The Haboub

I am adjusting to life with a new companion - the Haboub.

He comes knocking at my door at least once a week and gets quite aggravated if i won't let him in, leaving his name scrawled across the doors (see pic above) and if I happen to have dozed off and left the verandah doors open then he is very happy to recline on every piece of furniture in sight.

The picture below was a rather sudden arrival in Darfur a couple of weeks ago. A literal wall of the finest sand, encroaching on our compound.

This may take some getting used to..

Identity Crisis in a Khartoum Taxi

I was told in broken English by a young Sudanese taxi driver yesterday that I was not Australian, I was English. I thought he was confused, thinking Australia was part of, or near, England. But when I tried to explain it was a whole separate country, he became quite vocal. “No! Australians are black. Black like Africans. The English took Australia like they took Sudan. Sudan reclaimed their country”. I asked him how he felt about his people winning the battle to control their own land and destiny and he replied, quite adamantly, that they had not fought any war or battle, "Islam is about using the heart to win a battle, using the power within the Islamic heart". He told me about The Mahdi (Muhammad Ahmed Al Mahdi) whom he described as the Gandhi of Sudan. It was an interesting interpretation, (I had heard it was a rather bloody battle) but I kind of like what he said. How he said it.

His timing was impeccable. I had been thinking a lot about what it means to be Australian. Thinking about the original Australians, who have more of a right to say “I am Australian” than I. Saying that phrase many times these past few weeks has delivered me incredibly warm responses, particularly from most Sudanese who, like the Nepali’s, usually know someone who has been lucky enough to migrate. Usually as a Nepali student or a Sudanese refugee. I sense the image they have in their heads is built on luxuries such as the freedom to be or do or think whatever one likes. Concepts I suppose I have always taken for granted. Yet perhaps they have always taken it for granted that they have these ancient stories deep within their souls. Cultures pure and rich. We all hold envy sometimes for what lies beyond that border maybe.

Living here in a culturally rich country, working each day in an office with over 50 nationalities, I have felt a bit lost in all of it. Like a bit of an outsider. I cannot deeply say I am Australian because I am still trying to interpret what that exactly means. I also feel I cannot even really believe those words until I make the effort to learn from the true Australians about their land. Indeed most people with white skin are immigrants of some kind or another but even then, people have roots in some initial piece of soil where they started. And perhaps the biggest mistake I make is spending too much time on foreign soils, but I think I travel like many in this world, to drink in all I envy, to reach out and touch it and live for a day with something I have always desired - a true sense of cultural identity, threaded with all the centuries and stories and food and languages and faces that are sewn into that. And I will return 'my country' some day to do the same there.

We shall never cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Elliot (1888-1965)

Arrival

Time passes quickly here and all of a sudden it is one month since I stepped off a plane and into this desert. Stepped off the shelf of normality, turned the page away from a long-gone Himalayan chapter of adventures. Adventures of a small girl in a big world.

I think that I could not have stepped into a more foreign landscape to Nepal. Sudan is everything Nepal is not; vast, flat, intensely hot and, here in the North, cloaked in Islam.

The fine sand of the Nubian Desert creeps into my every pore, my vision is blurred from the June heat, my skin has an insatiable thirst. The Sudanese air is certainly a new souvenir for my collection of travel memories. It is heavy and dry and constantly moving. I am surprised at just how much a human can still function at 48 degrees Celsius. If it was humid, or under the baking Australian sun, daily life would be altered dramatically. Yet here, people just continue doing what they can only do, survive.

And not only just survive it appears, but be happy and positive and thankful for surviving! Indeed, the first Arabic phrase I pick up is a beautiful rolling collection of sounds, Al Humdoolillaah! – Thank God! (strong emphasis on the Hum..) I Love it. It is inserted into any number of conversations. “how are you doing?” “yeah I’m fine, humdoolillaah”, “The trucks made it to the camp for the distribution, hamdoolillaah”, “There’s a taxi, humdoolillaah!”. Super convenient. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhamdulillah

Sudan is my new 'camp' for a year, among many nomadic wanderings. The largest country in Africa, featuring in many international headlines in recent years, it is, i can already see, a complex and diverse human landscape, containing a wealth of nomadic history, of tribal culture, of religions. I look out the window of the small planes I travel west to Darfur in and look over a complex desert ecosystem sheltering complex desert people. A desert, I know as an Australian, should never be judged by its cover and this one certainly holds a rich story within. Rich in resources perhaps, but sadly this desert story has been written in blood. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur_conflict

But my first weeks spent busily adjusting to life in Sudan do not stop my mind drifting frequently over the many oceans to Australia and 'the bush'. I cannot remember the last time I missed my country so deeply while living in another. But then again, I have never lived anywhere like Sudan. The heat, the intense Islamic culture, the intense UN culture. It is as far as I could possibly go from a quiet coastal road, a Landrover with dogs in the back, singing along to the radio, stopping at the beach for fish and chips by crashing waves, driving home with the sun setting over distant hills. A place so far away suddenly, so deeply desired.