One Thread

For the past several weeks, I have been struggling to write something new about my time in Khartoum.  I have a number of half written snippets here or there, but nothing has quite come together.  As I pondered the reasons, one of them finally came to me.  After much consideration, I had to admit to myself that I was not, actually, liking Khartoum too much, and thus was rarely inspired to write. 

The architecture, which is usually the first thing to catch my eye in a new city, especially aged architecture, left much to be desired.  The ostentatiously large villas that popped up here and there aside, most of which touted quite attractive, shiny-new architectural features, much of the city looked like the aftermath of a tidal wave that swept in plastic half-parts and stuck them across the surface of the city like a disjointed jigsaw puzzle.

I also had to admit that I was putting Khartoum in an impossible position – I felt the more modern parts of it were awkwardly juxtaposed against the dusty roads, which also immediately reminded me that they were not accessible to many a local Sudani.  I thought I would like the more populously lived areas, but when I got to any of them, I found that I also didn’t like the seemingly random chaos of the small and big buildings, many a half-painted wall, and the ubiquitous dirt.  As I said, I was putting Khartoum in an impossible position. I supposed if I could understand any part of it, I would be able to catch that thread to liking it more, but it has not happened yet.

Another contributing factor was the general prohibition on taking photographs in public. I don’t know the reason, but it has been confirmed to me by a number of sources.  One colleague providing the solution ‘just have a Sudanese person with you’, which did nothing to explain the rationale.  So there I stood: failing at hooking into an aspect of the city that I liked, and denied my usual camera medium for discovering such aspects.  It practically de-motivated me from walking around the city altogether, and thus slowly distanced me from it.

I was also yearning for some exposure to real Sudanese life.  Working long hours at an office can get you into a socializing rut that, you soon realize, seems to mainly involve other internationals, who are wonderful, but they are not, by definition, local.  Besides, when internationals get together, our main conversation usually focuses on our own lives back home (not Sudan), or on how we are finding ways to adapt and adjust what is available to us in Khartoum to best approximate things we liked back home (again, not Sudan).  The anthropologist in me was getting frustrated that my experience was such that I could be living anywhere, and since I wasn’t in Beirut with my sweet husband, family and friends, then I didn’t really want to be ‘anywhere’. 

I must have been sending out this message into the universe because, shortly afterwards, I got invited to a concert commemorating the work of a famous Sudanese singer.  A day after that I had a pleasant experience with a sweet local neighbor, and earlier that same day, I’d finally been able to go on one of my random walks in the alleys nearby and at long last got a glimpse of what draws me to communities.  I’m so happy to have the excuse to remember them today as they might very well be the start of that thread I’ve been searching for.

As I set off on that walk, dodging the holes and rocks on the uneven sandy roads, I tried to keep an eye up at the extremely large houses marking the area, and pretty much creating the road around them.  It consistently surprised me to see the sand stop suddenly at the edge of a carefully paved driveway with its grand gate, and always made me wonder why the owner who invested so much into this home to top all homes didn’t spend a little more to pour asphalt around it. If each of these houses did that, most of the sandy road (if not all of it) would be perfectly asphalted.  I raised this question to a couple of friends, and never got more than a sigh in response.  As I continued to walk, however, my attention was frequently drawn to the carefully tended trees planted around the houses.  They are lush, and a pleasant presence, and clearly required a lot of care to blossom in their spot of fertilized dirt fending away the dry surrounding sand.  They sit at the outside of the high wall marking the contours of the house’s grounds, which reaffirms that they have been planted here not for the residents of the house, but for us, to enjoy their shade or beauty just so. How kind.

Other houses would have another welcome distraction outside their walls; a set of three or more clay water gourds, possibly bigger than the one that used to sit in my grandmother’s courtyard, sitting moist on a stand to cater to any thirsty passerby.  Some are placed in honor of a late family member (men and women alike, I was happy to note), others are just there as they are, and seeing them always moves me immensely as I find it an infinitely kind gesture in Sudan’s heat.

Lightened by these observations, I walked on, trying to carefully keep track of the heat, and zipping into any shaded alleys I saw.  Then, walking out onto a big side street, I finally saw what I realized I was looking for all along. I saw a mule-drawn flat carriage carrying its owner and a few urns of milk.  Don’t misunderstand me, it’s not that I was searching for a ‘quaint’ image of the ‘locals’ – not at all. I was just thrilled that these neigbourhoods that had exchanged orchards for big houses were still of equal claim to the other Sudanis.  I was thrilled to have a genuine element of daily life, as it is plainly lived, enter into this vista of polished signs on awkward shops, and plastic flowers adorning shop windows.  Sadly, on all other days of my bumpy, dusty rides through the city, I find that the plastic flowers are ever-present but the milk seller and his mule are not.

So now that I know the thread is there, I just need to hold on to it tightly.  One element that will make it easier for me to bear the process is, no surprise, the people.  The Sudanese are probably the kindest people I have ever met, in word and deed. So much so that they can frequently unknowingly put you to shame by their noble interaction.  They are just indescribably sweet, enough to make anyone seek out that thread and hold on to it – you figure that a country that has bred such fine people must have many saving graces.  Pity they’re not easier to find… I might have to venture out of Khartoum to uncover more.

