Driving in Sudan may be quite a traumatic experience if one does not stay vigilant 100% of the time. Drivers do not follow traffic rules, they don’t use the indicators, they cut in line and do all sorts of things that just startle any person from a fairly civilized place. Just two weeks here and I saw a few collisions. Today one driver was chasing another with the intention of beating him up. Yesterday a tuk-tuk nearly flipped over just in front of us as it made a rapid swerve to avoid a truck on a bumpy road. One has to really watch everything around.
Another nightmare are the beggars at the lights. They always operate in packs just wanting money. They will splay their faces against your windows looking very miserable and waiting for a handout. Others try to sell tissues, soap, or other small stuff to make some money. It is a nuisance really and many drivers are guilted into pulling money out. My colleagues often keep biscuits in their glove compartments and give these to the begging children.I do not condone supporting beggars but it is everyone’s personal conscience matter.
Today two colleagues took me out and we ended up in a supermarket. On the way to the car a little girl accosted us for money; one colleague gave her a little bottle of juice and another felt sorry as she did not have any small thing to give to the girl and said she wanted to steal one of my apples I had just bought. I said she could have it. She took an apple from one of my bags and gave it to girl. Now the girl, seeing that the two women gave her each something, was pestering me! And it was my apple that she got! She would not let go. She followed us to the very car looking all miserable and trying really hard to make me feel guilty but I was more and more annoyed. I said that this was really cheeky and we all agreed it was. I got in the car but the girl held the door! We got quite annoyed by the persistence and when my companions started shouting in Arabic the girl went away. Just as we reversed there was a whole gang of them ambushing the car holding their hands out! Quite wild really. We managed to drive away. My colleagues said it was rather unusual what we had just encountered as apparently the beggars are never this persistent. To me it was just a typical behaviour that I knew from other places full of beggars. The unusual part for me was that it was a gang of girls. Typically it is the boys.
One of my friends said that one day she was approached by two boys: one was getting her attention at the front while the other was trying to open the back door to steal her things. When she realized what was going on she put out her cigarette on the front boy’s arm. She said this quickly sorted out the scam. Maybe this is the only good thing that comes out of smoking: having a burning weapon at the ready.
Another thing going on here is the little boys at parking spots who want your business to have the car cleaned. Apparently, they do a good job but there are always a few of them and again they are taking you on a guilt trip as it is really hard to pick one out of the group to assign the task to. It is only one dollar equivalent but they put you in an awkward situation knowing full well that many foreigners will give a dollar to each of them.I do not mind those car cleaners though so much. At least they are doing something useful and they are trying to earn their money. This kind of approach I rather like but I still feel quite uneasy about it.
I have to say I disagree with the whole concept of helping the poor out in this way by the foreigners. This is and Islamic country after all, and they should have some kind of help organized by their community mosques. Maybe the children are not Muslim, or they are recruited by some kind of extortion group who take most of their earnings away.
Quite frankly though, looking back at the history of charity in Africa, it has been here for many years and, by the look of things, not much has improved. We keep sending the funds and supplies and it seems as if it is being thrown down a bottomless pit. There are no African-run charities. All aid is organized by foreigners. Their offices are usually quite flash and the cars they are driving are certainly some of the best ones you see here, you notice them immediately as they have different number plates. You wonder if this is the best way of spending the donors’ money.
I remember the cliché motto saying that wanting to feed a man for a day you give him a fish, wanting to feed him for life you give him a fishing rod. It looks like some people are really interested in just giving the fishes to people all the time as they have been doing this for about 50 years now. Why would that be? Or have they not heard that cliché yet? Sure they have and chose to forget it as this way they have a constant supply of guilt donations and they can keep their own jobs and the status…
I am a little tired of hearing that these poor souls have so little and we are so privileged so they deserve our help. The truth is that many people in this country are very rich. Why are they not interested in sorting the whole situation out? Clearly, this is not on their minds. So, if the locals are not in the right frame of mind to deal with the unequal wealth distribution and to help the poorest improve their situation, why are we meddling with it? The locals are the ones who know the culture and the mindset. Maybe they know it is just a futile task. Some say there are no opportunities for the poor to get out of the poverty, but how does handing out a little food help that? To change the situation the party involved must be interested in the change. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Is this too hard to understand? any form of unsustainable help is going to fail. Africa is its prime example, it does not take much digging to discover this.
I think the charity leaders know this very well but if they admitted this they themselves would have to join a queue back home for a handout as there would be few jobs waiting for them wherever they came from. So they keep pulling the wool over everybody’s eyes and reassure everybody what a great and important mission they run. Hypocrites.