so i went to the mountains

the bus dropped us off at the mountains.

i'm not gonna lie: i've been a little homesick these past few weeks. homesick for green things, bike rides, mountains and cool temperatures. homesick for monday night dinners and dancing and crafts. funks, i suppose are normal. but that doesn't make them any easier.

it's the city, i think, with it's crowded roads and constant noise that's been wearing on me. so, if i can't import stumptown, i can, at least, get out of khartoum and find some peace.

an 8-hour bus ride away from khartoum is kassala, a smallish town on the sudan-eritrea border known best for the mountains that break up its desert skyline. we didn't spend much time there, just two days, maybe a little less. but it was enough to relax at the rooftop cafes, climb the smooth base of mountains and eat some good fuul.

it was enough to remind me why i came here.


near the heart of the city.


on the way to the mountains.


a couple hidden in the rocks.

a women and her child climb down the mountain.

some friends caught between the sky and the earth.


there's a beautiful tomb at the base of the mountains.


part of the old mosque at the base of the mountains. once upon a time, the roof was set on fire.

wish you were here

khartoum's post office is a bit hard to track down if you don't know what you're looking for. what you're looking for is a rundown, colonial-style building with a rusting wrought-iron fence, one street west of nile avenue.

you'll know for certain that you've arrived if, between the hours of 8 a.m. and 2 p.m., you see men outside this crumbling building selling postcards from the 80s for anywhere between 50 piestas and two pounds.


i've never seen anybody lounging along the nile. certainly never a woman in a short skirt.


the presidential palace. it's still pretty impressive.

camels. (in case you missed it, camels = africa)

random wildlife.


the nile!

click, click, click, click

as a favor to lou, i spent yesterday morning at the school where she volunteers. the kindergartners are graduating at the end of the month and they needed someone to take pictures before the ceremony. i was happy to oblige. gotta say, they were pretty damn cute. here's some evidence:

colors in the sky

the sun sets in omdurman.

moving here has taught me there are a few things deserts have in common. one of them, it seems, is their big, uninterrupted skies. whenever i see a sky like this here, i can't help but think of arizona. it's sort of comforting to know that, with all of the changes in culture and law and language, there are a few constants in my life these days.

the wrestlers who came from nuba

two circles of chalk had been laid down, one within the other. and around those circles was yet another, this one made of metal poles and pieces of cloth. and between the chalk and the makeshift walls were yet more circles, circles of people, packed close together.

all of their eyes were directed toward the center, for at the center of this bull’s eye, were four men. two were there to fight. two were there to enforce the rules.

the wrestlers bent at the waist, their eyes on one another. they reached down, scooped up fistfuls of the powdery earth and bathed in it. they ran the dirt along their arms and their thighs. they moved it, like kindling, quickly between their hands. what was left of the dirt, they let fall, like soft rain, back to the ground.

everybody watched. everybody was quiet.

the refs circled, caught up in an orbit around the wrestlers, and the two nuba fighters began their own rotation. moving to one side and then another.

it was slow at first.

one man cautiously raised his hand, the other recoiled. one man extended his hand and tapped the other man’s head. they grabbed each other’s shoulders, then released.

a feint. a taunt. always rotating. it was slow at first. but only at first.

suddenly, they were upon one another. an arm around a neck. a leg around a waist. they became a jumble of limbs, a knot of flesh.

then, just as quickly as the action had begun, it ended with one man standing and another on his back.

it did not take long for the crowd to erupt. arms shot up into the air, and so did voices.

the victor stamped the ground with his foot and sent dust flying. he took a lap around the circle of people, offering a smile to all, collecting money from some.

this happened again and again, more times than anyone, except the referees perhaps, bothered to count.

when the wrestlers were spent and the matches decided, the makeshift walls were pulled down and the crowd exploded outward. they wasted no time leaving; it was time to pray.

soon, all that was left were the two circles of chalk, one with another, and inside them, two young boys.

the boys faced one another, bent at the waist, scooped dirt into their hands, let it fall and began to wrestle.

showed and told

i've started doing show-and-tell with my second-year classes. see, it's an activity that works to everyone's advantage: every student gets some time to talk, uninterrupted, and i get to learn more about my students.

