"The guest of honor has not arrived [notice the label on the empty chair] so we cannot begin. Welcome, feel at ease, feel at home, feel KTTC". KTTC is the Kauda Teachers Training Center and I'm not sure they really wanted us to "feel" the training center, but I definitely wasn't feeling it. At that point we had been waiting 40 minutes for the graduation ceremony to begin. The organizers proceeded to hand out sodas and pass around plates filled with dates and cavity-balls (I can't really refer to them as candy). Soda, by the way, is to Sudanese as coffee is to Americans. If you have money for it, you will buy it. It doesn't matter if it's 9 am or 9 pm, "every hour is a soda hour". If you ask me, Coca Cola and Pepsi don't even need to have ad campaigns in Sudan. Much like Starbucks in the US. I don't watch much TV, but I don't ever remember seeing a Starbucks commercial. Anyway, as I sat there and planned my next trip to the dentist the time passed, and 20 minutes later, at 12 o'clock on the dot, the next announcement came: "we have received news that the guest of honor is waiting for the minister of education who will be arriving at 1". "I'm out of here" I thought. The ceremony was supposed to begin at 9, but we had expected delays, so we arrived at 11, only to find that the guest of honor was not coming till 1! And that's a Sudanese 1, which really means 2 or 3. I'm sure some of those South Asian UN police guys (don't ask me why, but they are all from South Asia: Nepal, Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan) got there at 9 and waited for hours with nothing better to do. Yes, it's true that another war will probably break out around here, but having the funny UN police here is not going to change anything. At this point you might be asking yourself what this talk of war is all about. I won't bore/confuse you with the situation, but let me just quote (unedited) a couple people to give you a sense of what I mean:
"How can we emancipate from slavery; since childhood we have never seen freedom" (yes, this is a direct quote!)
"We take the guns, we Nubians are not cowards!"
I think you get the idea: people are not happy with what they see as discrimination by the Government in Khartoum and are ready to pick up their arms again!
So in case you were wondering, no, 21 years of war doesn't make people tired of war. If you don't get what you fought for you'll fight again until you get it.
As for me, I'm just fighting mosquitos. Life goes on: geckos in my bed, snakes in the "office", mice & bats in the eating area, and work to keep me busy. What work? Well, I've been serving as "acting Project Manager" since the new guy has yet to come. The story with this is quite classic. Apparently he's a Ugandan, but since IRC will only hire national staff, he needs to get himself a Sudanese ID card. How do you get one? Well, all you need to do is find someone with your same last three names (in other words, same father, grandfather and great-grandfather name). That's not as hard as you might think since there is not that much variation in names around here. All first-born (more or less) are given the name Kuku if a boy, while if it's a girl, Kaka. The second born son also has a special name, Kodi. So, having easily found someone with your same 3 names you talk to him and convince him (I'm not sure if you convince with a monetary reward) to serve as your witness. He will testify that you are in fact Sudanese. Now you probably don't have a birth certificate--or you say you don't have one since that's very likely--and you go to a doctor for a age authentication. The doctor writes a note that says you were in fact born on whatever date you choose to make up, in whatever place you choose to make up, and then the doctor also serves as your 2nd witness so that the authorities can process your "documents". The word on the street is that this process takes a while and that's why the new Project Manager isn't here yet. My guess is that when the system was invented they weren't thinking about people trying to pretend they were Sudanese because who in the world would go through all that trouble to become Sudanese? If you think about the system, given the fact that little official documentation is required, you could completely change your identity and make up a name (like my new names, which include Johnson, Jona, Jackson, and "Italian Wizard") to match your best friend's names and say you are cousins. It all depends on how badly you want to become Sudanese. All I know is that you better like soda.
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