Welcome to Kadugli

Location: Kadugli, South Kordofan State, Sudan

Dear Reader,

I am writing this to you from the comforts of my little cosy room here in Kadugli. It is Eid Adha today and tomorrow, everyone is out of town and I'm using this opportunity to catch up on reading and so forth. I have been almost 4 weeks and about 1.5 months in Sudan. Many times, I sit and wonder about the reality of my situation, of where I am and then it hits me that I am actually here in a foreign land that I had merely imagined before. Kadugli is not a big town, small, easy to navigate and the sun blasting its rays on you - a constant reminder to how hot and dry it is around here. I don't mind it so much until I was hit by conjuncvitis (blurry vision, discomfort and photophobia) but that is by far the minor inconveniences of living here. I have never lived in a small town, not one this small. It took me a while to become accustomed to the nuances of everyday living and what it means. Each day, I am faced with the same routine - get up, go to work (which is 2 minutes away), work, lunch, work, dinner, occasional socialising with the crowd of expats here most likely at Joe's guesthouse, movies, reading and sleep. The next day I probably do it all over again.

The first thing I worry about is the boredom - what else am I going to do with myself each and every day. But obviously life and the universe have a way of spinning things around. Now that I've been here a fair bit, I don't mind the routine lifestyle, the same food (barbequed chicken with rice, bread and ful) or the same company. I take joy that I have great colleagues, friendly warm souls that greet me in the morning, eat at the same few places, have the occassional drink, watch movie screenings in H's courtyard, listen to music, read my books again and again and eagerly wait for the familiar phonecall from R each night. The simplicity baffled me at first but being away from the normality of what my life is or used to be gives me this opportunity to stop and breathe and stop worrying. I enjoy each day as if it was brand new.

Since I got here, I have been amazed at my ability to get up early on weekdays (Sun - Thurs are working days), learnt to ride a motorbike, be at eased with solitude, be at eased with the various bugs in my room and so on.

The work I do is turning to be more enjoyable than expected. I am glad for the opportunity to meet with different people all working in different sectors and the opportunity to glimpse into what they do. What I do is I coordinate the work of 8 UN agencies planning and implementing interventions with the aim of preventing conflict and enhance peace building efforts around the 1956 borders. South Kordofan state is a rather interesting place to be right now with all that is coming up. Voter registration starts yesterday and I can see the excitement in N (my new sanity pill) as she goes on and on about it. While I don't see much excitement in watching and observing people register (I likened it to watching paint slowly dry), I envy her work and am happy for her. She gets to see a lot more of the state and the very people who will bring change come January 2011.

I went on my very first mission earlier last week with our partnering agencies to Al Buram, not too far away from Kadugli. There's something beautiful to mud huts, barren landscape and hills in the background all tinged with history waiting to be told to the unsuspecting visitor. As we passed by a landmark, a colleague, Ibrahim would tell me what used to there. In one village called Al Dar, I sat around with a bunch of women, not understanding a word. We were discussing female genital mutilation and early marriages. Girls get married as young as 12 and between 6 and 8 years old, they are circumcised. For an untold many, the entire vagina is cut out. What this means is the girl, who barely is in puberty starts having problems right as soon as she is married off - penetration, delivery and post- delivery and so on.

All I could think of was the blue sky above me in all its glory and the hardened faces in front me and wondering how and why the universe had forgotten about them. The faces never left me and to this day, I can picture who was sitting where and the colour of their scarfs fluttering about. I can remember the face of the little boy who sat near me, his legs covered in open sores and flies picking at it every few seconds and how his sister keeps flicking it away.

In another village called Shatt Alsofia, somebody asked me my name. I said it and she told me, "In Arabic, this means guiding light". Guiding light - I never knew that but I like it. I smiled and gave her my thanks. Her name is Hanan and she is 18 years old. She also gave a beaded necklace (apparently for luck) which now hangs on my wall.

This is the start of my life and small adventures in Kadugli. What you will likely read here are my thoughts and the things I have come across. There is enough politics for you to read out there and this blog can neither be arsed nor interested to get involved in political debates. I leave that to the professionals. It doesn't mean I don't care or utterly uninterested. It's not my story to tell what ought to be, how things should be settled or who's right and wrong. There's enough sources out there that you can call on. What you will get here are just the little stories of my life here as I go about each day, marvelling at the new things I have seen and discovered.

Welcome to my world, welcome to Kadugli.