What do we perceive and learn from every moment of lives?
I suppose there are so many things which shape our perspective, from education, upbringing and culture to how we use our mind, body and senses. In my case, I had the added unconscious learning from my father who was legally blind and had tunnel vision with what was left. For me that translated into tunnel thinking. While great learning for focus in meditation, I’ve found it not so useful in being adaptable and flexible which are gold assets when travelling.
Travelling, we bring those with us. And, for those who can afford it, we bring the environment we expect like bubbles with us, experiencing different places like a trip to an ethnic restaurant, watching multi-sensory TV or engaging in a virtual reality experience. Tourist buses, hotels, boats and planes with guides to interpret what we see and experience. All of which are there to protect from real challenges to our attitudes and expectations.
Travelling overland in the heat of early 1983 in the Sudan – as the troubles that led to the creation of South Sudan were just beginning – I had no such protections, but naively unawares still travelled in a mind bubble of my own. And, while I had been to many places, for me travel was like peeling an onion of layer after layer of attitudinal ignorance, towards the ever elusive core.
I encountered, like the vistas of my inner self, a country breath-taking and raw in its contrasting extremes of landscape, beauty, culture, history and politics. I also learned the meaning of attitude and expectation, gratefully, but painfully, turning in on me the sage advice of a dear City College of New York university professor, Bernard Belush, who said on the first day and moment of his history class: “Question everything, especially what I say.”
After weeks waiting fora visa in Cairo, I am on the ferry from the awesome Aswan dam, enjoying my last moments of complacency before the ordinary became the extraordinary. A place where I became very familiar with another layer of my own attitudes, not to mention those of others.
Ironically, my last semi-grounded conversation was with a concerned American father talking with pleading eyes to me about his teen-aged daughter – sitting right there with us with a backdrop of the Nile and Aswan dam below – who wanted to go off travelling alone. Enjoying my cold bottle of water, I’m afraid my own attitudes prevented me from giving him much sympathy or support. I think she and I secretly enjoyed that conversation at his expense.
Then, my last Egyptian water bottle long gone, on the other side of Lake Nasser, a short time,distance and ferry trip away, but light years in other ways – feeling very thirsty– in a dry, dusty hot desolate environment waiting for the next rumoured train to Khartoum. I was met by guffaws when I asked to buy a bottle of water in the only shop with very few goods near the train station. Silly me, they didn’t have any to sell. Welcome to the Sudan!
Over time I re-learned the value of clean water when all that was available in some places was pots of dark murky water sold off the shoulders of locals through train windows. Even using water purifying pills weren’t enough to bolster my confidence or as it turned out later the health of my gut.
Yet, this was the experience I came for, staying at hotels for locals and going to places where western tourists didn’t frequent. It was after all my intention to travel around the world overland (and sea). Yet, it was the little things and contrasts that made my day.
Getting off a train in an unknown station, just me and a few dozen other backpackers, all of whom had no idea where to go. Setting off quickly down a dark dusty street alone, not really knowing where I was going though. Then, my New York antennas picked up the noise of someone following me – fear and caution set in. Quickly looking back I discovered that every backpacker had followed me down the street because they thought I knew where I was going. Stopping to ask a solitary increasingly agitated soldier who spoke no English where there was a place to stay and gratefully moving on when the rifle he shoved in my face did not go off. Well,I must’ve found a place to sleep because while my recollection ends there, here I am writing to you.
A kaleidoscope of memories. Relishing the joy of local newlyweds at a modest hotel in Khartoum which had clean bottled water. Watching groups of men hand-scything the grass at the main mosque. Seeing a street performance of whirling dervishes. Just wandering about through random streets, street markets, historic places, along the Nile, past secretive walled compounds aimlessly was fine for me, though this loner didn’t enjoy the heat and the occasional bouts of loneliness. Fortunately, I had picked up one particularly useful thing from my father, a passion for walking.
So, once, I indulged in the past and secret longing for comfort by walking into the lobby of what could have been the only international hotel near the presidential palace and briefly savoured the air conditioning, a comfortable lounge chair and ice cold drink.And then, all too quickly returned to the very different world in which I travelled.
Once, feeling particularly lonely and curious, I even stumbled passport in hand into The American Club in Khartoum, before a pre-occupation with terrorism and security might have made such a casual visit less likely. I remember sitting in a comfortable garden lounge chair, drinking an ice-cold drink, briefly savouring the company of other Americans, the sound of their accented voices echoing my own and listening to discussion about familiar topics. It was at times like these that I could almost forget where I was.
Until I asked one strapping man in tennis gear with racquet sitting at the table what he did there! He said among other things that he was a weapons supplier. For whom or to whom I was not sure, and really didn’t want to know. He must’ve sensed some discomfort from me even though I didn’t say anything because after some pause he blurted out – “but we give the guns away”! At that moment, it very much seemed like an “American Sudan”.
I then remembered where I was. It gave me some pause for thought, wondering about what goes on beneath the veneer of normalcy all about us. That moment puts the movies Dogs of War and Missing with Jack Lemmon more in context for me.
Heading for Juba in the south of Sudan, I decided not to wait for the ferry up the Nile (good thing because I heard much later that it was seriously attacked along the way) and instead took the train to its terminus in Wau, a city then in southwest Sudan. A former centre of the slave trade, now an administrative centre and host to diverse peoples, but not the reputed ‘melting pot’ of New York City fame.
