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