My Sudanese friend Lubna Abdelrahman is a very enterprising lady.

In the last 18 months, she has set up an organisation to help immigrant women and their families and is also busy writing articles for and promoting the new Alqalam Arabic newspaper in the Vancouver area.

Lubna Abdelrahman speaking at Edmonds School, Burnaby, BC (Pix by Richard Greenwood)

Kathy Corrigan, MLA for Burnaby-Deer Lake (Pix by Richard Greenwood)

One of the guest speakers, Burnaby-Deer Lake MLA Kathy Corrigan, told the audience that even though Canadians believed in equality, Canadian women still only made two-thirds the money that men did.

As a result, it was even more important to encourage immigrant women and their families and help them settle into their new country effectively, she added.

Lubna described new workshops she is setting up to help women with a Middle Eastern, Sudanese or Somalian background set up new businesses and learn more about financial institutions in Canada.

“I know it’s very hard. Most new businesses don’t know how to sell their products. You are not alone. We will try to help you,” she said.

Lubna worked for the Ministry of Health for UNICEF in Sudan before moving to Burnaby, B.C. with her husband more than 10 years ago.

Since then, she has worked as an outreach worker, community health worker, program coordinator, translator and hosted numerous workshops. She is also kept busy raising two young daughters.

Bitmakaly Women’s Association (also known as Bitmakaly Women’s Empowerment Organization) can also be contacted on 778-919-1208 or via their Facebook site.

Sufi dancers in Omdurman (Pix: Alison Bate)

More Sufi dancing in Omdurman (Pix: Alison Bate)

The pounding beat got louder as we walked to the edges of the circle and saw what they were all watching: green, red and leopard-clothed mystics swirling and dancing in a hypnotic fashion in the middle of the circle.

Their faces told the story: blissful is the only way to describe it. The bumpy ride forgotten, all things forgotten but the compelling dancing, chanting and smiling faces.

It was Friday evening in Omdurman and I’d never seen the Sufi dancers before, despite living in Sudan for five months in 2007. At the time it seemed too touristy, and a long way to go on my one day off a week. Big mistake.

If you go to Khartoum, it’s definitely worth taking the tour arranged by the Acropole Hotel every Friday from 3pm. You don’t have to stay at the hotel to go, but pay about 30 Sudanese Pounds and you’ll see lots of sights and, most importantly, end up at the Sufi dancing in Omdurman.

To learn more about the Sufi religion, I enjoyed reading this post: Sufism in Sudan, Part One. Here’s an excerpt about the ceremony:

“The Hamad al-Neel cemetery—a vast, dun-colored cemetery in Omdurman—is the headquarters of the al-Qadiriya order in Sudan and was founded by sheikh Hamad al-Neel, who is buried at a nearby mosque.

“The expanse serves as an attraction for tourists and photographers due to the nature of the order’s rituals, which combine African heritage, dance, music and colorful attire.

“On Friday at 5 pm, the cemetery fills up with people of all ages, ethnicities and walks of life who come to be a part of the rituals, while tea sellers and pamphlet vendors surround the area around the tomb site.

“The dervishes are dressed in red and green, patchwork, leopard-prints or flowing white ‘jellabiyas’ and ‘immas’ (turbans). Some sport dreadlocks, amulets and talismans, and others don on colorful hats and enormous strings of prayer beads.

“Standing barefoot above the sand and under the heat of a sizzling sun, a few men pick up the rhythm on their ‘tambours’ (drums) and chant ‘zikr’ melodically while the crowd swells palpably, grooving to the rhythm.” ((Continued in Sufism in Sudan, Part One)

(Posted by Alison Bate on Jan.1, 2012)

The old and the new in Khartoum (taken from Omdurman).

By Alison Bate

The capital of Sudan feels a little lost and empty these days.

The distinctive Dinkas – the impossibly tall, thin Southerners – and their fellow compatriots have mostly left Khartoum for their new homeland and the deadline for the rest to leave is just months away.

After April 9, 2012, any southerners remaining will become stateless or, if they are lucky, have to get work visas like other foreigners.

The new country of South Sudan, born on the 9th of July, has taken with it the biggest chunk of Sudan’s oil revenues and Khartoum seems totally unprepared for the loss of all that money.

It will have to find new ways to make an income and meanwhile the residents of Khartoum and its sister cities of Omdurman and Khartoum North are hurting as prices shoot upward.

