sumiko_blogging_from_sudan

ich glaub, mich tritt ein elephant...


maybe i should take up singing... although i seem to have more fun doing it than others listening to it.


another two gorgeous - even with another dislocation


quite surprised and 90 degrees of dislocation


two times gorgeous


food!!!


Frankie

slender, sand colour, about 4 months old, son of Sam, trying to be a good dog, named "Schnuppi" for no smart reason


probably one of those pictures where humans would cringe and cry out "delete! delete!" my dog doesn't mind. he knows he's beautiful.


he can be terribly annoying. but he doesn't mind that either.

and i LOVE it.


i really do.


just idiotically happy and spoilt by too long a time in terrain without red lights...

and a very different kind of food distribution...


(i loved that lunch, Tim. let's do it again!)

...in austria were put into gaol (accused of i don't remember what). they were demonstrating outside certain fashion stores that, among other things, sold jackets with fur collars. they are in gaol as we speak. here, dogs wear fur collars. c'est le dernier cri ici! crazy world.

judge and victim


judge, victim, jury and some fitness equipment


now if this is not evidence. but still i got stuck with the sentence.

neither the piglet nor the kid were quite sure what was happening.

checking...


everybody knows what to do? 'cos i do. i'm the bearer of the list. :)

sure has protein...

so that's what we do: a food security project. classic. part of it is the distribution of seeds and tools. the following pictures are a glimpse of that.

the house of grains you could see earlier. now this is how the yard looked for most of the month of may:


i'm really particular about qualified staff. so just imagine if fully qualified, highly experienced medical doctors carry seeds, what kind of calibres there are for other works... :)
(Ferruccio, you are famous - people still talk about the hard working doctor!)


machinery breaks down. all the time. but no machine that can't be fixed. at some point.


we were lucky, however. we were rolling along strong.


distribution


protection?


women carry enormous loads on their heads. men never do.

...in a male dominated environment.

i had been joking with an ICRC colleague who had been asking me the other day if the austrian red cross guest house in kadugli would have a "safe room". "no," i naively replied, " our safe is in the office." after a quizzical look, he explained what a safe room should be. "aha," i said, "you mean something like jodie foster's panic room? no, we've got nothing like it. and bearing in mind that the whole guest house is merely "thatched" with corrugated iron, i would very much doubt that the reinforcement of walls would suffice in this case..."

two weeks later, the trucks with seeds rolled into town and the bags had to go somewhere. here they are. at least in appearance, the guest house turned into a safe place. in case of gunfire, i could have published the bullet absorbtion qualities of peanuts and cowpeas...

the sheikh of Tagulli (man with white cap) presented me with this lovely rooster. i had planned to keep the chicken at the house as a pet but it soon became lonely and depressed. after two unsuccessful escapes, the rooster's fate was sealed and he landed in the pot.

...i add some pix of myself. with one of the more amazing creatures of this place: a baobab!


some may recognize this typical gesture: yes, it's me lecturing! as usual! ;) "look at the quality of work! will any of the contemporary infrastructure survive for this long?! the british ..." etc.etc. i'll spare you the rest :) and, no, i didn't jump.

no banking system close to you? invest in livestock!


queue for your turn...


... Zeinab's filling the needle!


first a shot from afar...


...then she reloaded...


...and stepped into the ring!




we saw some good wrestling.


let me see you tongue, honey!

supposedly a poem to/about this place... rather a lament, i'd say.


here's watching you, baby


protecting heritage


out of sea. soon back in the sea?


an apprehensive beauty here...


...two apprehensive beauties there.


morbidity has its charm. and people also go to Venice to see it wither, don't they?


every empire crumbles (see the canon)... in more or less dignified circumstances.

If you have a chance to do it: do it!

swimming among sharks, food aplenty, decent company if you're lucky (as i was) - and if the company's no good i'm sure the crew will compensate (thanks to the Baron Noir team! you are fantastic!)-, wrecks, and for folks like me who just dive because they simply find the world sub-watersurface mind-bogglingly amazing: plenty of mind-boggling, plenty of amazement!...


that almost invisible speck out there's our boat!


a bonito - in transit from the sea to the table

...no more pictures of toilets (as it now would be normal and thus boring) but a picture of a sunrise above the toilet :)

i funk away on the laundry...

this must have been a particularly stupid individual. how else could a creature like that end up like this?

we were stopping for lunch when we heard the "sweeeeeeeeeeeeee" sound of escaping air from the left back tyre of the car. the spare was installed. not much later while in the next village meeting, the driver announces that now the right back tyre has gone flat. he calls in our colleagues who are working at another village some 15km away. we all make it to base safely in the evening.

the next morning both punctured tyres are repaired:



in the late afternoon, however, while happily heading back to Kadugli, a huge "BANG". the car fills with dust, ears ring, eyes water. one of the "repaired" tyres which were in the back of the car burst. properly. never seen anything like it:

meanwhile the food situation has improved: i've hired staff that acutally cares what it eats... but sometimes it still happens that we get this for lunch:



dinner in the field is comparatively sumptuous. because of the immediate availability to poultry albeit of the Kate Moss sort we do get animal protein into our diets:



isn't this beautiful?! this is sorghum, the staple food of the region. women arrange the sorghum panicles in this aesthetically pleasing way - just to transport it to threashing...



we all wash it down with plenty of water. i prefer the bottled version, however, seeing what colour the local H2O usually has.



no wonder bearing in mind that this is probably the standard water hole. seems like a good idea that the project will establish proper water points?!

it's been some time. well, i don't have internet connection at work - i depend on the generosity of the international taxpayer and those who represent him/her here in Kadugli: a UN agency does open its doors to NGO staff like me and lets me use the network... but i guess i have elaborated on this topic before and it bores me.

anyway, the team's been busy going places and organizing the target villages of our project. now, that merits extra explanation and introduction - stay tuned and you'll find the details of the project here at some point. this information's been somewhat overdue but ... whatever.

so here we go... places where there's no road. somewhat disconcerting when taking into account that that week a truck rode over an anti-tank mine maybe 3km from where we were romping through the bush. fortunately, nothing happened - neither to the truck passengers nor to us.

change of perimeters...

my present perimeters...

on the road. but no, we're not travelling in beetles although the low sun in this picture seems to have reduced the landcruiser to one. these "trucks" have a far more comforting crush zone. buckle up and go safely.

open Leni Riefenstahl's book "the last of the Nuba" - and you'll recognize the sight. i work in exactly the village/s she stayed in the first time in the early 1960s. rather fascinating.

that particular book - the pictures, the texts (see some pix on http://www.leni-riefenstahl.de/eng/dienuba/1.html) - needs to be studied in the light of who ms Riefenstahl was and what she did, what she said about her work - and what she didn't.