Ma'aslama

This week I say ma'asalama. I have made many comings and goings in this desert over the past 2 years and 8 months, but this is my final departure.  At times this week my heart has felt a weight of heaviness, something resembling sadness and loss. But then at other times I have felt a great lightness, with a sense of release and freedom on my doorstep. This perpetual roller-coaster of emotion does not surprise me. This is Sudan. She can fill you with joy and break your heart in the very same day.  No other country has left me feeling this way. Departures are always bitter-sweet, saying goodbyes, moving on to new chapters and new friends, but this one is different somehow. I feel like I have witnessed the best and worst in humanity here in this desert, this country lost in a sand-storm of greed and power and innocence and suffering, where occasionally the sands lift and clear enough to briefly glimpse the durability of the human spirit. I have been blessed to have witnessed it, but I have perhaps allowed it to alter my perspective more than I should have. 

A good friend once said to me, in response to some of my characteristic moaning about Darfur and more, " Just lower your expectations". I thought about it a lot after that. Peace can seem like an illustrious, distant concept some times. Peace talks fail, fighting continues, food aid goes missing, soldiers get fat, crops fail, villages still get burnt to the ground, women still get raped when they go to collect firewood, the UN high-ups still talk, and talk, and talk. I have cynical days. But perhaps that is a given, and perhaps that allows me to really celebrate success when I see it, even if it is in small doses. I should never have come here expecting to see a troubled country find peace and democracy and prosperity. I should never have gone to Darfur expecting to feel like I am "making a difference" on a daily basis. I should never have expected to find every single beneficiary in genuine need. I should not have expected people to appear grateful for my presence here. I was naive to have assumed a major UN agency would be driven by humanitarian principles. I should not have expected egg yolks to be yellow! And I should not have expected all my colleagues to have come here with the same ideals as my own. But I have seen a desperate nation gain their independence after a 50 year struggle. And I have watched Darfurian school children eating a breakfast of food-aid in their playground. And I have worked with several amazing people, who are here solely to contribute to poverty alleviation rather than to their bank accounts. And I have met foreigners, who obviously never had the expectations I did, who remain perpetually hopeful and positive, ready to dedicate their whole lives to this country. I applaud them, and wish them luck on their journey. Sudan taught me to finally open my eyes to the small things, and allow myself to be content with that, even if just for today. And wherever my journey takes me next, I will try to carry these valuable lessons.

And so theses notes must now find their rest, in my heart, in my pictures and words. I leave them behind, to begin a new chapter. Thank you for joining me on this journey. It has helped me greatly to be able to release my thoughts and share my pictures with you. Unlike previous transitions in my life the next chapter has not presented itself with well defined clarity, but I am choosing to embrace this and revel in the unknown, the unexpected, the unpredictable. And to rest. My journey moves onward, via a place called home, where I plan to re-collect my soul and focus on the things that bring me happiness and comfort. My alignment has been off, for a while now, and I hope to correct that before moving on. 

Juba, 2010

I'm taking with me the smell of a desert horse and the velvet touch of his muzzle against my cheek. I take with me the call to prayer as the sun rises over the desert at day-break. I retain the smiles and the shout-outs of "okay!" of the Darfurian children living in the camps that define their small lives, as they run along side the huge white Landcruiser, giving me the thumbs-up sign the peace-keepers had taught them. I take with me the adventures of Africa in places where pieces of my heart also remains; from Namibia, Zanzibar, Masai Mara, Lesotho, Bwindi and her Gorilla's, and with a school of Hammerheads in the Red Sea. It is all now with me, locked inside this wandering heart. 

I tend to let countries seep into my soul. I dive in, deep in emersion. Every place I have lived has somehow become part of me. Sudan is no different. Here below are some of my best memories. 

Ma'asalama Sudan, I wish you Peace.

Juba, when two Sudan's were still one, January 2010.

