Visual Podcast-First time in Sudan
Mustafa: When you decided to travel, did you leave with the attitude of knowing that this is only temporary and that you would always end up returning to England or Western Europe? Or was it more like: I don’t know where on Earth I’m going to end up dying.
Tobias: The latter, actually. As it were, I saw LiveAid which was sort of the first international music festival which featured international artists from diverse cultures on such a grand scale. It was made to gather funds for a famine that was taking place in Ethiopia in the mid 1980s. Now I had been to places like France and Spain on family summer holidays, but I had never really opened my eyes, until then, to anywhere outside Europe as being part of the world I lived in. LiveAid really excited my attention to that there was much more out there for me to pursue - other places to seek self-development.
Now a friend of a friend of a friend had taken part in a volunteer programme to go and teach English in Sudan. They showed me the advert for the opportunity the Guardian newspaper and I applied without hesitation. Three months later I was on an airplane which landed in Khartoum, Sudan. At the airport, myself and 3 other volunteers were given bus tickets to travel to the North of Sudan, and a 24-hour bus ride later we found ourselves in a market of a small village in a place called Dongola with a few hundred dollars in our pockets.
Mustafa: So, this was a volunteer program. There was no salary. Just some money to provide for the essentials. Who organized this?
Tobias: It was a programme run by the Sudanese government at the time. Their cultural attaché in London ran this program for 7 or 8 years whereby they sent a large number of teachers to teach English in school across the whole of the country.
Mustafa: How long did you stay in Sudan?
Tobias: I ended up spending two years there. So, after arriving at the market, we found a cheap hotel to stay at until we could arrange for more permanent housing. We found the school where we were expected to teach. Apart from the money we were given to survive, none of us had any money really. We were just graduates with debt. We managed to find a cheap, unfurnished place and got a few bits and pieces such as a mattress and a water pot.
Mustafa: How did you communicate with people in order to attain all of that, such as food?
Tobias: Some people knew a little English, but we just had to try to communicate in any way we could.
Mustafa: Did anyone accompany you?
Tobias: No, it was just the four of us.
Mustafa: It must have felt like such an adventure, then.
Tobias: Yes, a huge adventure!
Mustafa: So you had some cash on you, but no phones or anything like that.
Tobias: No those days no mobile phones, nothing at all.
Mustafa: What if you got sick or bitten by a scorpion?
Tobias: I did get sick. I contracted malaria. Luckily, I had been hanging out with a few Sudanese friends who came to visit one time and saw that I had obviously been very ill. They took me to a medical facility nearby which had a few missionary Christian nuns in it who spoke English. They tested me for malaria and provided treatment.
Mustafa: I’m trying to create a mental image of the circumstances of your life there. Who supervised your work? What about your students?
Tobias: There was a boys’ school there and a girls’ school. We arrived at the school with a letter from the central authorities in the capital Khartoum. They had been expecting us.
Mustafa: Was there law enforcement stationed in the area on behalf of the authorities in the capital?
Tobias: There was a police station and a post office. The post came once a month on a steamer boat on the Nile. Other than that, there wasn’t much infrastructure at all. Life seemed very simple.
Mustafa: No utilities of any sort? This must have been such a contrast from life in the UK.
Tobias: There was very limited intermittent electricity, but no appliances as such. As simple as everything was, I had such an amazing time. I felt so excited. I’d wake up in the morning and go to the ‘souk,’ the market, for coffee and cake. I remember spending afternoon swimming in the Nile and watching massive lizards that looked like crocodiles. I forged beautiful friendships with many people from there. One time they invited me on a boat journey along the Nile from Dongola to Karima. Another time I was taken to look at ancient pyramids for which we took several modes of transportation across the Nile and the desert.
It was a year full of fantastic adventures and beautiful company. I came back to the UK afterwards and got myself a contract for one more year. The second year went by more smoothly as I worked at the same school and had become familiarized to the area and the lifestyle. By then I had a few more objects and furniture in the house.
Mustafa: And the British friends who volunteered alongside you, are you still in touch after all these years?