“Everybody want to leave Sudan. Why you come to Sudan from Canada?” asked one resident, only half-joking.

The price of a sheep shot up to between 400 and 700 Sudanese Pounds (SP) for the Haj earlier this year – the religious occasion when every family buys a sheep.

Translating this into US dollars is not even easy, as there’s a huge gap between the official exchange rate and what you can get on the black market.

Officially, $1 US equals about 2.75 SP but on the black market, $1 US will buy you more than 4SP. That’s a huge slump compared with four years ago, when I last visited Khartoum, and $1 US was worth 2 SP.

So, oil has gone, the southerners have gone, and the UN has also largely left town. The massive bureaucracy of the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) has shut up shop in Khartoum and there are fewer fancy white SUVs with their monster UN logos charging around town, and fewer well-paid jobs for the Sudanese: about 4,000 Sudanese who worked for the UN in Khartoum have lost their jobs.

In the process, UNMIS has morphed into UNMISS and headed south to Juba, the capital of South Sudan.

Paradoxically, Khartoum itself is full of new gleaming buildings, roads and bridges built with oil money. But it seems like a shell city.

Whether this is the end of an era of new growth or simply a lull before the next wave comes in remains to be seen. But right now is certainly not a good time to be a resident of Khartoum.

(Posted Dec.16, 2011 by Alison Bate)

1. Take lots of US dollars in cash, in fact everything you’ll need, as none of your western ATMs or credit cards will be accepted.

Kassala resident near the Gash river

2. Change money on the black market, not in banks or official exchanges. As of Dec.1, 2011 you’ll get about 4.2 Sudanese pounds to $1 US on the black market, compared with only about 2.75 SP to the dollar officially.
To change money in downtown Khartoum, the moneychangers’ area is near the Al Kabir mosque, on the northeast side, where they also sell cellphones, ones that likely fell off the back of a truck. Just wander along and you’ll hear plenty of murmurings of: “Change dollars?”

3. If you are travel light or backpacking, don’t bother with a big towel (you’ll dry quickly without one) or lots of soap, toothpaste etc (all readily available and cheap).

4. If you like reading, bring a few books or your e-Reader as pickings are pretty slim for English books, and more likely of the deadly “Elements Of English Grammar” kind.

5. If you want to meet up with local people, everyone uses a cellphone in Sudan and they’re really useful. A cheap cellphone is about $10 US, then pick up a Zain SIM card for about 5 SP ($1.25 US) and a 10 SP top-up card (about $2.50).

6. Don’t freak out too much over the scary travel advisories for Sudan. Khartoum is one of the safest cities you could be in, as well as northern and eastern Sudan. For real advice, check out the Lonely Planet’s Thorntree Forum page on Sudan.

7. But don’t rely on LP’s guide to Sudan (very limited). The only one worth getting right now is Bradt’s Guide to Sudan.

8. You have to register on arrival within three days. If you want to do it by yourself, you can, but the one time I did, I waited in the blazing heat for about three hours in a massive line-up and ended up paying a “special rate”. This last time I stayed in a hotel and they did it for me for a modest fee. My total registration fee was 160 SP (about $40 US).

9. If you are in Sudan and want to go to South Sudan, there are loads of flights. But if you have a single entry Sudan visa, as I did, it’s difficult to get back to Khartoum. If Juba’s on your list of places to go, it’s much easier to arrange to fly out of Juba to Addis Ababa or Kampala.

Village just outside Kassala, East Sudan

10. I thoroughly enjoyed Kassala in East Sudan (see my post “Coffee and lamb fright in Kassala”. First, get a travel permit via either the Acropole Hotel, Global Tours (Tel: 09122 53484) or take photocopies of your passport (front and back) and a passport photo to the tourism office. A first-class bus cost 58 SP ($16) from Mina Bary bus station in south Khartoum. It’s best to buy your ticket the day before as they fill up. Buses leave early morning between 6.30 am and 7 am.

(Posted Dec.9, 2011 by Alison Bate)

Drinking Ethiopian coffee in Kassala, East Sudan

I’m in a hot little internet café up some very narrow stairs, so narrow I had to squeeze sideways to get up here, helped marginally by a wobbly rail.

The internet in Sudan is sometimes very good and sometimes very bad and slow. The connection keeps dropping, and I’ve just managed to switch out of Arabic and change the direction of type. But the owner, one of many Eritreans living here in East Sudan, has very kindly just lent me his portable, with an mDSL internet stick…much faster.