Much of the time was spent waiting, several hours at Khartoum station for the train to arrive and then to take a trip in days that would have taken hours back home. Finally, the train arrived and people boarded into and on top and we waited for a few hours more.
Finally the train pulls out of the station and stops again for a few hours just outside the station and then just outside of town. Curious, I walked outside through the heat to the front of the train to see what the delay was and found the train engineer eating a sandwich. Asked what the hold-up was he smiled and softly said: we only “get paid by the hour”. Now I understood something the hundreds of accepting others already knew, this is the Sudan. I think I was the only person to go and ask the driver what was going on.
Later, as we entered the south, the train paused overnight in complete darkness at a train station filled with very nervous soldiers. The story here was that very recently all of the muslims, who had a monopoly on shops selling staple goods, had been hacked to death by animist southerners upset at being increasingly gouged to buy staples like salt. A bit nervous, I stayed on the train that night!
Back in the compartment I shared with local Catholic seminarians, more jovial conversation about their girlfriends. Asked what they would do about becoming celibate priests, they all laughed and said: “This is the Sudan”. Perhaps the only one who still didn’t really get it was me!
Arriving in Wau, I was graciously offered an unused classroom in the seminary to sleep in and gratefully did so on the floor. I was starting to feel unwell. Was it the canned sardines, the ubiquitous Laughing Cow cheese wedges which seemed to have out done Coca Cola in its presence all over the so-called third world or was it the murky water I had been forced to drink?
I was thus keen to get on to Juba where I had been offered a place to stay by an aid worker I had met in Khartoum. Going back, emotionally, the determined, competitive and tunnel thinking person that I am, was just not an option for me.
From Wau, I discovered,there was no public transport. Rather, for a fee, space was available to ride on the top of goods trucks. I found one and left, riding atop a fume-reeking petrol drum for hours in the hot sun. Here I learnt the power of creative visualisation. Hungry, I crafted images with full flavour of bacon cheeseburgers, chips and all manner of the sugary junk food that I can tell you from experience ruins your teeth and helps cause diabetes. Nevertheless, the images were so powerful they carried with me to Nairobi (and even to this day) where I bought and ate everything I had dreamt of ‘til I burst.
Do you know why there are ripples in many dirt roads? I believe they are caused by vehicles travelling at speed when the roads are first made. The net result is that driving slowly is very wearing on vehicles and passengers. Hence, trucks tend to drive very fast for a smoother, but not safer ride. The feeling for a passenger on the top of a truck is of constant vibration which becomes more severe when the truck travels at slower speeds.
However, feeling quite ill along the way, my body still vibrating and like the cheesy cow really was laughing at me, the truck stopped at a small village with an old British guesthouse.I thought to stop, stay and recover until I met its only guest, a foreigner who sick like myself had stopped weeks ago. He had been unable to get decent food and treatment. Now he felt too sick to leave. He was frightened and frightening to look at. Briefly feeling sympathetic, I ran to get back on the petrol drum and found myself even sicker, but got lost again in my food fantasies. Days later I arrived in Juba and gratefully recovered for a week at the house of an American aid worker with two African servants whom I had met in Khartoum. There were quite a few foreigners in Juba working on aid programs for the poverty stricken south of Sudan.
One day, I time-warped back into the Western world, having been invited with a bunch of people to visit the house of the head of an American aid program to watch the last episode of the TV show MASH. Arriving at the compound surrounded by barbed wire, there were dozens of naked locals standing outside the fence, staring in.We drove in and upon entering a suburban-style house with a neatly manicured lawn, I was greeted by a clean, well-coiffed teen-aged girl who asked with a big smile would I like an ice-cold Coke or Pepsi? Inside and the surrounds, but for the naked Sudanese and barbed wire, reminded me of suburban Phoenix, Arizona.
I am still there right now, feeling these moments very deeply, though I can’t remember that last episode of MASH. Experiencing these contrasts have carried with me and had a profound effect on my whole life. Such multi-sensory memories will pop out at the most unexpected moments, contrasting sharply with my current lifestyle.
The stresses of growing up in New York City, living in public housing, experiencing crime and violence while watching heaps of TV and movies, but still having tremendous opportunities through public education, being able to save enough money to travel and having a relatively comfortable, safe and comfortable existence,could not have prepared me for the challenges I experienced in the Sudan.
The most difficult things to deal with were not my experiences but my expectations and attitudes which were exposed in every encounter. And, then were further challenged when I stepped into the bubbles of home life created for tourists by the hotels and travel agencies and for expatriates by the governments, businesses and charitable organisations for whom they work.
What I found particularly disturbing was that some people, like those aid workers, didn’t even seem to notice these contrasts and contradictions. I did, but still returned to the dubious safety of Western living in Australia. I try to imagine what it must have been like for the citizens of Rome when it was sacked by the barbarians.
I think the most important thing to me was not the memories I have or the challenges I continue to face, rather it is the shaking, like the vibrations on the back of the truck, which makes the attitudes, beliefs, culture and early learnings of my life a very shaky foundation on which to continue relying.Accepting as I do that every experience in life has meaning which can contribute to my maturation as a human being, there is much to consider and as my former professor said to “question everything”.