The House of the (Hot) Rising Sun

There is a lot of talk about the heat, here in Sudan. As I enter the office every morning, the security guard greeting me will ask me “keef el sakhana?” (how’s the heat?) with a smile that is part solidarity, part apology.  It was sweet the first few days, but three weeks in, it’s getting tired. The same goes for the number of (extremely) sweet counterparts that I am meeting, each of which will not end a conversation with me without mentioning the heat.  This carried me through the spectrum of graceful gratitude for their small talk about the weather, to wondering whether I was exhibiting some undesirable side effects of the heat and this is their polite way of excusing me (paranoia much?).

There are no two ways about it – Khartoum is hot!  It’s hot and dry. I spent my first few days moisturizing my dried skin and soothing my itchy, dried out nose (and clean up whatever imagery that conjures up, there was no unseemly picking taking place, just a lot of incessant nose-blowing).  It is sufficiently hot, even with air conditioning, that my hair is tied up and away from my neck for all but a few short periods during the day.  It’s hot that, when I took too long to find water on my first walk out and about town, I could almost feel my body absorbing any hydrated cells, and felt I was dehydrating as quickly as litmus paper changes colour. Yes, it’s hot… but it was hot yesterday, hot today, and will probably be hot again tomorrow – can we stop talking about it and wrecking my attempts at tuning it out and getting on with my day?

There is really only one point in the day where the heat truly bothers me, physically moving me out of my spot, and that is during the afternoon when it chooses my exact corner of the office to beat against rather persistently. It’s a completely unfair fight where the air-conditioner and ceiling fan simply cannot abate its power despite their best efforts.  As I try to withstand this lapping heat in the last hour or so of the workshift, I cannot help but silently hum the song; house of the rising (or afternoon-setting) sun, indeed.

This also always brings me back to thinking of the little compound that makes up our offices. A series of six villas, three on either side of a central driveway, which also leads off to a small tennis court/football field, swimming pool (I’ve only seen one, I’m told there’s another) and underground gym.  Though this lends itself to much suspicion as to what sort of financial management would allow such premises, let me explain the situation as it was explained to me on my first day.  We are apparently located in an affluent part of town, an area that used to consist of orchards leading up to the Nile (very close by), and was then sold off plot by plot to rich Sudanis who wanted to build lavish homes for themselves, and their families. Yes, that’s plural – it’s apparently common for fathers to build a mini-compound of villas or apartments to be inhabited by himself and each of his sons. When I was told this of our office complex, I jumped to the mistaken conclusion that it was a one-off type of construction.  That was, until I walked around some structures in the neighbourhood. I was passing this one gate to the driveway of a three storey building, which seemed like semi-detached houses, and had taken many strides before I started wondering why there were no other gates along this long wall. My question was soon answered at the other end of the wall, when I found the entrance gate and the sign “Ahmad Moussa & Sons Residence”.  I did not even have time to giggle at this company-name-type format to the houses before I came upon another one and another, and I wondered how these fathers had succeeded in persuading their sons to live next door when the owner of our office complex had clearly failed – we were the villas’ first inhabitants.  There is many a day when I walk through the re-divisioned office-villas and wonder how they were meant to be lived in… and wonder, as well, who would have occupied my hot corner in the sun, we might have had a few stories to share.

Haboob

My first encounter with Sudan came in the form of a lovable sounding phenomenon: ‘haboob’.  I can assure you that nobody in Khartoum was referring to it in loving or endearing tones, but whoever thought of calling this phenomenon of a ‘soft’, continuous sand-carrying wind something as cute as ‘haboob’ knew that newcomers would not be able to utter the name without following it with a comical smile.  Good on them, because shortly after encountering haboob, it becomes a central nuisance to your daily life.


Haboob made an appearance before I even got here – it was active the night I was flying in and there were some concerns that the flight might not be able to land, or possibly be delayed.  If a 3am flight is delayed does that mean it’s arriving late or early? Doesn’t the ‘late clock’ reset at dawn?  But I digress.  The plane landed safely, and I decided that too much of nothing was being made of this haboob… until I got to the guest house.  This seemingly mild-mannered wind has sneaky ways, literally.  The moment you enter any room, you sense that something else is already there, and you find it as soon as you touch anything: the thinnest film of orange sand – on – everything!  Slighter than Gulf desert sand, but more tangible than dust, it immediately colours the soles of your feet, and wraps itself around the toilet seat, wash basin, cups and utensils, and practically anything else exposed to light.  But it’s still haboob, so I smile, wipe the surface and carry on.  The locals have developed many a trick to deal with haboob, I’ll try to learn them quickly.