I went to look at the striking Taka Mountains yesterday, but as is the way in Sudan, never quite made it, sidetracked by friendly people at the street cafes.

I’m in a cute little town next to the mountains called Kassala, a long, eight-hour bus ride east of Khartoum. The bare mountains that rise up suddenly out of the desert pull you toward them automatically. I was heading there when I saw a store selling all kinds of luscious desserts. So I bought a Sudanese baklava, which you order by weight (so I couldn’t just get one), and sat down to eat them.

This town is very close to the border with Eritrea and Ethiopia, and there are many people from those countries living here, bringing their coffee customs. Many fled here as a safe haven during war in their countries.

I was admiring the coffee, which comes in a tiny individual Turkish-style coffee pot with what looks like dried grass coming out the top, when a lone tourist joined me. Victor, a young Swiss guy backpacking around Sudan, has come down through Egypt and is now on his way to Ethiopia.

“You want coffee?” they asked Victor, bringing out just one coffee cup. I was seething. The men had been chatting happily with me, but once a man joined me, I ceased to exist. I understand it is the culture – not polite to talk to a woman when there’s a man with her – but it was still annoying. Victor must have picked up on my vibes, as after drinking two cups, he offered me some.

It was dynamite: very strong and tasted almost like Irish whisky..I learned later they put ginger in it, which gives it the strong, smooth taste. And the grass? It is used to filter the coffee.

Victor and I were then invited for supper by a Sudanese guy who lives in the U.S. some of the time and has a very posh villa in Kassala. We learned a lot about the history of the region, about when it was occupied by the Italians, and more recently, the fighting just over the border in Eritrea.

I’ve also eaten at a local restaurant, but must admit I wasn’t brave enough to try the “Lamb Fright” or “Barbecue Problem” in the English menu. However, I did have some really neat shish kebab and fresh orange juice.

And maybe I’ll make it to the mountains tomorrow.

Posted Tuesday Nov. 29, 2011 by Alison Bate

I ‘ve just arrived in Khartoum after a four-year gap, and this morning between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m., it was pretty magical.

Khartoum shepherds feed their flock in the early morning

After a sleepless, jetlagged night, I went up to the rooftop of the Bougainvilla Guest House, where I’m staying.

It was still dark, the moon and stars were out, and a cool breeze swept across the patio. Four or five mosques started competing with each other, and the mullahs’ prayers bounced all around the darkened city.

I stayed up there until the skies began to lighten, and the sun landed on the concrete buildings below and little birds with fanned tails flitted around the dirt streets. Khartoum by day is a hot and dusty city, so it was neat to see it this way.

No one in the city seemed in a hurry to wake up. A donkey cart and driver ambled across the dirt square below, and the air smelled of burnt sand. I wandered along one of the streets, where a few sleepy people were heading to work.

And after breakfast I’ll have all the fun of sorting out registering with the police and getting a SIM card.

(Posted Sat. Nov.19, 2011 by Alison Bate)

I can pack a backpack or suitcase for a trip in under an hour, but deciding what tech toys to take is another ballgame altogether.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time researching cellphones and agonizing about whether to take my beloved Macbook with me.

I’m meeting various friends in Khartoum, and everyone uses cellphones there. But of course, many Canadian cellphones (sigh) – including my own – don’t work outside North America. The cellphone with my Telus account doesn’t even have a SIM card, and I foolishly gave away my old unlocked FIDO phone, which would work overseas. I toyed with buying one of Future Shop or 7/11 ‘s unlocked phones, but all the online research drained my limited shopping energy.

So while in Bahrain on a second tedious eight-hour stopover, I bought a $27 US Nokia 1616. Hopefully, it’ll work with a Sudanese SIM card. I’m sure it will – the Sudanese seem to do cellphones better than Canada.

As for my MacBook, I couldn’t face worrying about losing it (and all my pix and personal data). So two days before leaving, I bought a cheapo HP 10.1” Intel Atom N455 Netbook for $249 plus tax from Nanaimo’s Future Shop. Asked them to load Skype and VLC to save time, and set up the Arabic version too. My friend David kindly installed a spare copy of Microsoft Office, and I was all set to go.

My other toy – definitely an indulgence – is a Zoom H4Ns digital recorder that cost $319 plus tax from Tom Lee’s store in downtown Vancouver. It replaces my fancy Sony minidisc recorder, which is basically obsolete after four years of minimal use, and had annoying proprietary software that never worked. The new Zoom seems to download MP3s easily via a USB port. Thank you, Zoom.