Tobias: Occasionally on Facebook, yes. There were two women who worked at the girls’ school. The other man left shortly after arriving the first time. He decided that he couldn’t hack it, so he got on the bus back to Khartoum and travelled back to the UK.
Mustafa: What as transformative experience it must have felt. Tell me more about your day-to-day life during the two years in Sudan. Any romantic encounters?
Tobias: At the time there was so much excitement that the last thing in my mind was to pursue romance. I had such a vibrant social life and lots of local friends. They were Northern Sudanese Arabs from whom I started to learn to speak and read Arabic. There was no technology to speak of so human interactions felt very intimate. We would spend hours talking and bonding. There existed such a closeness to nature: the desert, the stars, the Nile.
Near the river it was lush with agriculture. Plantations of ‘fool’ beans, tomatoes, and veggies. We cooked in the primitive barbeque oven called ‘tannour.’ We would make cheese out of powdered milk and mix it with water in a plastic container. Then we would add lemon or lime juice in order to curdle it up in the sun. After that we would wrap it in fabric and squeeze the water out and tie it under the cool clay water pot. The cheese would last for 2 or 3 days. The clay water pot maintained the coolness of the water as it seeped out of it and evaporated.
Mustafa: I suppose such a close-to-nature lifestyle made you appreciate what life this Earth offers us.
Tobias: It is interesting as I arrived in Sudan I expected everything was to be different than in England. However, the real culture shock was when I returned to England and marvelled at the excesses of an industrialized society. Why did we need 20 different types of chocolate biscuits? We must really not need 17 different kinds of washing powder?! I supposed I was young and idealistic about things, but did we really need all these different kinds of breakfast cereals?
Mustafa: So moving from London to Cornwall at the age of 7 felt like a regress, but returning to England after spending your early 20s in Sudan made you disdain the wastefulness of modern society.
Tobias: I mean of course also in Cornwall my parents did teach me as a child the value of the Earth. I learned that one can just plant seeds and food will grow. I did learn that cheese is made out of milk from cows that we dearly looked after. In that sense I had been acquainted with knowledge for survival. Nevertheless, coming back to England from Sudan did reveal a hint of something that modern societies had managed to lose.
Mustafa: In any case, us homo-sapiens still survive be depleting the finite resources of this planet, albeit most of us unfortunately grow-up unaware of the fact.
Anyway let’s move on, what happened after you left Sudan?
Tobias: I came back from Sudan thinking: OK that was exciting to volunteer but I really need to embark on building a career, so I decided to do a post-graduate degree in teaching. I moved to Anglesey in Northern Wales and spent a year acquiring a formal qualification to teach English. I got lucky in finding an abode overlooking the most beautiful scenery that Wales has to offer. I would get up in the morning and open the curtains to a spectacular view of the sea and an amazing skyline of Welsh mountains. Absolutely stunning! I studied for a year.
Mustafa: Who paid for it and what did you survive on?
Tobias: In those days the government actually paid the course fees but my daily expenses were thanks to a loan which I later had to pay off when I started working.
Mustafa: I suppose you stayed in touch with your family via letters?
Tobias: Letters not so much from Wales as I had the option to make phone calls, but from Sudan I sent them letters which my mom still has. I also stayed in touch with my sister.
Mustafa: After finishing your formal qualification to teach English, what then? You must have thought you wanted to travel to a non-English-Speaking country in order to put your knowledge to use?
Tobias: In Sudan, I had met a French lady who worked for the VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas). She showed me a book in German which was about a country called Yemen. I could not read or understand anything but I was mesmerized by the beauty of the imagery. Everything looked stunning in an otherworldly way, the mountains, the landscapes, the architecture. It had really stuck in my mind and I wanted to find a way to go and work and live there.
After I finished my degree, I applied for jobs which were advertised to work both within or outside the UK. I was offered a job in the UK, but a cultural relations organization which also hired people abroad also offered me a job with the option of choosing where to relocate. Luckily, they had an operation in Yemen and I jumped at the possibility. My mother was again unsettled by my choice to move abroad, nevertheless I got on that airplane to Sana’a, the capital of Yemen.