Of Note

There are some things I have been noticing that are disjointed but I want to mention them.
No one turns off their watches when their watch alarms go off. They let them beep. One more reason why Ed gets along well with Sudanese people.

Clothing: People wear absurdly fancy things to do everyday tasks. It’s wonderful. You’ll see women dressed in two piece dinner outfits and children in party gowns baking bread or cleaning the porch. Men wear suits to work everyday, even though its hot out. Long sleeved shirts, long wool pants. No sweat. Meanwhile George and I and Neesha are all in tee shirts and capris to try and escape the heat. But everyone else looks like they could be lifted out of this little village in Sudan and transported to a dinner gala, and look completely appropriate. And no one wears black (who would want to, its so hot). Everyone is in bright colors and patterns. It’s like a rainbow every time a group of women sit together.

Names: Fantastic old fashioned names. Rosemary. Clara. Doris. Betsy. Jane. Helen. Florence. Mimi. Margaret. Abigail. Alice. Lucy. Charles. Emmanual. Dominic. Paul. You don’t find Michelle or Sarah, or Emily or Katie or Megan or any of the other names so common in the US today. Imagine you were living in the 50’s where everyone had nice names, and wore skirts all the time, and you can start to imagine here. I love it. I want to name my child Doris.

Jerome is 27! He doesn’t look 27. No one here looks their age. They all look ridiculously young, up to a point, and then they look ridiculously old. Father Ben is 37, and he looks to be at most 25. Jerome looks like he should be 18 or 20. I told him he couldn’t be 27 and he asked what it took to be 27 which made me pause. He doesn’t act young. He seems like he does at first glance, but he is very steady actually. And very old fashioned. He is having trouble finding girls that he likes, he doesn’t like James Bond movies because “James Bond lies too much”, and he wants to make enough money to get married and have lots of kids (boys and girls). He let it slip he can speak a little of most languages, but he wouldn’t tell me about himself until we are leaving, he said. Its just interesting. He isn’t what he seems to be.

Reverend Mother was talking about Arabs and Blacks in Sudan and what she had to say was interesting. The Arab north doesn’t like to consider itself “black”, and the word for black in Arabic is slave (or at least, that is how it was explained to me, and how it is used). They see themselves as separate from the rest of Sudan, separated by their religion, and their identity, and their skin color (though most of them are dark). They are often surprised to go to other countries and be treated like black people. Regardless, she was telling us about it, and how she didn’t blame people for resenting the Arabs in the north because there was so much viciousness. One man called her a donkey. Ultimately, she said, there can’t be reconciliation between the North and the South. Black southerners cant be accepted as Muslim. “Their prayers don’t mean as much.” But when asked if she thought there was going to be a civil war, she frowned. She said she hoped not, because “if we have another civil war then we will have begun with war and we will end with war and we will die with war. We will never escape it.” It was bleak, but this was a woman who had lived through it all before. Had a gun held to her head that only didn’t hit her because the man guarding her pushed it away and took the bullet himself. It is hard to imagine that happening over again without looking at it with desolation.

One man said in the staff meeting, “We are all Africans and therefore we are all polygamists” and a journalist we were talking to didn’t know you could only have one wife in the US and asked us why.

Pasquena in her childhood:
Pasquena once tried to steal honey by climbing on her brother’s back to reach it. It fell and covered both of them with honey and her mother made her go outside and stand in the sun “to be licked clean by the flies”

I'm pretty sure crickets snore. I was napping in the morning after breakfast and all I could hear was this hushed version of a cricket chirp, but to the tempo of breathing. Also I accidentally killed the children of my family of crickets and I felt a bit guilty about it.

There are always sun showers during the day, but never a real storm until night.