Back for a short while…

I haven’t updated this blog in a while. It must be nearly a month ago now since I last sat down to right a couple of lines to be posted online. But now that I’m back in Sudan for a couple of months, I promised myself I would resume writing on a regular basis.

The title “back for a short while…” refers to the fact that I’m back in Sudan for only a short time now. A little over two months of my internship are left. And I plan to make the most of it!

The three weeks I have spent at home in Europe with the most important people in my life has given me more than enough energy to tackle life in Khartoum with a positive attitude. I won’t go into details about my holidays, how important they were and how great a time I had. Nor will I write about how much I wished I could just have stayed. Because the people that need to know this, already know it. And the other readers of this blog will be more interested in what’s going on in Sudan .

Even though I’ve only been back for a week now, I have a lot to write. Many things have happened or are going to take place soon.

On the general situation in the country, I assume most of you will have followed the news about the plane crash in the southern part of the country, killing a number of important members of the Government of Southern Sudan including the Minister of Defence (or Army) and a Presidential Advisor. I’ve actually received questions from friends about the nature of this accident and based on the information available to me – this is also the official version and generally accepted explanation – the plane crash was really an accident and not in any way related to an attack/assassination. The reason for the crash is as simple as it is regrettable: African governments and local airlines don’t have money for decent airplanes so they purchase old Russian Antonovs that are not reliable anymore. Yesterday, a person working in Uganda told me that in the whole world only 12 airplanes of the type that crashed are still registered as reliable to fly. The others are no longer allowed in the air and should in principle not be sold anymore, but obviously that that makes them extremely cheap. You can figure out for yourself how many of these 12 planes are flying in Africa …

On another development: the census has finished now. It started with a slight delay but when I first arrived I was impressed that it appeared to be a success. However, I soon figured out that first impressions are often misleading. In my absence – and therefore I didn’t know this – the SPLM (the main party in the South) had decided to boycott the census because it wasn’t satisfied with the way in which it was designed. Before I left, the government was discussing the demands of the SPLM to include a reference to religion and ethnicity in the questionnaire, so I assume these discussions did not harvest the desired result for the SPLM. But that was not the only disappointment about the census. Apparently it was not very inclusive. I have talked to my colleagues and several of them have not been included in the census or know of many people who haven’t. One colleague said she was waiting at home the entire opening day of the census, which was proclaimed a national holiday to ensure maximum participation, but nobody showed up. And these are people living in Khartoum . So I very much doubt the overall participation and inclusion of the census. We’ll have to wait for the official results…

As far as I know these where the main developments in the country the past month.

Myself, I have been back for a week now and am more or less getting used to working and living here again. Actually, things are going a lot smoother than I thought they would. I don’t have that feeling of being hopelessly lost, thinking “what the hell have I started here?”, that I had when I first arrived to the country, when I was staying in the same room in the same hostel I’m writing this post from now. But as an extremely important and infinitely wiser person than myself told me, it’s probably because now I don’t have that prospect of spending six months here, which can feel overwhelming. Instead I know that in principle I’ll be out of here in two months time. Which is nothing. And I have to be honest: keeping that positive thought in mind makes me want to make the most of my time here instead of feeling slightly miserable like I often felt before leaving. It also helps to have a number of plans that I hope I’ll be able to somehow achieve the coming months. First of all I would like to travel across the country, to at least see a different part of this so diverse country. It would be a real pity if I were to spend six months here without ever venturing too far outside of Khartoum . Of course the same financial and logistical restrictions that have existed since the start of the internship are still bothering me. But I’m going to try and overcome them. I have already talked to my boss about tagging along on missions with my colleagues and he reacted in a positive way. There were two missions that interested me a lot: one joining the consultant we are contracting to train Sudanese NGOs to Juba and one to visit a torture project in Nyala. My boss advised against Nyala because even if it is safe, it is still Darfur and he only wants to send those people there that are really necessary to be sent. So I’ll be focusing my attention on getting to Juba . It will first require me to do some administrative things at the Delegation to get permission to go from the Administration Section, but that shouldn’t be a problem. The tricky part will probably be the money again. Ideally I would want to fly there with an UNMIS flight because they are for free. But of course they are designed for flying UN personnel to certain regions. As a consequence, the government – who checks the flight log obviously – can always decide to kick off non-UN staff in case they don’t have a good justification to be on board. And if this happens last minute, there’s no time left for commercial alternatives – that would cost around euro 150 for a return flight – so there is definitely a risk connected to the UNMIS flights. But I do have to think about the costs… Because it’s not only the flights, I’ll also have to stay in a hotel and pay for it. And hotels in Juba are not cheap, because they come far and in between and are almost exclusively designed for internationals and business men… A mission that I would be sure to join if it takes place is a potential trip to the Blue Nile State , because this mission would be organised by car so I could join without worrying about the financial aspect… But this mission is not sure to take place. So in the end I might end up not going anywhere… Which wouldn’t be a disaster because I’d be able to use the money saved for my September – somewhere next year plans! Anyway, I’ll keep you updated here on progress made towards this travelling across Sudan plan.