also, i get presents: one girl gave me some sudanese marriage incense. i accepted. the class thought this was hilarious. obviously.

anyhow, this past thursday was the first round, so i went, too. i showed and told about my polaroid camera.

thursday, 8 to 9:30 a.m.

thursday, 9:30 to 11 a.m.

thursday, 9:30 to 11 a.m., reverse

and the young boy sang for us

i never really know where i'm going in sudan. or what's coming next. at first that bothered me. lately, though, i've just been trying to let go, let sudan take me wherever it wants.

a few nights ago, after a day at the camel market (obviously), i found myself at a sufi compound in omdurman, one of the three cities that make up khartoum's metro area.

sufism is hard to explain -- at least, i find it hard to explain. the best i can do is describe it as sort of a mystical branch of islam.

the people there, as is often the case wherever i wind up, were kind beyond all expectations. the sheikh showed us through the compound, through the mosque and through the small cellar where, we were told, he spends the month of ramadan without food or water or fresh air.

we also got to meet the students at the adjoining islamic school. all students in sudan, unless christian, are required to take islamic studies as part of their core curriculum. but the students at the mosque study nothing but the quran. a good part of this education involves reciting quranic verses.

one of the young boys (he's in the picture above) showed us how it's done. to hear what that sounds like, click on the media player above. listen closely, and you'll probably also catch the evening call to prayer in the background.


boards like these we scattered around the otherwise-empty school room.








once the camera comes out, you know a group picture is inevitable.


"there is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God." this message was repeated several times in the cellar where the sheikh spends the whole of ramadan.

when the sun came up

sunrise over the blue nile -- hasaheisa, sudan -- jan. 31, 2010

i remember learning about the nile river in grade school. it usually came grouped with mummies and hieroglyphs and pharaohs and other things that seemed too far away (both in distance and time) to be real. so, i guess, that's why i've always felt the nile was some sort of magical place. specifically, some sort of magical place that, despite the fact it winds its way through more than 4,000 miles of earth, i would probably never see outside the pages of a textbook.

but then sunday morning, my alarm went off at 5:50 a.m., and i found myself walking through a small town south of khartoum called hasaheisa. i found myself walking past closed shops, empty roads and waking roosters. i found myself climbing down a hill of dried up mud, taking a seat and watching the sun rise over the nile.

here's what i saw:

let's talk about ...

one of my listening and speaking classes.

when i showed up to teach at al-neelain university, i wasn't given a syllabus or curriculum so much as a course name: 'listening and speaking.'

basically, my goal is to get the students to talk - and to listen to each other talk. seeing as how what we talk about is left completely up to me, i try to pick meaningful topics. so far, we've covered censorship, cultural taboos, the environment, gender equality and ... soccer.

but i'm running low on ideas these days. so, today, fresh off a two-week 'winter' break, i opened it up to my second-year students. what, i asked, do you want to talk about? here's their unedited list:

-the upcoming elections
-women's rights
-sudanese culture
-punctuality
-stray animals
-harassment
-rape
-acid attacks
-secularism
-globalization
-the world cup
-corporal punishment
-tribalism
-life style
-how to stay healthy
-fashion
-polygamy
-suicide
-fame

and there you have it, my curriculum for the upcoming semester. sort of.

sounds of sudan

most days i spend working at an ngo in amarat, a small khartoum neighborhood that's a fair ways away from where i live. in the morning, mostly out of laziness, i get an amjad (i hope i'm spelling/ transliterating that correctly) straight to work. amjads are a small step down from taxis, sort of compact minivans that look (and feel) like they're made out of aluminum. you have to negotiate your price up front.

my morning conversation usually goes something like this:

me (with terrible arabic accent): asalaam alaikum! (hello!).
amjad driver: wa alaikum assalaam. (right back at you.)
me: ana mashi al amarat. sharia mohammed najeeb wa sharia saba hamseen. tamam? (i'm going to amarat. mohammed najeeb and 57th streets. you dig?)
amjad driver: aywa (yeah. obviously.)
me: kum? (how much?)
amjad driver: khamsatasha. (because you're a foreigner, 15 pounds.)
me: la. katir. ashara? (no way. that's way too much. and i'm not stupid. how about 10 pounds?)
amjad driver: ok (ok. but don't get too excited. this trip should only be 8 pounds.)

