Sudan Day One

Saturday 18th October

Since we arrived at dusk on the first evening, and will be leaving at a similar time, I have decided to use the Biblical day, running from dusk to dusk.

Elizabeth took Fiona to get milk on her first evening here....

We wandered out of the house into the dark streets, and came to a place where half a dozen men were sitting on the dusty pavement. One had a fire with a large metal pan balanced on it; he was cooking felafel, delicious smelling balls of chick pea.

Several other men were preparing ful beans for tomorrow's breakfast. The beans are boiled slowly, then bashed a bit with the bottom of a Pepsi bottle to make a rough mush. Then add onion, cumin, coriander etc. to taste. If this seems a strange mixture for breakfast, bear in mind that Sudanese generally eat it between 10 and 11 a.m., after doing several hours work.

Our target was a man with several large containers of milk. He scooped about 5 pints into Elizabeth's container, and asked for £4,000 (!). Elizabeth paid 400 dinars. The explanation is that the currency changed from Sudanese pounds to dinars roughly 15 to 20 years ago, but everyone still uses pounds. Whichever way you look at it, the milk cost about £1 sterling.

Something similar has happened with time in Sudan. The time zone used to be GMT +2, then a few years ago the government decided to join the Arabian peninsula by moving to GMT +3. Some people, however, resolutely cling to the old time zone on the grounds that sunset has always been at 6 pm, and cannot possibly change to 7 pm. Bear this in mind if you ask the time in Sudan.

We ate bread stuffed with cheese and salad vegetables that evening. The bread is very good - think of a cross between french bread and pitta in a small loaf about the size of your palm. Tomato and cucumber are tasty; the cucumbers are paler than in the UK and nothing appears as unnaturally perfect as British supermarket veg. The cheese was a new experience. It's known as rope cheese, because it can be pulled apart into long stringy strips. Taste it and discover that it's hard, chewy and very salty, because it has been pickled in brine. It goes well with the bread and salad.

The general pre-travel advice is to avoid salads in countries where the water quality is uncertain. Elizabeth and Leoma wash all vegetables in water with a capful of bleach and this seems to do the trick.

Next morning (Saturday), Leoma took Fiona to the University where she teaches in the linguistics department. She was pleased to see that one MA student had appeared this week, as no one had shown up on the previous Saturday when the course officially began. However, several students were still missing, so she decided to wait before embarking on the course itself.

We visited some of the departments. The folk music section has a huge library of video and audio tapes collected from all over Sudan. Leoma is encouraging the department to sell copies of this material to the delegates at a forthcoming linguistics conference, but the Sudanese are extremely hospitable, and dislike the idea of guests/visitors paying for anything. Fiona was sorry to leave the department - the air conditioning seemed to be more effective there than anywhere else.

The library revealed that books are not like any other sort of property. Students cannot take bags inside, so their personal belongings were hung on the window grills outside the library. The bags are perfectly safe, because it's generally a very honest society. But books are different. They are expensive to buy, in short supply to borrow and photocopying pages is also too expensive for most students. The solution is to slice out the pages you need with a razor blade, with the end result that the most useful books in the library are about half their original thickness and all the best quotes have been pinched.

We returned home for lunch and sheltered from the heat until it was time to meet Stan and Philip at the airport that evening.