by the river”, he let out in a final attempt. A brave final attempt.
There was only one problem: I wasn’t allowed to go. Under no circumstances was I going to be able to stay in the country for at least the first few months, maybe more. In other words, he’d be drinking cocktails while I’d be floating in a spatial vacuum between Sudan, France and the UK.
In the end, we decided not to go to. It was hard, since it would have been a really nice opportunity for Ginger Beer. But we learnt something beautiful in the process: as we listened to each other’s hopes and fears, we tried to look beyond ourselves and trust God for what would come next and we decided to face it together.
So we’ll be flowing in the ‘Toum for a few more months, which is not bad really given that all our lovely friends are still around. And I’ve recently found tonic water again.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Friday, May 1, 2009
All the fun of the fair
Mr Bin Laden has done many things in his life. Arguably, one of his better acts was to build Child City, just south of the airport in Khartoum. During his five-year stay in Sudan in the early 90s, he seems to have been credited with a lot of building, but as the rumours on this one are more than usually persistent, we will give him the benefit of the doubt.
Khartoum is peculiar for its inordinately large number of funfairs and parks (though please don’t think green or trees), to which your Joe Khartoumer will flock of an evening. And Child City is one of the biggest and best – well worth the one pound entrance fee.
Before you get too excited, we are not yet at the level of Alton Towers. Or even Thorpe Park. Wide expanses of scrubby grass decorated with empty water bottles are punctuated with a fascinating collection of dilapidated fairground rides, from bumper cars to carousels. Buying tickets for each ride is an interesting process of finding the little kiosk closest to the ride (often a difficult judgment call), and trying in our broken Arabic to ask the man in immaculate shirt and tie what exactly we were paying for.
Pride of place is clearly the astronaut ride – a couple of massive metal arms rotating on a central pylon towering over the park, with a car full of passengers at each end. While suspended upside down 30 metres from the ground, I was hugely encouraged by my friend shouting repeatedly in my ear, ‘Chinese manufacturing, Sudanese maintenance!’. And the park must make a fair profit in the change and mobile phones falling out of pockets.
If you need time to build up to this climax, there are a number of more sedate options, though each with their unique selling points. From the Shetland pony of rollercoasters, where the slowness and flatness of the ride is more than made up for by the alarming creaking and uncertainty over whether your car really will turn the corner; to the spinning teacups, which a few people were manfully trying to master. Sadly their resolution didn’t last to the end. The insides of the nice man who told us he took his niece there every week, ended up in the lap of the niece. Not sure whether this was a deliberate strategy to get a night off next week.
Perhaps the only ride that struggled for value for money was the haunted house ride. The owner obviously very proud of the motion sensors his ride depended on, they were on prominent display and hardly upstaged by the papier mache snakes and crocodiles jumping out. Thirty seconds later, while we were trying to work out the significance of a colonial style man in hunting gear leaping out at us, the little cart arrived back at the beginning.
Add in forty degree heat, family picnics with little children running around (at midnight), men in flowing white jellabiyahs screaming like little children, and you have a very different and fine Friday night out.
Khartoum is peculiar for its inordinately large number of funfairs and parks (though please don’t think green or trees), to which your Joe Khartoumer will flock of an evening. And Child City is one of the biggest and best – well worth the one pound entrance fee.
Before you get too excited, we are not yet at the level of Alton Towers. Or even Thorpe Park. Wide expanses of scrubby grass decorated with empty water bottles are punctuated with a fascinating collection of dilapidated fairground rides, from bumper cars to carousels. Buying tickets for each ride is an interesting process of finding the little kiosk closest to the ride (often a difficult judgment call), and trying in our broken Arabic to ask the man in immaculate shirt and tie what exactly we were paying for.
Pride of place is clearly the astronaut ride – a couple of massive metal arms rotating on a central pylon towering over the park, with a car full of passengers at each end. While suspended upside down 30 metres from the ground, I was hugely encouraged by my friend shouting repeatedly in my ear, ‘Chinese manufacturing, Sudanese maintenance!’. And the park must make a fair profit in the change and mobile phones falling out of pockets.
