Like monkeys in the garden

A negative HIV test being a requirement for working in Sudan, today was the special day we overseas-hire teachers were supposed to report to the "Aliens' Registration Office" downtown. We had been warned: it will take hours. Bring a book, and water, and even food. The Sudanese bureaucracy is inefficient, they told us. Just be patient.

So we were ready at 9:30 a.m. for our bus to pick us up, and we get a call from the school that it will be 20 minutes late. Twenty minutes come and go. At 10 a.m. we confer with our colleagues at other buildings. The bus is now coming here first, rather than last. They decide to drive/public-transport it to Garden City and meet the bus.

Two of them arrive by car. We wait under the trees, pee again, speculate about monkeys and communicable disease (not in that order). The bus arrives, an hour late. We wait some more for the others to show up by public transport. We get another call: they're already downtown. Shit. We decide to get on the bus, with two cars following.

We leave our street, make a left and a right and another right, and stop, at 11:15 a.m., in front of the Aliens' Registration Office...only 300 yards from our building.

We file inside in silence. Our colleagues have come and gone. I struggle to breathe evenly and eventually get my arm stabbed behind a dingy curtain by a guy with a box of disposable needles and a rapidly filling cardboard tray of foreign blood. We leave the office at 11:30, about 10 minutes after we arrived.

Yeah, the HIV test took a few hours - but Sudanese bureaucrats had nothing to do with it!

Afterwards, in a room darkened by lack of electricity at the gym in Khartoum's only mall, I lifted weights and worried that blood might start spurting out of the needle mark on my arm. Nothing happened. I guess I got lucky this time.

The kids are all right

I've just finished my first full week ever as a teacher in the midst of Sudan's

worst flooding in 20 years

. We had a massive rainstorm on Monday around 2 p.m., just as school let out for the day, and parts of campus are still covered in inches of water. Khartoum is completely flat, the Nile is at its highest right now, and Khartoum's infrastructure is, uh, not that great, so there is no place for all the extra water to go. Apparently even some of our school guards have lost their homes in the flooding. I myself have only had to "suffer" some dirty water on the floor and in my sink and, yesterday, a smashed window in the 4th-floor laundry room during yet another rainstorm. (Good thing I didn't go up there to view the storm!)

The rundown on my job: there are about 30 teachers at my school, and I am part of a 5-teacher middle school team. I teach 5th/6th grade English (plus a high school journalism elective), my colleague teaches 7th/8th grade English (and high school electives), and there is one teacher each for middle school math, science and social studies. Yes: my colleagues teach grades 5-8 every day, one class per grade!

My students are from all over the world, and I actually do not teach any white Americans, my own demographic and the one predominant in the places I grew up and went to college. Instead, my students represent a delightful mix of cultures and ethnicities: Sudanese, Sudanese-American, German-Sudanese, Dutch-German, Dutch-Korean, British-Sri Lankan, Korean, Chinese, Indian and Afghan. The downside for me as a new language arts teacher is my students' wide range of English language ability. Some are native speakers while others have only recently attended ESL classes. When I asked my 6th graders what made good writing, they responded not with "exciting details" and "juicy words" (as my 5th graders did) but "spelling," "good grammar," "punctuation" and "correct verbs." So I see my (monumental) challenge this year as making English less of a source of rules and anxiety and more about accessibility and creativity and FUN.

My weekend plans: $12 Thai massage this afternoon, get government-mandated HIV test tomorrow morning (fun!...not), go to gym, attempt to enroll in Arabic language classes. Between planning for school, lacking a car, the difficult travel in Khartoum after the rains and the generally remote location of my apartment, it's hard to get much done around here after school hours. I have to keep reminding myself that I have the entire year to take language classes and explore, but I am impatient.

Cloudy and humid in Khartoum,

Charlotte

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