And, of course, when I got to Khartoum (just last night) all I wanted to do was write longhand in a ruled notebook . . .

(Posted Saturday, Nov.19, 2011 by Alison Bate)

South African-based Sophia Shuttleworth has written a well-researched and fascinating article about Sudanese perfumes on her African Aromatics website.

Sophia, who describes herself as a artisan perfumer, starts out this way: “On Sunday 9 July 2011, South Sudan seceded from Sudan and became the world’s youngest country. The conflict in Sudan has been well documented, but little attention has been paid to the crafts and arts of Sudan.

Few people realize what a rich reservoir to the aromatic past Sudan is, and that Sudan once played a vital role in history of Perfumery and the trade of aromatics. . .” (See Sudan’s Aromatic Culture for the rest of the article, which also discusses Bint el Sudan)

“Do you dare to wear it?”
– 1974 advert for Bint el Sudan perfume

Mar.22, 2011

By Alison Bate

It was my last day in Khartoum, the dusty desert capital of Sudan. I lay spread-eagled on my bed, trying to keep as cool as possible, and planning the day ahead.

I’ll visit Omdurman Souk, I decided, follow on my grandfather’s trail. After all, it was thanks to Grampy and his “expert nose” that I was in Africa at all.

The original Bint oil perfume (non-alcoholic)

Eric Burgess, known in the style of the times as E.E. Burgess Esq., was a traveling perfume salesman for W.J. Bush & Co. of Hackney, East London.

His mission? To sniff out new markets for exotic perfumes. Like his father before him, Eric Burgess started at the company as a youngster and stayed with Bush for 50 years. It was a family tradition: his grandfather and great-grandfather also traded in chemicals of some kind. And as an export manager and buyer, he travelled all over Africa, the Middle East and Europe, often in very remote areas.

“He lived at a time when you could have real adventures,” his younger daughter Elizabeth – my Mum – recalled.

As a young child, she remembers him flying in a small plane over their garden in Kent, waving a large white hankie out the window as he headed across the English Channel on yet another long trip.

I grew up listening to my grandfather’s travel tales at his home in Kemsing, Kent – the cozy English village he lived in for 60 years.

NOTE: A shorter piece, “The Bint Factor”, was published by Reader’s Digest Canada in December 2009)

Grampy’s home was full of elephants: ivory tusks carved with a row of elephants; book-ends with ivory elephants at each end; and a carved wooden elephant stool on the landing near the top of the stairs.

His wife Ann died when I was only eight, so my memories are of him living alone, but very comfortably, in the same grounds as Auntie Pat, Uncle John and our cousins Simon and Roger.

Travelling with my grandfather in France

He’d tell of his adventures with an infectious chuckle, bushy eyebrows twitching, glasses at the end of his nose, and a cigarette with a full inch of ash wedged between his fingers.

My brother Tony, sister Gill and I would watch fascinated, wondering when the ash would fall off, as we listened to how he’d had to shoot a man in Africa or helped toss a dead thief off a train.

Grampy told one of his stories in the company’s Albright magazine in February 1965, shortly after he retired.

Journeys overseas took months in his early days, sometimes more than a year, and he was a regular on the Continental long distance trains. Late one night in the Balkans, he was in a sleeper when he heard a noise in the corridor:

“I left my compartment and saw the attendant bending over a fellow lying on the floor. Apparently the guard had caught him stealing, the thief had drawn a knife and the guard had shot him,” he recalled.

“I asked what he was going to do about it and he said quietly: ‘Give me a hand to shove him out’ – and we did, out of the window”.

In another interview, this time with The Sunday Times of London, Eric Burgess recalled an unplanned six days in the desert.

“We crossed the desert from Damascus to Baghdad in a fleet of Cadillacs with enough food for a week in case we got stuck with the rain coming. But we reached one patch of mud 25 yards across and it took us two hours to get through it.

“We all fell flat on our backs and I arrived in my office in Baghdad covered in mud. I caught sight of myself in a mirror and, good heavens, I realised I hadn’t got a tie on.”

Grampy (right) riding in Africa

Bint is born

It was on one of his early expeditions that Bint was born, after Eric Burgess set out for Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) and Sudan in 1919 with several large leather cases and a strong trunk, tightly strapped.

As he told it, one blazingly hot day a group of 14 Omdurman merchants “looking like brigands” crowded into the small office used by the company representative in Khartoum.