If you need time to build up to this climax, there are a number of more sedate options, though each with their unique selling points. From the Shetland pony of rollercoasters, where the slowness and flatness of the ride is more than made up for by the alarming creaking and uncertainty over whether your car really will turn the corner; to the spinning teacups, which a few people were manfully trying to master. Sadly their resolution didn’t last to the end. The insides of the nice man who told us he took his niece there every week, ended up in the lap of the niece. Not sure whether this was a deliberate strategy to get a night off next week.
Perhaps the only ride that struggled for value for money was the haunted house ride. The owner obviously very proud of the motion sensors his ride depended on, they were on prominent display and hardly upstaged by the papier mache snakes and crocodiles jumping out. Thirty seconds later, while we were trying to work out the significance of a colonial style man in hunting gear leaping out at us, the little cart arrived back at the beginning.
Add in forty degree heat, family picnics with little children running around (at midnight), men in flowing white jellabiyahs screaming like little children, and you have a very different and fine Friday night out.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Traffic control, Khartoum style
Policing in Sudan covers many interesting areas, most of which we cannot cover here. But today’s snippet is concerned with your common or garden variety, the Khartoum traffic police. Dressed in spanking white uniforms, they are ubiquitous on the streets of Khartoum. There are two distinct species – the poor sheepdogs braving the mad onrush of buses, taxis, amgeds (kombis/matatus), motorcycles, 4x4s, Mercedes with blacked out windows and old pick-up trucks, gloriously but vainly trying to direct and channel the attacking hordes, sometimes disappearing between them only to rise again waving hands and blowing whistles. Somehow, they also find the time to slap the hands of friends in cars as they charge past.
Then there is the altogether more languid breed, blue trousers with yellow stripes setting off their daz-ultra shirts. They loll on benches at junctions like lizards on a rock in the summer’s heat. Then, when recharged, they launch into action. Car after car is whistled to the side, documents checked, broken headlights condemned and small fortunes collected in fines. My wallet is lighter after being found without a valid driving licence on me. That the Ministry of Interior had been holding it for the last 3 months while vainly promising to issue a Sudanese one didn’t seem an acceptable excuse.
But my sympathy has been restored after a heroic episode this week. Driving home one evening, I was following a red saloon through a junction. A blue and yellow lizard waved it over. For fear of a penalty, deserved or not we will never know, the red saloon charged through. Which brought up a thought – if half the lizards have no transport and the other half are far from their machines, why doesn’t everyone do this?
Continuing with this thought behind the now smug saloon boy, I was overtaken by a decrepit but undeniably classic vespa, its little engine buzzing like an angry wasp. On it, beneath the fluorescent jacket, I could make out a flash of blue and yellow. Noticing late in the game, saloon boy weaved across the road to shake off the angry wasp-lizard combo. But this one wasn’t for shaking.
Risking a good squashing, it managed to draw level beside the swaying car and a tad suicidally in my opinion, bore down on the car’s front wing, forcing it to the side of the road. Changing tactics and wisely deciding not to add to his crimes by running over a policeman, the red car braked suddenly and pulled a screeching right into an unlit side road. A brilliant and unexpected move, leaving the two-stroke wheezing uselessly along the main road. No doubt breathing easier now, he eased slowly into the dark. But little did he know that the tenacious vespa had slipped into the next turning and was tracking along a parallel road…
Then there is the altogether more languid breed, blue trousers with yellow stripes setting off their daz-ultra shirts. They loll on benches at junctions like lizards on a rock in the summer’s heat. Then, when recharged, they launch into action. Car after car is whistled to the side, documents checked, broken headlights condemned and small fortunes collected in fines. My wallet is lighter after being found without a valid driving licence on me. That the Ministry of Interior had been holding it for the last 3 months while vainly promising to issue a Sudanese one didn’t seem an acceptable excuse.
But my sympathy has been restored after a heroic episode this week. Driving home one evening, I was following a red saloon through a junction. A blue and yellow lizard waved it over. For fear of a penalty, deserved or not we will never know, the red saloon charged through. Which brought up a thought – if half the lizards have no transport and the other half are far from their machines, why doesn’t everyone do this?
