El Messelemiya Higher Secondary School for Boys: # 9

The trouble with traveling

In a country that stretches the equivalent of the distance between Aberdeen and Gibraltar, and from Dublin to Athens across, travel is always going to be problematic. In Sudan it is doubly so due to the sparse number of good roads, the weather, and the distances involved.

I was told of an unfortunate teacher who had to travel by train to the region of Darfur in the north west of the country. The journey took three weeks from Khartoum and the teacher spent that time on the roof of the train with the poorer Sudanese, who travel this way out of necessity; you don’t pay on the roof, although I imagine the advantages of free travel are easily outweighed by the need to spend 21 days on the roof of a rumbling rain with several pieces of luggage. I am sure it was an experience she will remember for a long time, but I must say that I am in no hurry to follow her, experience or not.

For more modest journeys, the time is measured in hours or days rather than weeks, although this can depend on the weather of course. Right now it is the rainy season and disruptions to travel are not infrequent. The rain falls in the night – usually, and is heralded by much thunder and lightning, the like of which is comparatively rare in Britain. The night sky lights up and the Heavens grumble.

The thunder is followed by howling winds that can be frightening in their ferocity. After ten or fifteen minutes of torrential rain, we are left to get about as best we can in the mud and surface water that takes days to vanish, in spite of the heat that returns almost immediately.
Robert L. Fielding