Traveller's tales

Thursday, January 11, 2007

A Journey to the Red Sea # 10


-10-

Khuna: life in a refugee camp

Unbeknown to us, the bus to Gedaref stops after about one in the afternoon. A lift on a truck as far as the village of Khuna, several kilometers away is all we can manage today.

At first sight, passing through, this village might be overlooked as just another Sudanese village, like so many others. A closer look reveals that it is not Sudanese at all, but Tigrayan, and that it is not a village at all, but a refugee camp.

Feeling like intruders into the world of suffering and hardship, we enter the village and are thankful that we have left our cameras behind in Gedaref. Our intrusion would have felt doubly humiliating if we had had cameras around our necks, we thought.

Eventually, in the midst of the grass huts, some of them topped off with little crosses (the Tigrayans are not Muslim) we find a hut that looked a bit like the one where we had bought tea in Safawa. Sure enough, tea is on sale.
“What’s tea in their language?”
“Try Arabic,” suggested Ade. I suppose that saying anything in a questioning voice and pointing at the kettle in a place that only sells tea will always obtain the desired beverage. The young boy understands and gives us two glasses of tea.

In a corner of the hut two young men are playing draughts using bottle tops in lieu of checkers on a piece of cardboard marked out in squares. After a few minutes, we begin to watch and are invited to play. A game of draughts between an Englishman and a Tigrayan in the middle of Africa has got to some kind of first, hasn’t it?

Luckily for us, the man spoke a little English and some Arabic so we manage to communicate the fact that we are sort of stranded in Khuna. We are promptly taken to someone’s home and fed and watered and given beds for the night.

Eating a fine meal of adis (lentils), tomatoes and shata (chilli peppers) that has been been prepared by people who have been lucky to escape death or malnutrition, or the ravages of war in their own land is a peculiar experience, and the welcome is cordial and hospitable.

After the food and tea has been taken away, our hosts produce a radio and tune it in to the BBC World Service to make us feel at home. It does seem that the relationship between wealth and material possessions, and hospitality is an inverse one.

At first light the family rise and make tea on a charcoal stove, then after we have drank, we are taken through the bewildering maze of huts to a point from which lorries from Safawa arrive to take people into Gedaref to work.

Gedaref now has a familiar look about it, like an old friend, and our journey feels almost over. We step aboard the bus heading back to Wad Medani three hours away and it has ended. In front of us, the Shihada, a couple of days in Khartoum to tie up loose ends of Sudanese red tape, and a nine hour flight back to that other world of red double-decker buses, fast food and the good life. The thought occurs to me thatafter this trip the ‘good life’ might not have any of its former appeal.
Robert L. Fielding

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