Thursday, August 13, 2009

Cliffhanger resolved...

A pygmy hedgehog just wandered into my living room, snuffled around a moment, and vanished behind the couch. Not what I expected from a legendarily shy creature.

But a decent welcome to Darfur - or technically El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state. What little I've seen of massive Darfur is precisely as flat and dry as you'd expect from the newspapers, with drifts of dust a foot deep against walls. But it is the rainy season, and as we drove in on Monday from the airstrip, goats huddled single-file against walls, seeking scant shelter against a few minutes of unexpected rain, and donkeys clustered, shivering in the low-30s heat, under the few dessicated trees. El-Fasher is a single-story town, nearly as flat and featureless as the desert surrounding it. I've seen very little of it, because Sudan is a country roughly the size of Western Canada, and Darfur the size of BC, and there are few incentives to conserve space when building towns. It's spread out to an almost comical degree, with roads (a term charitably applied) often a hundred meters. The sky is imposingly vast, and after a brief and intense shower yesterday morning, cloudless and startlingly blue.

There goes the hedgehog against, poking unhurriedly around the lawn furniture of my guesthouse.

I'm here in Sudan for a few months to help an NGO coordinate support to people displaced by the Darfur crisis, and I'm unlikely to often offer more detail than that. I'll spend most of my time in Khartoum, the similar dispersed capital that's nonetheless rather more welcoming than Kathmandu, at least according to my single day's impression. I'm here in El-Fasher, many hundreds of kilometres away, until Saturday, learning the ropes and shaking the hands of the people I'll be collaborating with in the coming months.

I've got much more to tell, but first I think it's time to see if that hedgehog wants to be my friend.

Sunday, August 09, 2009

One of blogging's cute ironies is that while unexpected, entertaining, or even tumultuous events often fuel the most fascinating blog posts, they frequently make actually writing such posts a practical impossibility.

For example:

During a brief but lovely visit, Emily and I took a too-short sojourn to Pokhara, the anti-Kathmandu - a serene, yet still marvelously entertaining city where, had I been sane, I would have settled rather than in the nightmarish capital.

The rainy season turned Kathmandu to goo. (Hey, that rhymes!)

My thuggish, sleazy bottom-floor neighbours nicked $500 from my coffee table. I'm loth to go into the details, but suffice it to say that it wasn't due to any silly lapse in security on my part but rather to a previously unexpected layer of depravity on their part. Jenn and Court (my cool and considerably less larcenous neighbours) have informed me that the theft has led to the eviction of the guilty parties, so I'll call that a Paul victory, if a Pyrrhic one.

And I'm in Sudan.

Bedtime.