Settle, o dust

The last few weeks have been a nervous breakdown averted, a gradual routine established and a grudging resignation accepted. As for the breakdown: I learned to (kind of) manage my daunting workload and begin to (kind of) enjoy my 60-hour work weeks. The routine: I have figured out (kind of) how to arrange my time, how to get the things I need in Khartoum without a car and the best days to get them. Resignation: I have accepted that I will work all day every Saturday and part of each Friday, all year.

It really helps that I get to flee Sudan in two weeks for a weeklong visit to Jordan. Fab vacation and legal alcohol, here I come!

At least teaching is important, right? When you're exhorting children to submit their reading response journals, hauling them off the playground to spend 30 minutes sitting in the office at lunch because of bad classroom behavior, breaking up fights, or answering the same question for the sixth time in five minutes, that's hard to keep in perspective.

(Then there are the times, like yesterday, when I watched an 11-year-old standing on desk chair try to scoot the chair 15 feet across a "toxic bog" while his classmates cheered him on. Or the time I discovered two boys taking turns reading in pairs...by reading every other word. So cool when you are 12!).

Okay, I will cease with the teacher stories. They really aren't funny or relevant if you don't spend all day with "tweens." Other points of possible interest:

The expatriate community in Sudan...is varied and curious. I have met British, Canadian and Australian teachers, Norwegian and Croatian soldiers with the U.N., South African pilots, Spanish and American aid workers, Ugandan police officers, Indian businessmen and even Pakistani "house-husbands." People are in Sudan for all kinds of reasons, and in Khartoum you would almost never know that Darfur is stagnating/worsening or that relations between the northern and southern parts of the country are worsening except for reports from the BBC. (Okay, I admit I haven't started reading the local papers, even the English-language ones). If you want more opinions on such matters, I would prefer you e-mail me :)

Gettin' around is hard to do

Travelers, visitors, erstwhile wanderers, listen up:

Twelve Things Not To Do In An Amjad*
*Sudanese mini-buses for hire

1. Do not flag a driver on an emptyish street around 6:30 p.m. He is probably on his way home.
2. Do not tell said driver you know your destination when, in fact, you do not.
3. “It’s just down there!” does not constitute “knowing.”
4. Do not tell driver that your destination is near major landmarks if it isn’t.
5. Do not rely on passersby for information about your supposedly prominent destination.
6. Also do not rely on supposed friends whose cell phones are turned off.
7. Or friends who give crappy verbal directions.
8. Do not encourage driver to drive recklessly past armed men down a closed street.
9. Do not make driver turn around more than once.
10. Do not give too many backseat-driving orders.
11. Do not insist on being driven still farther when the driver is visibly angry.
12. When your goal is to see a speech by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon (at the International Friendship Hall, no less), don’t rely on public transportation in Sudan!

Addendum: If you miss Ban Ki-Moon by 15 minutes, just say “fuck it” and instead attend expatriate-laden party at the embassy of a European country.