A second plan/little idea is to teach a bit of French to the children of one of my colleagues. She is looking for a private French teacher, so I offered to test what I could do for them with my limited French speaking skills. Since the kids are around 12 I think I would actually still be able to teach them some things. And their mom has bought French exercises books, so that would be a great help. I’m not sure yet how concrete she is about me teaching her daughters… She said yes when I asked her if she would still like me to teach her kids (we had already discussed this before I left on leave), but we didn’t decide on a real first day for me to go to her home and meet her kids… We’ll see what happens here, but the plan might just die out…

In work related matters, I am still working on evaluating a high number (50 by the end of next week) of concept notes received in application for a call for proposals we launched entitled “Non State Actors and Local Authorities in Development”. It’s really interesting and keeps me busy all day, but it can get pretty frustrating as well to see the poor quality of the vast majority of these concept notes. People requesting € 750,000 for a project on “Fishing for Peace”… In general the quality of these things is sub-standard. I have read 20 of them by now and passed 4 or 5. And some of the ones I passed, I intentionally passed with a low score because they deserved to pass, but not to get selected for the second phase (full proposal) of the call because there were some major problems with the design. So in the end I think I read 1 concept note so far that actually deserves to receive a grant… Really really sad if you know that these concept notes are only 4 pages long and it is clearly indicated what is expected from the applicants… And still even international NGOs are incapable of convincing me as an intern to pass them to the second phase… The good thing is that I have now discovered the biggest advantage of doing this internship for me. You see, it’s my opinion that there is no way anyone can do a job like this for any donor without and practical experience in implementing projects in the field for NGOs. And like I wrote earlier, I really want some hands down experience. So I will try to find a job within an NGO in the field (Latin-America is first on the list; South-East Asia and West Africa and the Great Lakes Region are a little further down) for my next professional goal. And then I will definitely be able to use the experiences I had now and incorporate them in my future function. At least I’ll be able to write a concept note that is almost sure to pass the first phase, if the quality is this low everywhere! Because I’ve seen things through the perspective of the donor and I know exactly what kind of information the donor wants to find in the concept note.

This week I have had my first training! Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you: I received training by the European Commission, even though I am just an intern! The three day training was organised in Khartoum for the entire region, but most participants came from the Delegation here. There were 5 other people from Nairobi and Kampala , but that was it. The training was on Internal Project Monitoring and basically explained how Task Managers should monitor their projects in an efficient way. I’m not a Task Manager so I found it sometimes difficult to participate actively but I learned a lot and I’ll definitely be able to use this training in the future. It will of course also look great on my relatively empty cv… It was also a lot of fun and got me fed until I was stuffed like a balloon. We received so much food on such a continuous basis (breakfast sandwiches and cake at 10.30, extensive lunch buffet at 12.30 with soup, salads, a myriad of main dishes and an even bigger selection of fruits and desserts, and even more cake and little pizzas around 15.00), I was simply not hungry at all anymore until and couldn’t eat anything in the evening until around 22.00 – 23.00, which fitted perfectly with the eating schedule I got used to in Spain! The training also got me to eat out  in a real restaurant since I arrived here in January. Yesterday (Thursday) we went for dinner with all participants to an Indian restaurant – called very originally “Little India” – and I had a very good time and tasty food, even if it was a bit expensive for my normal Sudanese budget.

This evening we also have a party at someone’s house and on Sunday evening we’ll have an official celebration at the Delegation for Europe Day, so I won’t be bored fast!

I mentioned above that I’m staying in the hostel again. That’s because I had been looking for a new apartment ever since I got back. And now I think I have found one! I will normally sign the contract this afternoon. It’s above my budget because it’s a two bedroom apartment, but it is extremely difficult to find something within my budget here so I will have to take it. It’s a quite small apartment, but it is located in an ideal area and it has air conditioning, which were the two main preconditions for me to consider any new place. I might try to share with someone else and actually already have someone in mind, but first I have to discuss this possibility with my landlady. Sharing would of course be perfect to cut down the cost, but I’m not sure whether my landlady will like the idea, nor whether the apartment is not a bit too small to share… I’ll take some pictures on Sunday or Monday when I move in and post them online somewhere.