Mrn exclusive seven month stint in sudan
MRN News Service – A division of Media Review Network
Written by Yazeed Kamaldien for MRN (2008)
“Living in a country that just came out of a 21-year civil war and that still battles with Darfur gets to you, but the people are amazing.” That’s the standard response to anyone who asks the inevitable: “What was it like?”
You know, nobody asks for the hard-knocked life. And that’s not what I expected during a seven-month stint in Sudan to acquire the Arabic tongue, work with aid agencies and bleed words from my fingertips as a freelance journalist.
I landed in a boiling Khartoum – this North African country’s capital city – on July 1 2007. I had enrolled for an Arabic language course at the International University of Africa, but should have guessed that facilities would be way less than grand.
This so-called university seemed worse off than a poverty-stricken primary school in rural South Africa.
I was also introduced to the world of aid agencies; those organisations that aim to Make Things Better in conflict hotspots like Darfur. This took me to various parts of Sudan and offered insight into the strength and resilience of the warm Sudanese citizens. It also brought me face-to-face with the military regime that governs this land with little mercy.
These trips took me back to the first time I visited Darfur, in October 2004, to accompany a South African aid agency to deliver aid to displaced persons. During that trip, children’s smiles reached out to me, somewhat in defiance of their miserable fate in a refugee camp near Al Fashir town in Darfur.
By the time I returned, my responsibility with one particular aid agency was to photograph and write about relief activities, which exposed me to the depth of need in Sudan.
This country has been plagued with conflict for almost as long as I have been alive. Its post-colonial history started in 1956, when England and Egypt handed back the reigns of leadership to the local population.
