I got back from Dongola on Sunday and I've been really busy since. I thought I'd spend a couple of blogs on my trip. I really enjoyed it. That's Mohammad on the right in the first photo, some friends of his with he and I in the second, me standing in the street (?!?!?) in Taitti in the third, the bed I slept on in the fourth and the goat pen in the fifth (if you look closely, you can see one of the goats sticking his face through a hole in the gate to watch us. They're very curious creatures. I didn't grow up with goats on my parents' farm so it was a learning experience for me with the goats!)
I really enjoyed myself there. I was visiting my friend Mohammad Said (who some of you may know, he’s on our advisory committee in Ottawa) in his home village of Taitti (pronounced Taytee), near Dongola in Northern Sudan. I went along with a friend, Heba Aly, whose mom is Tyseer, another good friend in Ottawa. Heba is an independent journalist, here doing stories on us in the UN and the life of the people of Sudan and a whole bunch of other stuff. Mohammad just lost his dad a month ago or so ago and was back to spend some time with his mom and family.
I took the bus with Heba from Khartoum, it left at 4:45 AM but Mohammad’s brother Ibrahim got us up at 2:30 to make sure we were at the bus stop on time. We were kind of tired on the five hour bus ride there; it was a modern bus and paved road for the most part but they played music and videos all the way up and I couldn’t sleep. If you check out Heba’s blog (http://hebasenegal.blogspot.com) I think she took a video on the bus ride of me with my headphones on, singing along to a song on my mp3 player to drown out a video of a child prodigy preaching in Arabic. She thought the whole thing was hilarious…she was very tired and getting giddy.
Mohammad and I slept outside under the stars (on our beds) at night. It is very hot during the day however, 40+, so we stayed inside and read or slept during the afternoon. We visited many of Mohammad's friends, who all seem to be cousins of his. We had to eat and drink something everywhere we stopped. Typical village. There are about 5,000 people there. They all live in homes made out of dried mud. Some of the rooms have dried mud or cement floors, some have packed earth floors. Some of the rooms have roofs, some are open. The toilet is a hole in the ground. The shower is a tank of water on the roof hooked up to a shower head. We had to shower in the morning or the evening because the water gets scalding hot during the day.
The food was very good (notice I always talk about food), Mohammad's mom is an excellent cook. Mohammad's mom is like my mom and most moms I suspect, always trying to get us to eat more. We had tea and biscuits when we got up in the morning, then coffee and biscuits an hour or so later, a full hot lunch that they call breakfast at noon, tea and biscuits at 5:00-6:00 o'clock and we ate supper at 10:00 o'clock at night, then went to bed. They don't have electricity but they have a generator that they turn on for a couple of hours at night. No tv, no phone, no fridge, no Internet. As is traditional, at every meal we ate from the same bowls as everyone else who was eating. There was always a meat dish, some vegetables, some delicious bread. One night I was particularly enjoying a meal at a cousin of Mohammad’s, I thought I was eating some kind of beans (again, I think everything is beans) and Heba said “Mohammad, did you try the intestines?” Gulp. Intestines??? I didn’t eat them with as much enthusiasm after that but they were still good. Sheep liver is very good; I’m not fussy about cow liver but sheep liver is excellent.
There are donkeys and goats and sheep and some cows and dogs, in Taitti and yes even a couple of cats (that was for my daughters Stephanie, Melanie and Natalie, they always want to know about the cats). We were about half a kilometer from the Nile River. It’s a very slow pace of life, much like what living back in my home village, Dacre (27 kilometers past Renfrew, way back in the bush of Renfrew County) was like when I was growing up. It reminds me a lot of Dacre actually, except it is in the desert and the people are Arab and speak Arabic obviously. I think I was the only white person in town. They are mostly Arab with some black people. Everyone gets along very well. They work very hard, especially the women, they seem to do most of the work there. Many of the men go away to work: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Canada and the United States and just come home on their holidays, so they only see their families once a year. There is not much work in Taitti except for farming.
I took the bus with Heba from Khartoum, it left at 4:45 AM but Mohammad’s brother Ibrahim got us up at 2:30 to make sure we were at the bus stop on time. We were kind of tired on the five hour bus ride there; it was a modern bus and paved road for the most part but they played music and videos all the way up and I couldn’t sleep. If you check out Heba’s blog (http://hebasenegal.blogspot.com) I think she took a video on the bus ride of me with my headphones on, singing along to a song on my mp3 player to drown out a video of a child prodigy preaching in Arabic. She thought the whole thing was hilarious…she was very tired and getting giddy.
Mohammad and I slept outside under the stars (on our beds) at night. It is very hot during the day however, 40+, so we stayed inside and read or slept during the afternoon. We visited many of Mohammad's friends, who all seem to be cousins of his. We had to eat and drink something everywhere we stopped. Typical village. There are about 5,000 people there. They all live in homes made out of dried mud. Some of the rooms have dried mud or cement floors, some have packed earth floors. Some of the rooms have roofs, some are open. The toilet is a hole in the ground. The shower is a tank of water on the roof hooked up to a shower head. We had to shower in the morning or the evening because the water gets scalding hot during the day.
The food was very good (notice I always talk about food), Mohammad's mom is an excellent cook. Mohammad's mom is like my mom and most moms I suspect, always trying to get us to eat more. We had tea and biscuits when we got up in the morning, then coffee and biscuits an hour or so later, a full hot lunch that they call breakfast at noon, tea and biscuits at 5:00-6:00 o'clock and we ate supper at 10:00 o'clock at night, then went to bed. They don't have electricity but they have a generator that they turn on for a couple of hours at night. No tv, no phone, no fridge, no Internet. As is traditional, at every meal we ate from the same bowls as everyone else who was eating. There was always a meat dish, some vegetables, some delicious bread. One night I was particularly enjoying a meal at a cousin of Mohammad’s, I thought I was eating some kind of beans (again, I think everything is beans) and Heba said “Mohammad, did you try the intestines?” Gulp. Intestines??? I didn’t eat them with as much enthusiasm after that but they were still good. Sheep liver is very good; I’m not fussy about cow liver but sheep liver is excellent.
There are donkeys and goats and sheep and some cows and dogs, in Taitti and yes even a couple of cats (that was for my daughters Stephanie, Melanie and Natalie, they always want to know about the cats). We were about half a kilometer from the Nile River. It’s a very slow pace of life, much like what living back in my home village, Dacre (27 kilometers past Renfrew, way back in the bush of Renfrew County) was like when I was growing up. It reminds me a lot of Dacre actually, except it is in the desert and the people are Arab and speak Arabic obviously. I think I was the only white person in town. They are mostly Arab with some black people. Everyone gets along very well. They work very hard, especially the women, they seem to do most of the work there. Many of the men go away to work: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Canada and the United States and just come home on their holidays, so they only see their families once a year. There is not much work in Taitti except for farming.
I'll write more tomorrow.
1 comment:
Your guest accommodations look like they had all the comforts of home - pink sheets and an animal print blanket - and you got to go to sleep while looking up at the stars - what more could you want?! Well, maybe higher bedroom walls. You've forever changed how I'll look at eating pork & beans after your intestines story.
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