In the meantime, I’ve been implementing a few of my tricks to settle in.  My familiar pillow, sheets, towels, soaps, etc. everything was quickly unpacked and put in place, with the additional cozy accommodation being provided by a dear friend’s home.  This is so much better than any prior move, but it still took me a couple of days to gain my bearings and settle in.  I assign one part of that to the early hour arrival on the first day, and I can’t but acknowledge that the last piece fell into place when I finally obtained my very own local phone chip.  I was utterly restless for two days, got the chip, made two phone calls – just two calls – and that’s it, I was settled.  When did we (I) get so spoiled by technology?  Those two days without a local phone felt like an eternity, and I felt completely suspended out of time and place.  How did this happen?  When I went to university for the first time many (many) years ago, my only certain form of contact was a landline somewhere in the vicinity of what would be my room, and I took great care to register and share that number as appropriate. Now, we travel half way across the world without paying much attention to our points of contact, we hold on to our cell phone and its roaming capacities like a lifeline, and we feel abandoned and lost without the full use of those services – either roaming or from a freshly acquired local cell.  As if that weren’t enough, I have now developed an additional dependency on internet access through my phone.  You may share such a dependency with me, and if you do, I invite you in joining me in this exercise: go to a mirror, look yourself squarely in the eyes and say “Seriously??!”


If you’re wondering what this has to do with a short travel note about Sudan, it is because I have spent this, my first day off in the city, in the cooled comfort of this flat and the familiar company of my internet world.  I promise to head out tomorrow and I’m sure I’ll have more to share then, and it will, no doubt, be hot!

Stick in your Spokes

I pondered for a moment if I should have chosen “Like Riding a Bike” as a title instead, but decided that would have been too misleading.  “Like Riding a Bike” is a much more reassuring expression meant to instill confidence in what you are about to do, that the motions will synchronise perfectly and you will find that sought after balance.

That is hardly the sensation I am trying to describe.

It is one of those days in Lebanon, one of those days when you think your day is best served by time-efficiency and smart planning – plotting your errands or meetings as per relative geographic location and traffic trends, filtering and prioritizing those that are restricted by bank opening hours, meal times, or other similar considerations; similarly working out the day’s wardrobe to suit the spectrum of meetings and occasions, and so on.  As I started saying, it is one of those days where you think that is how your day can best be served… until you are startled by a stick in your spokes that brings your bike to a frightening halt and hurls you over the handlebars to a dusty, heavy thud on to the ground.  You are not hurt, you stand up and assess the damage to your clothes (dusty and you find a tear somewhere), to your body (that’s going to bruise, but span of motion is normal), and to your bike, that looks so graceless in its distorted form on the ground.  There is no major damage to speak of, but the incident has completely shaken you up, disoriented you.  You try to pull yourself back together, but you continue to feel unsettled, and that sticks with you for the rest of the day.  You ride your bike with an eerie focus on not falling off again, so much so that you can’t think of anything else, or allow yourself to slip into a playful ‘swoop’ as you slightly avert your eyes to look at shop windows.  You reach one destination and you second, third and fourth guess the next one, trying to convince yourself that it truly is necessary, and failing that in the face of the hundred opposing excuses you have come up with, you decide instead to return home to relative safety… and do nothing.

You have so much to do, so much that you could be doing, and yet you are too restless to be able to focus on any of it.  Your entire day has been derailed, like a stick in your spokes.

A friend or a loved one who hears the news is similarly rattled and as they cannot assess the extent of the damage or how you are continuing your day, are also stuck in that state of worry.

Ironically, both of you are now restless, and busying yourselves with mundane tasks and pedantic motions in your attempt to stop thinking of the event, the accident, and what this could mean for the next day and the day after that.

As you have gathered, the proverbial stick in our spokes can represent a number of things: a shooting, a bombing, an assassination, a protest that blocks streets and sets tires to fire… A sudden unexpected event that derails your day, rattles you, leaves you unsettled.  Sadly, we seem to be practiced in such experiences, so much so that we each fall into our usual motions for coping, self-preservation, moving on.  We dust ourselves off and try to get on with it, some form of muscle memory lifting us back into a precarious balance as we pedal forward.

Ironically, like riding a bike.

قلمي

آه ... ما ألذّ هذه اللحظة...

لحظة سـكينة... هروب مؤقت من زحمة حياتي

صفحة بيضاء تغريني بتألقها واحتمالاتها

وارتياحي لثقل القلم في يدي

 

قلم يمشي من اليمين الى اليسـار 

حركة حميمية: يدي اليمنى تأتي بالقلم أقرب وأقرب الى قلبي مع كل كلمة

أشـفق على من لا يعرف لغة تحمل إليه هذا الشـعور وهو يكتب

أشـفق على من لا يتمتع بحرف كالحرف العربي الذي يُرسـم ولا يُكتب

يلتفّ وينتصب ويتطلّب التنمّق بـ"شـدّة" هنا وتنوين هناك

 

حرف يبعث فيك الحيوية واللهو، فيحثك على الكتابة حتى تمتلئ الصفحة!

 

واليوم، هذا كل ما اريده

أن أضمّ هذا القلم... وألعب!

 

للرسـّام ريشـته وللموسـيقار آلته، وأنا اليوم لي قلمي يرقص ويراقصني "على موّاله"

أعتذر عن أنانية (ومتعة) هذه الحركة

فلا مكان لثالث في هذه الرقصة!