Sunday, 4th February, 2007

There is just too much to do on a rest day and not enough time for it all! Back at another internet cafe which I had to search for in order to print/fax some signature, and ... anyway, boring. So thought I'd relate today's adventures so far. Not much time, though, because I have to meet Khalid at 5:00 to go over to Tikka Island.

The great news is that this big, fancy shopping centre that I went to had a place where you could develop digital photos in 30 minutes! I thought, "Wow! So, I can print the pictures of that school teachers children!" (The school teacher that I met in Abri-mu-farka.) So, I did that. The next step was to go to the Post Office so that I could mail them, along with 4 post cards that I'd written to friends in Uganda. Well, actually, the Post Office was *not* the next step, which was the start of the whole problem. Instead, being typical me, I wandered about town, stopping here and there. Every once in a while, casually noting the time and remembering that Abdil told me the Post Office would close at 3:00. The last thing I decided to do before finding a Post Office was to go into this big bookstore I passed. Thought I'd browse around a bit. Fortunately, there was not a lot of browsing to be done. All the book were in this strange-looking language. Imagine that! There were only 2 that I saw in English. One was about Visual Basic: 6.0. The other was a random one entitled, "Hamlet: Prince of Denmark". I decided I didn't need either of the 2 English ones, and couldn't read the Arabic ones, so the browsing lasted about 1 minute.

Good thing, too, because then I went scurrying around, looking for the Post Office! At the end, I barely made it there at 3:01! As I rushed into the Post Office compound, saying, "Posta! Posta!" the people in the compound said, "Yes, this is it, but it's closed," and indicated the closed and locked doors. This was real disappointment, because I had really wanted to mail these pictures that I had developed, plus the 4 post cards. So, I could think of nothing better to do than say "khalas!" and sit down in a stool and hang my head and hold my 4 empty post cards with no stamps up in the air in despair. But the kiosk man that was there said, "No, not all is lost!" and showed me that he had stamps! He didn't really say that, he said something like, "Ma khalas," which I have decided to interpret as "all is not lost". I said, "But posta! Posta!" And he got up and showed me the outdoor post boxes!

So, he helped me get stamps on my post cards. That was the easy part. Now came the part where I was supposed to mail a letter and photos to:

English School Teacher
Abri-mu-Farka
Sudan

This, as far as I can tell, is a 3-line address. Really, only 2 lines, seeing as how I'm mailing it from within Sudan. But by the time we'd finished having everybody helping me in writing the address in Arabic, it turned into no less than SEVEN lines! No kidding! There were 3 of them, arguing about how to address this envelope. They kept asking, "Yes, school teacher. But what is her name?" And I kept saying, "I don't know. School teacher. Abri-mu-Farka is a very small village." Then, somebody else would add something else to the address line. Then, somebody asked, "Where?" I said, "Abri-mu-Farka". He said, "Yes, Abri-mu-Farka", but where? I just said, "That's it. Abri-mu-Farka." So, he added something MORE to the envelope, while one of his buddies was saying, "No, no, no, don't write that." Well, in the end, after 7 lines were written, they finally all came to the consensus that, yes, this letter should probably arrive. I showed them the pictures and said, 'Yes, it must arrive. These are the school teacher's children." They said, "Yes, yes, should arrive," and looked at each other in consensus.

So, after I had a picture taken with me and the main helper and his kiosk, which I'll upload next time. Then, one of the other kiosk helpers gave me a free tourist map of Sudan. Isn't that the greatest?

Gotta go...