Introductions
A typical introduction at an aid worker’s function:
“Hi I’m Witsche.”
“I’m Will. Sorry, what’s your name again?”
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Travel Essentials
A list of things I take into the field:
(Make any additions in the comments section and I’ll update the post!)
Ipod Touch: more reliable than mobile phone communication in the field is wifi in our offices. An Ipod Touch has wifi and is like a pocket computer that you can check email, surf the net and skype on as well as all the traditional functions of an Ipod. Downloading BBC world service documentaries and listening to them in the middle of the bush? priceless!
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Carousel number three
There is a certain hell that only airports and air travel can conjure in one’s psyche. Having spent the better portion of 19 hours breathing recycled air, 12000 metres above sea level, I arrived safe and sound at Jomo Kenyatta. What weary travellers we all were, for to arrive in Nairobi requires a connection and then a connection and then some for most East African bound passengers. Struggling through a lazy immigration point and shedding tears over wrongly filled forms and incorrect currencies, the passengers of EK 721 arrived at the baggage claim frazzled but joyful that we had reached the end of our epic adventure. What followed in the next hour or so was hell – a hundred odd passengers stationed around a sushi train of luggage waiting for bags that took forever and ever to arrive. I swear that magical hole in the wall gave birth to my luggage last of all, and if it wasn’t for the hymn humming of the elderly lady next to me, there very may well have been blood shed at carousel number three.
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The scourge of Africa*
One thing you will notice upon arrival in this beautiful city is the complete and total domination of trash – black plastic bag trash to be specific. Each day vendors of all goods from bread to soft drinks to camel-hide shoes package their goods in these cheaply manufactured black plastic bags. Once torn apart (they’re so weak they’re only good for one use), they are then unceremoniously flung out the door and onto the street for the grazing pleasure of passing donkeys and goats.
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Home for Christmas
I’m grateful to be going home for Christmas, there are few things more important than friends and family. Please remember in your thoughts and prayers some folks who probably won’t be as fortunate as myself:
Perfectly Normal
A drunken guy started shooting his ak-47 at the gate of our compound around 9:00 pm on Thursday night. He was shooting over the roof of the compound just for kicks I suppose. This was the following conversation I had with security over the VHF radio moments later:
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A ramadan joke
So the imperialist westerners may not realize it but the entire Islamic community is currently in the middle of their annual Ramadan celebrations. Essentially I’ve come to understand it as turning day and night inside out where you pray all day but only eat and drink only between the hours of 8:00pm and 5.30am, spending the entire working day in a daze of hunger, thirst and sleep depravation.
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Flying in Darfur
Read an interesting account of a UNHAS pilot who flew in Darfur around 2005-2006 (from what I can tell) from a new online Aid story collective called HELO: Crisis story Magazine (weird name, and the website design is straight out of 1998, but some good content at least, especially if you’re interested in humanaid as a career). Below is an excerpt:
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The Sudanese road trip from hell
I was looking forward to today. I rang my folks last night and talked about how it felt like the first time i was actually doing something truly recreational since I started working here. A friend from work organized a trip for some of us to head to the little known pyramids, which sit about 200ks north of Khartoum. Who wouldn’t love a road trip out of the big smoke, see some country side, visit some ancient ruins of a once glorious empire and simply forget everything that you’re coming to despise about this place.
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Prison.break.season.1.finale
I guess one of the things I was looking forward to with my work was the liberal R&R schedule allowed to me. I get a lot of holidays and maybe it’s because my org is really nice, but it’s definitely also because Darfur makes you crazy.
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Billy’s shop
On just about every street corner of my town is a store of some kind. Those fortunate enough to live at an intersection and have money can usually construct a concrete shack with iron doors and sell the same things as every other store in the suburbs of my town – soap, softdrink, melted toffees, coffee, sugar, rice, beans and a few other nick nacks like razors and perfume. They are pretty much the local version of a 7-11 but in true Darfurian form, they’re closed just about as often as they are open.
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Flying UNHAS
UNHAS offers the rare experience of boarding a flight and having no idea where it’s actually headed. The airport itself could’ve been mistaken for an abandonded British imperial outpost and once inside the crumbling walls I was taken to the check in and customs desk housed in a grubby demountable cube. Inside the human xray machines took extra care to squeeze and rattle any fragile looking items and confiscated both my carry on and check in luggage until boarding.
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Donkeys
In Mongolia we used to joke that the country’s national anthem was probably a car alarm. Every day and night you could here these alarms resonate a warning to their owners through the streets and pervade even the most sealed air conditioned offices in the city.
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Satellites
My family taught me how to look for satellites on Fraser Island. You have to judge whether a ‘star’ is moving by its proximity to the other stars around it – is it moving?! It’s a great game when you’re camping and also a great game whenever the sky is dark enough to see what lurks out deep and yonder in our amazing universe. So naturally in Darfur, when I’ve finished dinner and the city power goes off, I lie out under the stars listening to music and watching satellites criss cross the sky.
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Darfur Disease
I felt a bit like a lawn chair these last few days, ready to be folded up and stored away in a dusty shed for a few weeks or months. Truthfully, the reason for curling up at my work desk and head-lolling in meetings was that I had simply drained my body of all those salts and minerals (call them ‘electrolytes’ if you will) necessary to function normally. After drinking so much water and sweating it all out I had simply run out of gas to keep going. It first came as a headache, then joint pains and finally the whole fast and furious digestive system came into play at both ends. I thought it was food poisoning, but in his defence our resident ‘cook’ claimed it was most likely the dreaded malaria.
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The Rain
It started at around 4:30, I thought it was pigeons doing their morning laps along the tin roof. But sure enough after a few seconds the tapping became a complicated cacophony of noise, it was raining. The smell of soil filled my bedroom as raindrops hit the desert dust in the alleyway behind my bedroom. The temperature plummeted to somewhere in the high 20s and I gladly grabbed my sleeping bag and curled up for a few hours longer. Mmm, very nice to wake up not covered in sweat for a change.
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The Heat
Obviously, it’s easy to associate Darfur with intense desert heat. Yesterday was one of those intensely hot days that make you cross eyed, your throat continually raspy and the pages of your diary curl up in surrender to the elements. The all pervading desert dust dries and becomes a second epidermis while your clothes itch and stick to your skin.
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The City of not-so-shining lights
Thinking back from my week in Khartoum, I actually quite enjoyed it. There were some really interesting aspects of it that I didn’t quite expect, and they make great reasons why you should consider Khartoum on your next holiday…
1. Khartoum is Cheap- following sanctions by the US, no major credit cards will work in Sudan, so consider yourself lucky when you don’t go home with a huge debt and that 10 foot high stuffed camel that may or may not get back when shipped through customs in six months time (yet it really would look great by the pool)
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Welcome to the Little Garden
My first impressions about Darfur would better be expressed by coloured crayons in the complex patterns of a conflict map rather than uniform styles of black text on straight lines. But hey, it wouldn’t make sense. Here is a brief account of my first day in the ‘little garden’ …
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