The final ride in Sudan is about 310 miles from Dongola to Khartoum through such desert camps as Dead Camel Camp, Desert Hut and Abu Dolooa.
If not the most scenic, Dead Camel Camp was perhaps the most aptly named.
Where ever we camped however, we could always count on the luxury of having four toilets.
Be that as it may, by far, the best experience was a visit with Sulayman a subsistence farmer in the Sudanese desert.
Sulayman is around 80-years-old, he didn’t know for sure, but he has three wives which makes him feel every minute of how ever many years it’s been. We only met one. They lives not so much in a village as an extended family compound composed of adobe huts and animal corals.
His home would be described in Architectural Digest as austere minimalism.
Sulayman sat in the middle and politely asked and answered questions via an interpreter. He said he had 8 children and 5 camels. The interpreter said that was not true. He didn’t know if he was just counting the male children and as far as the camels, he had many more. In fact he was a wealthy man in his community but it was tradition to minimize his children and animals for fear of bragging and attracting the “evil eye” and bad luck.
Sulayman pays no taxes, participates in no government programs and receives no form of government support. He rarely, if ever uses any form of currency. All trade is done by barter.
The boys go to public schools, which are notoriously poor, this is the only governmental intervention in the lives of their community with the exception of public roads and electricity. The boys go only until they are old enough to work on the farm and with the animals. But for now, the teachers have been on strike for a month.
The girls do not attend school and are married off as early as twelve. They have no choice in their marriage partner. The conversation didn’t go further at that point but later the interpreter very unapologetically said the girls would under gone female circumcision “to keep them from wanting other men.”
In preparation for my trip one of the books I read was The Girls in the Wild Fig Tree by Nice Leng’ete. She is a young Masai woman who escaped ‘the cut’ and became a U.N. Spokesperson against the practice. In doing so she has reversed the practice is some areas, saving thousands of young girls and advocating their continued education.
It was mind boggling to sit among people unabashedly advocating the practice of suppression, repression and depression of half the population. What kind of society would want to negate half their brain power. And in many cases the better half? What fate awaits those beautiful young girls? Do they dream of a better life?
This was not something Sulayman wanted to talk about. He wanted to talk about farming. I was the only one in the group that admitted agricultural roots. So, when asked about irrigation I showed him pictures of cows in green fields and told him we relied on rain. He asked about the crops we grew and I showed him a video of my brother Doug combining beans.
He had no response to that either.
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