Continuing with this thought behind the now smug saloon boy, I was overtaken by a decrepit but undeniably classic vespa, its little engine buzzing like an angry wasp. On it, beneath the fluorescent jacket, I could make out a flash of blue and yellow. Noticing late in the game, saloon boy weaved across the road to shake off the angry wasp-lizard combo. But this one wasn’t for shaking.
Risking a good squashing, it managed to draw level beside the swaying car and a tad suicidally in my opinion, bore down on the car’s front wing, forcing it to the side of the road. Changing tactics and wisely deciding not to add to his crimes by running over a policeman, the red car braked suddenly and pulled a screeching right into an unlit side road. A brilliant and unexpected move, leaving the two-stroke wheezing uselessly along the main road. No doubt breathing easier now, he eased slowly into the dark. But little did he know that the tenacious vespa had slipped into the next turning and was tracking along a parallel road…
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
The haircut
For those of you who are assiduously following our progress, we are rewinding several months for this episode that has been engraved on my memory.
After 5 months in Sudan, when my ‘look’(it’s a French word, honest) was becoming dangerously like that of a hardened missionary woman, I decided that it was time for a haircut. After numerous helpful answers of ‘Me ? I wait to have it done when I go back home’, I was somewhat disappointed that nobody had dared try the local option. So I resolved to seek out a beauty salon. Finding a promising candidate, I refused to be deterred by the surprise of the receptionist when I made my appointment.
The next day I sat in the chair with a sense of optimism. The first difficulty was one of communication. A friendly Ethiopian, she admitted to never having cut a European’s hair before, but ‘I did have five months experience of hair cutting in Ethiopia !’. I was clearly in good hands.
To offset the possibility of language difficulties, I’d brought with me a picture of Katie Holmes, with a lightly layered cut. As she shot me a slightly worried glance, I murmured ‘Go on, I’m sure it’ll be fine’. Starting to tremble, she took a lock of hair between her fingers and purposefully snipped it off. So far so good. Except that the cut was diagonal to my head, and was the wrong side of her fingers.
As she pressed on, a dozen Sudanese ladies crowded round to have a look, offering her advice on technique and for me encouraging smiles. Ten minutes later, I was looking a little less like Katie Holmes and more like Cruella De Ville from 101 Dalmatians. Although my hair was indeed layered, some layers were a good few centimetres longer than others. Once she had insisted on straightening it, the effect was multiplied.
‘It looks very nice, doesn’t it ?’ she asked. ‘Do you want to see the back ?’ Absolutely not. Nor did I have the courage to tell her that a) I would have to wear a beret for the next six months ; and b) I would never be seing her again.
After 5 months in Sudan, when my ‘look’(it’s a French word, honest) was becoming dangerously like that of a hardened missionary woman, I decided that it was time for a haircut. After numerous helpful answers of ‘Me ? I wait to have it done when I go back home’, I was somewhat disappointed that nobody had dared try the local option. So I resolved to seek out a beauty salon. Finding a promising candidate, I refused to be deterred by the surprise of the receptionist when I made my appointment.
The next day I sat in the chair with a sense of optimism. The first difficulty was one of communication. A friendly Ethiopian, she admitted to never having cut a European’s hair before, but ‘I did have five months experience of hair cutting in Ethiopia !’. I was clearly in good hands.
To offset the possibility of language difficulties, I’d brought with me a picture of Katie Holmes, with a lightly layered cut. As she shot me a slightly worried glance, I murmured ‘Go on, I’m sure it’ll be fine’. Starting to tremble, she took a lock of hair between her fingers and purposefully snipped it off. So far so good. Except that the cut was diagonal to my head, and was the wrong side of her fingers.
As she pressed on, a dozen Sudanese ladies crowded round to have a look, offering her advice on technique and for me encouraging smiles. Ten minutes later, I was looking a little less like Katie Holmes and more like Cruella De Ville from 101 Dalmatians. Although my hair was indeed layered, some layers were a good few centimetres longer than others. Once she had insisted on straightening it, the effect was multiplied.
‘It looks very nice, doesn’t it ?’ she asked. ‘Do you want to see the back ?’ Absolutely not. Nor did I have the courage to tell her that a) I would have to wear a beret for the next six months ; and b) I would never be seing her again.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)