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Migreh is not a village …
It is a market, a place where trucks stop when the drivers are tired, there is a mosque and many small shops, no hotel but only those camp beds I avoided in Doka … it is right like this what would be a journey through Sudan without at least one sleep on these camp beds under the open sky, colored, asymmetric, and I must say that they are quite comfortable … it is from here that I am writing I just hope that it will not rain … I do not know whether or not to take the sleeping bag out and if it rains it will get dry in Egypt …
The people in Sudan are really friendly, and they do their best for the guest, that is me, in this case … this evening I arrived here more or less towards the end of Ramadan … and I was invited to eat on a long carpet with lime juice to drink, carcadè and ilu mur o abre, which means ‘sweet not sweet’, a tea prepared with seven local spices which convey this ‘sweet not sweet’ taste very thirst drenching, then dates and lentils, and some quiches with milk creams and legumes … despite what you may imagine people do not stuff themselves, they eat fast but soberly, then they pray and they pass on to the coffees, coffees and narghile.
Tonight the interpreter, guardian angel is Ibrahim, a friendly engineer around fifty who studied for five years in India, who deals with water treatment, of which Sudan is rich he said. I told him I feel a bit embarrassed to eat and drink when everybody else is fasting, when I enter the shops, I put myself in a corner, in any case I always look for a place where I can be seen by as few people as possible. This morning I could not start off without eating anything, there were all the children around, and the other members of the family, so I went to eat where you wash yourself … Ibrahim told me I can also eat publically, that there is no problem … He called the wife to ask about the weather in Khartoum, in sight of my arrival, because it seems that the area is among the rainiest in Sudan … I liked how they talked to each other, like any other couple, far from the stereotype which we often have of the Muslim couple, it reminded me of my parents in the beautiful moments. Abrahm is the father of Islam, he is the one who taught us to believe in one God, … … Abrahm is also the name I would like to give to my son. Abrahm Tembo called his son Matteo, after an evening in a tavern, with my brother who came to visit, he told me he never had so much fun with some musungu. Then the Aids, the treatments, the death when it seemed he was recovering. The funeral denied by these miserable priests, because he did not pay mutulo, a monthly tax to have the right to a funeral, where is the Christian charity in Africa?, not a priest, myself to give a speech at the cemetery, together with a very distant family member more interested in the inheritance than anything else …
With Abrahm we understood each other, at once, beyond the language barriers, at times he would start laughing even before I finished talking, or got to the point, he always came to see me at difficult times, we had a really beautiful trip to South Africa together, we laughed a lot and also on the last trip we did together two days before he died, we laughed like crazy, and discussed a lot.
I hope with my son to have the same meeting of minds I had with him.
I never felt so good writing outside on a camp bed, in the middle of strangers, who respect my privacy, smile at me and are happy to have me here with them, I am not worried at all about how I will sleep, for now the most beautiful aspect of this Sudan, are the people.
Tawarit N 13° 33,0’ E 35° 39,0 – Migreh N 14° 05 E 34° 56,666’
158 km