Semi stage, flown away in a bit less than two hours …
The favorable wind today that I had to do so few kilometers … it seems almost a waste…
I have just arrived back from the Nile where I had a fast swim, ten arm strokes all together, because the manager of the Nubian Guest House told me that from August to September it is very dangerous and every year more or less twenty people die, the current is very strong, certainly on a canoe I will arrive quicker to Wadi Halfa, … the color today is always the same brown, yesterday in Al Khandaq it seemed more light blue and the play if lights of the evening must have mislead me, even if looking back at the pictures of this morning it did not seem as brown as here …
I arrived very early, so much so that I was unsure whether to go ahead or stop, but after 500 kilometers in the desert, sleeping on the go, I could not let one of the last guest hoses available before Wadi Halfa to pass me by …
The sand enters everywhere, mainly when the wind is sideways, often on the road you can see trickles of sand pushed by the wind, the cold shower, boiling because of the heat, brings you to new life, the skin breathes … it will last just one day … but it is a great relief …
Even if this afternoon was quiet and restful, I drank a lot, a Christian guy I met told me that when Ramadan falls in this season nobody works … this does not surprise me, it is already difficult to move eating more or less regularly like I am trying to do, but not eating and mainly not drinking from sunrise to sunset, with this heat there is nothing left but to stay on a camp bed trying to ration the energies … Ramadan is a problem for me too, since scouting food during the day, especially in the villages here in the North is a difficult task …
The same guy told me that for him who got a degree in Public Management in Juba, now South Sudan, it is impossible to find a job because the priority is given to Muslims, it happens in Italy too the other way around, the laity of the state and meritocracy are still a far objective for many states not only in Africa. In my experience in Zambia I saw that often the most shirkers, with some exceptions, were Catholics coming from parishes where there were Italian missionaries, they are people grown up with pure dependency culture. To mown the lawn, half a day, the missionary in question would give him a sixth of a month wage of a general worker, so when these started later working, they would say ‘but how, is this the salary?’, ‘with Father John Doe with little effort I was getting the same amount in a week …’ … … you have to keep in mind the sustainability and the reality of things when working in developing countries … it is also true that some priests often find themselves doing things without any specific competence …
I had dinner with a Sudanese originally from Darfur, even if he has never been there, who works for a Chinese society which manages a gold mine here nearby, after telling me all the history of Juventus, better than I knew it, told me that ‘for the Chinese the only God is money, and the manager his prophet!’ …