After squatting on the floor and drinking several cups of thick strong coffee, as was the custom, they produced a large number of exotic essences, including jasmine, lilac, lily of the valley, musk and amber.

They asked my grandfather to use them to make the perfect perfume for Muslims. Strict Muslims don’t touch alcohol, so the perfume had to be oil-based, a more expensive process.

Reflections as South Sudan votes 99 per cent for independence

Boys in Dilling, South Kordofan

By Alison Bate

As we headed toward Dilling, white egrets wandered in and out of scrub bushes and stubby trees.

It was the rainy season and the desert land was transformed into an endless series of golf courses, with fresh green grass broken by bunkers of burnt orange mud.

Sand seeped into the crowded minibus and my nose twitched and throat itched. But each kilometer took me farther away from El Obeid and eased the tension in my shoulders. I’d been quizzed three times by the security police while overnighting in El Obeid, and believe me. . .not much fun.

This was 2007 and I’d been cocooned in Khartoum for a few months. Now I was heading into South Kordofan for a brief break from teaching.

Dilling, with Nuba Mountains in the background

James was an engineer from Juba, the capital of South Sudan, and he taught me a lot about the complexities of Sudanese loyalties. I learned that Sudan is not just about South Sudan and independence, or Darfur in the west and grazing rights. That other areas of Sudan, such as South Kordofan, are also unhappy with Khartoum’s dominance.

The name Nuba is really a collective term for those living in the Nuba Mountains, but includes many distinct peoples speaking different languages and with different religions. There are 99 mountains in the range, and used to be as many separate tribes.

During the last civil war, the Nuba peoples allied with the southern rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), but had been fighting their own war of autonomy against the Khartoum government for years. In fact, the Nuba region was one of three special areas identified in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005.

As James took me on a tour of Dilling by pickup truck, he talked about his own life, as well as the lives of those in the Nuba Mountains.

Like so many others, James fled Sudan when civil war broke out and moved to Nairobi in Kenya. An estimated 2.5 million southerners died and a further 4.6 million were displaced or became refugees in the war between North and South Sudan.

After the war finished, James returned to Sudan, but his family stayed in Kenya. He was building a house in Juba and almost ready to return. But he was reluctant for his family to join him until schools were functioning properly and his kids could get a proper education.

Drilling in Dilling

He’d been living in Dilling for a few years and had set up the field office for a charity called International Aid Services (IAS). By the time I met him, the IAS crew had drilled 101 wells with hand water pumps for nearby villages.

Although the charity was Scandinavian-funded, the engineers working in Dilling were all African. And after seeing westerners squandering aid money in Khartoum, it was refreshing to talk with engineers doing practical work in the field, and to see Africans helping Africans. They were slowly winding down for the rainy season, as muddy roads made it almost impossible to get to some of the remote villages.

Dilling was a quietly pretty village, with green fields and picturesque piles of rocky hummocks. Driving around, we passed the usual messy but colorful souk (market): an amorphous mix of tea ladies, small restaurants and minibuses. A procession of people and animals drifted by: a donkey cart, two men on cycles, then a white-robed man leading a camel and two women in colorful robes, curious at seeing a foreigner as they walked past.

Shady avenue in Dilling, Sudan

A grand avenue of mahogany trees lined the road and had been planted by the British in their colonial days. A soccer field was surrounded by a decrepit brick wall. There was an old-fashioned feel of faded glory, solidness and predictability.

But then on the outskirts, we entered a totally different area, with remnants of more recent conflicts. Small thatched and brick round houses were full of SPLA supporters resettled as a result of the peace agreement.

Just because a piece of paper says a war has ended, doesn’t mean it has in people’s minds, though. Or even in reality. Outside of town, bright lights in the distance marked the UN compound. Although the UN patrolled the area in vehicles, several people said there was still a lot of crime, and they didn’t really do anything.

The civil war in the Nuba Mountains ended with a ceasefire in 2002, but five years later, many villagers still didn’t realize a peace agreement was in place.

“They believe it’s just an interlude,” James told me.

After the vote in South Sudan, Africa’s newest country is set to formally declare its independence on July 9. This area in the Nuba Mountains will remain in north Sudan. Strategically, this is a very important area in Sudan and there are so many unresolved issues.

What happens in a country when some get independence but others still feel marginalized? Certainly, it’s not a good recipe for stability.

UPDATE: Darfur Redux: Is ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ Occurring in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains?