Sudan: The first 17 days

The best view in the fantastically ugly city of Khartoum may very well be the one from my north-facing fourth-floor windows, opening over the shoulder of a villa and onto the immense west-flowing Blue Nile beyond. Other pros: our laundry room is on the roof, so I only need walk up one floor with my new purple plastic basket; my apartment is gigantic (three bedrooms!) and airy; and up here I can hardly hear the noises that (infrequently) break the silence of Garden City, our somewhat-aptly named quarter of Khartoum. Cons: I awoke on my third day to find a pool of water covering my entire apartment. There are ants in the kitchen. There is dust coming in through every crack.

Super-pro: I have a maid! She even does my dishes.

Welcome to my expatriate life in Sudan.

I’m a first-year teacher in Khartoum; I arrived on August 3 and I’m here until next May. This blog exists to chronicle my stay, which thus far has involved fewer cultural interactions and more job-related work that I was theoretically but not actually prepared for; I literally come home from school each evening and plan lessons until I go to bed, with only a pause for dinner, and I can’t cook anyway. I sometimes wonder why I have crossed half a world to hole myself up in an air-cooled apartment, but I have also heard that...workaholicism? (workaholism?) is a big problem among foreigners in Sudan. After my first month or so as a new teacher has passed, I really hope to avoid this trap, if it indeed exists.
So until I get into the rhythm of making regular shorter posts, I’ll take the lazy writer’s shortcut of using bullet points to illustrate my thoughts, thus avoiding the construction of transitions:

The city...sprawls for dusty miles in all directions, is unrelentingly flat and treeless, and incubates at a nice 100 to 115 degrees around each midday. Sometimes you get “relief” in the form of a 45-minute Great Flood that renders half the streets impassable and slows all traffic to a crawl. Everything is mud. But by noon the next day, voila! It has all become dust again.

The subsequent dirt...justifies the hiring of a maid. You’d totally believe me if you were here.

Food...in Khartoum is MUCH more expensive than I thought it would be. To give you an idea: an eight-ounce package of cheese is $8; two pounds of chicken is $10; a bottle of olive oil is $11; a (small) jar of juice is $3; and a kilo of tomatoes can run to $4. Almost all prices except for those of the ubiquitous stuff (like rice, potatoes, some kinds of vegetables) seem equal to American food prices, which for anywhere in Africa is really outrageous. American brands are few and far between because of economic sanctions, but now and again in a grocery store a freezer full of Baskin Robbins or Ben and Jerry’s will appear like a vision. Price: $12 per pint. Vision shatters, mingles with dust.

Setting up an apartment...is an exercise in materialist restraint. If any of my recently-graduated-from-college friends were here I am sure we’d together marvel at the three short months that have scratched off our “Student” labels and smacked over them the awkward and painful labels “Person starting new life and new job in new city who is now interested in paint chips.” I left the U.S., among many reasons, to escape the pressure to amass goods, yet my new curtains from Souk Shabi (hand-sewn, $24) and my woven African-design plastic mat ($15) from an area of small merchants known as “Plastic City” look so good in my new pad, and gee, I really need to frame two posters and paint my walls!
I really need to make a budget,
Charlotte