Port Sudan after a dive trip on the Red Sea

Sufi's of Omdurman

Shade never felt so valuable 

Riding to the Pyramids of Meroe

Kassala, Eastern Sudan

Desert breakfast

Desert Coffee

Desert Rush-hour 

Desert Oasis

Walking home down a Khartoum street

Treasures of Souq Omdurman

Climbing Pyramids

Camel nomads in Darfur

'Protection' in Darfur

Distribution day, Kalma Camp

Food Aid for sale in the camp market, Darfur

                       

Women dividing food rations
distribution day, Kalma Camp

Nomads watering their stock,
near the South/North Darfur border

Curious camp kids, Darfur

At the races, Khartoum

'Nullarbor'

Ancient ruins of Meroe

Riding home from the Nile, Khartoum

View from my bedroom window, Nyala

We are lonesome animals.

We spend all of our life trying to be less lonesome. 

One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say, and to feel, 

"Yes, that is the way it is, or at least that is the way I feel it.

You’re not as alone as you thought".

 — John Steinbeck

Desert Joy...

A Decision

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

- Mary Oliver

I have been reading the poetry of Mary Oliver of late, one of America's greatest poets. She captures the essence of living in the moment I think and of seeing beauty in the everything. For her it is in nature, but it could be any simple thing in our simple lives.  Her words have made me shift my focus again and have brought my attention back to my heart. Or perhaps I should say, I have realized how important it is to continue to listen to my heart, and never stop. 

I have been struggling with some choices lately. Thinking about what it is exactly I am part of here, as I travel to the field on work missions and ride the taxi's up and down these city streets to and from the office.  Choices that you yourself may have encountered at one stage or other along the journey..  To stay or go? When your heart checked-out some time ago, and you are staying for reasons that have never defined the kind of person you are, you start to grow increasingly queasy with the person you are becoming. My heart was saying things, many things, but I dulled it in logic and reason and hushed it with practicalities. But I was never a logical, reasonable, practical girl.  Some might call me irrational and emotional and idealistic. In fact, they do. But all of a sudden I did not fit. I did not fit here and for all my looking, I could not find a way to fit. And why should I? Sudan and this work we ignorantly call 'saving lives' has become a square hole for this round peg of a girl. I do not fit and I blunt my edges by continually trying. 

I believe in helping people, and I want to continue to try and do that. But I also believe that this should be a fluid, dynamic, experimental and intelligent attempt.  Not a bureaucratic money driven one. I no longer feel inspired by the people that guide me in my work here, and even more worrying, I disagree with them at the most fundamental level. I disagree with a mandate of lies and of directly supporting a regime that creates suffering for its people. I am tired of being seen as a walking dollar sign, and tired of ingratitude and greed and a lack of compassion at almost every level of the system I find myself in. I am so tired of so much money being wasted when women and children slip between the cracks of the system and were never the concern of many of these people to begin with. I am tired of blind conformism and organisational politics that are based on personalities and promotions, more than exposing the truth at the core of an issue. 

So here is my truth. I only have one wild and precious life. And I choose to cherish it and honor it, by allowing myself to be surrounded by inspiration and beauty as I define it. I choose to be free to explore all angles of compassion and let it flow continually into all my actions. And I choose not to have my compassion restricted by ideals that were never my own. I choose to let my light shine bright again. 

“Above all, be true to yourself, and if you cannot put your heart in it, take yourself out of it.”- Hardy D. Jackson

To the desert we go...

"The desert is the environment of revelation, genetically and physiologically alien, sensorily austere, asthetically abstract, historically inimical. ... Its forms are bold and suggestive. The mind is beset by light and space, the kinesthetic novelty of the aridity, high temperature, and wind. The desert sky is encircling, majestic, terrible. In other habitats, the rim of sky above the horizontal is broken or obscured; here, together with the overhead portion, it is infinitely vaster than that of rolling countryside and forest lands. ... In an unobstructed sky the clouds seem more massive, sometimes grandly reflecting the earth’s curvature on their concave undersides. The angularity of desert landforms imparts a monumental architecture to the clouds as well as to the land. ...

To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality".

- Paul Shepard, Man in the Landscape

I am Slave

There are reportedly as many as 20,000 salves in Sudan. There are people in this city, perhaps in homes right near my own, who were stolen or sold like cheap commodities and  are forced to work in the homes of the wealthy for no wage, with no freedom, with no future. I was  out of town recently when a local film festival screened a film called "I am Slave", based on the tragic but inspiring life of Nuba woman Mende Nazer. The trailer below looks quite powerful and I hope to find a copy of the full film. 

More about slavery in other countries from the organisation Free the Slaves.