after that, i get in, the amjad driver figures out he's heard just about every single word i know of arabic and we drive silently to amarat. (or he actually tries to talk to me and we just keep saying the same words over and over again -- only each time we say them a little bit louder. because, you know, the louder you are, the more the other person understands.)

anyhow. after i get off work, i'm feeling a little less lazy and a little poorer, so i take the bus (only 40 sudanese cents!) back to my flat. (more on the fun adventure that is every bus ride later). but the bus does not offer the door-to-door ease of an amjad, so i'm stuck walking a mile or so.

now to the real point of this post: walking sort of wakes you up. at least it does me. it makes you a bit more aware, more aware of directions and smells and people and ... sounds.

see, khartoum has a soundtrack all its own. i guess that's true of any city, but this one, well, it just seems so right, so perfect for the constant movement of sudan's capital.

i was going to try to describe it in a blog post, but when i tried to sit down and write, words didn't work. so, the other day, i took an audio recorder with me and flipped it on for a few minutes of my walk home.

my advice: close your eyes, press play and imagine streets full of sand and cars and shops and people and random telephone chargers for sale.

close your eyes, press play and listen to khartoum.

now what?

new posts should be coming soon. good stuff, too, i swear. maybe even audio and video.

but! until then, i thought i'd post a link to a washington post story from a couple years ago. it's a first-person account of a journalist caught up in khartoum's crazy bureaucracy for an entire day.

i haven't been detained by police -- at least not yet -- but the experience is still pretty true to the way things work in sudan. whether you're being interrogated or you just want to get a photo permit, you're politely shuffled from office to office, offered drink after drink, and often left without any idea of what's going on or what comes next.

sx sudan

deanna recently arrived in khartoum. along with a nice little bit of home, she brought with her an sx-70 polaroid camera and some tz artistic film that i had ordered after i arrived in sudan. i have just a few packs to last me until i get to ethiopia in late june, so i've only taken three shots. here they are:

(wall i passed by while wandering through khartoum)

(deanna in my flat)

(my front door. welcome!)

(p.s. it's raining! the first time since I got here almost two and a half months ago. makes me think of portland and its slick streets. khartoum's mostly just get muddy; there's no stopping the dust here.)

so fast

a while back, i started putting together a stop-motion video of the area (and apartment) i called home when i first moved back to portland in 2008. this all happened nearly a year ago. i finally finished it about a week ago -- in sudan no less. it has, obviously, nothing to do with khartoum or sudan or my latest adventure. but i still thought i'd share it.

suddenly sudanese

hassa hissa, sudan.

it’s been a full two months – to the day! – since i stepped off the plane, the warm khartoum air hit my face and i got my fist look at this duty country. two months. it’s hard for me to imagine that i've been here that long. time passes so quickly when you spend entire days trying to figure out how to buy a tomato.

anyhow, two months gone means i have just over five months left before i leave for asia. it's about time i start to blog in earnest. it's about time i start to write about khartoum and sudan and the things i've seen here. right now it all seems so distinct and unforgettable, but i know it will all leave me just a few short months after i leave it.

i remember when i first started telling people i was moving to sudan. more often than not, i got some warning along the lines of “don’t die.” sudan, of course, is a place known best by media accounts of civil war, genocide and poverty. but, there's more to it than all of that. sudan is also a place of extreme kindness and – if you let yourself see it – beauty. a place where people spend their entire lives without knowing conflict.

there's no one "true" sudan. just a collection of personal narratives, personal stories. i plan to share mine here.

it was warm, that day

i've been slow to post, i know, but i have four rolls to get through now, so i should have a steady stream of new images for a bit. here are some from a lazy day at the river:


another holgarama -- from the pebbly shore


the lake in cross-processed slide film.


an adorable couple all hawk-eyed up.


a stack of pebbles we came across. no doubt some ancient formation.


i don't like this one as much as i'd hoped i would. the tops of the trees met the sky in a really beautiful way that day, but it doesn't translate nearly as well onto film -- even with cross-processed magic.