More from Khartoum...

I had another busy week in and around Khartoum. The highlight was a trip to Sennar, an old dam on the Blue Nile that is used to supply irrigation water to the largest gravity-fed irrigation scheme in the world, the Gezira. The scheme covers over 2 million hectares and is mostly planted with four basic crops: cotton, groundnut, sorghum and wheat. Over the past few years, though, farmers have been granted increasing autonomy to choose their own crops and manage the land more independently from the Ministry of Irrigation. So things are changing...and it is difficult to know exactly what is going on. I will spend much of next week in Wad Medani (near the center of the scheme) working with researchers there to organize some focus groups with farmers who face varying levels of water shortages.

In Sennar, we were mostly interested in talking to red-clay brickmakers who use the Ethiopian silt that is deposited by the annual Blue Nile flood, and to fishermen who fish in the reservoir. Both sets of activities face a number of constraints, and both are affected by Blue Nile silt. The local fishermen say that the silt during the flood makes the fish "drunk", as it gets into their gills and suffocates and often kills them. The brick-makers depend on large floods to fill their favorite harvesting areas, and worry about competition from the cement-brick industry, which is increasingly more economical than their product.

I wish I had brought my camera. You supposedly need permits to take pictures in Sudan, but everyone here tells me that is rubbish and you can take photos of just about anything (except government buildings). I would have loved to document some of these conversation and demonstrations of the various techniques used in these industries.

Yesterday was Friday (the weekend here), so I caught up on recording my notes and thinking about where I stand with this mission. I have moved to a different hotel in Khartoum which is run by a Greek family that has lived here for 50+ years and had one of the very first hotels in the city. It is a full-board place where you get all of your meals and the owners are very friendly and helpful. In the afternoon I joined their complementary "City Tour", in which we visited many places. Our first stop was the National Museum which contains many artifacts rescued from the Nubian areas that were flooded by the High Aswan Dam, including several temples that were disassembled and brought here. Unfortunately, many have been defaced by tourists or visitors who for some reason feel the need to write their names or other messages on the stone. This practice began with French and British explorers in the 19th Century and still continues today. We also went to the Palace Museum, from which we could see the Presidential Palace (where Omar Bashir resides) and a collection of old presidential cars and gifts to the various overseers in Sudan throughout the colonial and post-colonial eras.

Our tour then went to the Blue Nile "Sailing Club". It is a funny name considering you cannot really sail on the Blue Nile, but there were some boats docked there (motor-driven mostly) that members use for excursions on the river. It was all pretty decrepit, including a modest British gunboat that apparently played a very important role in the British conquest of Khartoum and North Sudan. It is amazing what one small boat could do at that time! We left the club to then go to Omdurman, where we say some 19th Century fortifications used by the Mahdi when he defeated the British, and stopped by his tomb, a mausoleum still visited by many Sudanese Muslims who consider the Mahdi to have been a holy man. We ended our trip with a stop at a Sufi mosque where we saw whirling dervishes dancing to the lull of chants and drumbeats praising Allah. That was a wonderful scene of movement and celebration; many Sudanese also attend in coordination with their Friday prayers. The people were quite friendly and I had conversations with several groups of celebrants.