Our home town - Wad Medani

View from a Rakshar in Medani

We have been hanging around for what seems like forever and so we were very excited to be travelling to our final destination (not that final!)  The journey itself was fairly seamless and we arrived in Wad Medani after a 2 ½ hour air-conditioned coach ride and were picked up immediately and taken to our temporary accommodation by people from the Ministry of Education.

The accommodation is quite plush, with ceramic floor tiles, air conditioning in all rooms, double glazing and comfortable furniture.  We were told that we would be here for 2 or 3 days and we also guess that our permanent accommodation will not be as salubrious as this so we are making the most of it.   Take-away lunch is brought for us all and we sit around and chat for a while with the Ministry people for a while.  They leave and tell us that they will ring at 6 to make sure we have everything we need for our evening meal and that is that.

The apartment is on the 3^rd floor and some poor lad had carried our 6 bags up the stairs and so we asked Rami how much we should give as a tip and he said 3 or 4 pounds. We gave Rami 5 and asked him to give it to him on his way out but Rami couldn’t find him and so instead put the money on my phone.

At 6 this same boy turns up and asks us about food and so assuming he had been sent by the Ministry we gave him our order for food.  He spoke only very little English but he explained that his brother has a market stall and would we like some oranges or bananas?  So he went and bought us a kilo of each. We also took the opportunity of giving him the tip for carrying up the bags.  He came back again later, asking us whether we wanted some meat.  There followed a long conversation about meat and we said no we didn’t want any.  Then he came back with a frozen chicken and a couple of packs of meat.  We said no again.   He was hard to get rid of.  We were suspecting that he wasn’t from the Ministry at all but acting under his own initiative and we were feeling really put out by his persistence.  Echoes of Ethiopia.

The next day he was back again.  Banging on the door asking if we wanted food.  We told him no but he kept on.  Martin went down to buy something from the shops but the guy was behind him harassing him and so he came back up without buying anything.  The next day as we were walking out he stops us and tells us that the money we gave him wasn’t enough for carrying so many bags – it was “Little money”.  He asked us the same thing next time.

It got to the point that we stopped answering the door and it was only after persistent banging last night that we opened the door and he had brought us up a visitor who we had met the day before who didn’t have my number but knew where we lived.

She told us that he was Ethiopian.  Well that explained everything as this was our experience in Ethiopia and were beginning to think it was going to be a Sudanese approach as well.  What a relief.

Ethiopians are not liked here.  I don’t think it is for any particular reason other than the fact that they are immigrants.  During famine times, many Ethiopians crossed the border to The Sudan and have stayed and many go looking for work here as it certainly appears to be more prosperous that what we saw in Ethiopia.  From what I can see, all countries do this when they have groups of immigrants coming into their country, no different to us or the US in this respect.