humanitarian.info

It’s the weekend here in Darfur, which means that the entire town of Nyala has closed down (please bear in mind that it’s not the liveliest place during the week either). Nothing moves on Friday and very little moves on Saturday. Expatriates require a permit to travel outside Nyala, so going for a picnic in the desert is pretty much out, and you’d get sand in your vol-au-vents in any case. In town it’s quite safe to move around (in the requisite big white 4-wheel-drive) but there isn’t actually anywhere to go or anything to do.

Every single expat that I’ve spoken to here says the same thing – you have no life here, just the office and the guest house. You don’t need me to explain what life is like here – just read a few posts from sleeplessinsudan. So my assessment has ground to a halt, which gives me an opportunity to reflect on the difficulty of working in Sudan.

Without wanting to give away any state secrets, it’s fair to say the government of Sudan is very bureaucratic and a little bit suspicious of any foreigner who isn’t Chinese. In essence this means that you need a permit to travel anywhere (even to the outskirts of Nyala town, which is about the size of Brighton), to bring communications equipment into Sudan, to take photos of anything – even to leave the country. You would never guess that Nyala is one of the biggest cities in Sudan (although the fact that there are maybe 140,000 IDPs sitting in the suburbs probably helps), because the infrastructure is terrible; barely 3 fully tarmac’ed roads in the town.

As you might imagine, this poses particular problems for the agencies trying to meet humanitarian needs in Darfur. On top of that, the persistent instability of the entire western region of the country also has an impact; whenever there’s a serious security incident, fixed line and cell phone networks have an unsettling tendency to go down at the same time, and sometimes for days afterwards. Lucky we all have radios… but radios only go so far when you’re in a country that’s a quarter of the size of the United States.

All of this – the bureaucracy, the infrastructure, the insecurity, the geography – puts you far away from everywhere. And frankly it makes it really, really difficult to do assessments.