“I would rip off someone’s arms at the moment to get to a clean, crisp, delicious, fresh salad and grilled fish which was not going to reappear again within 30 minutes in mutant form. Tonight is my cooking night, so I have to go to the store and choose which can of bland vegetable will be to added to spongy potatoes and fried onions. None of which I can eat at the moment, but everyone else will.
Probably what I will have will be a Tusker (the very excellent Kenyan beer) and a couple of cigarettes. Sadly I have succumbed to the aid organisation affliction – but I just had to give myself a break on something, and it is only three at night, never during the day.”
That’s a quote from my friend Sally Warriner who’s just been published by Online Opinion, click here for the article titled ‘Everything is not gwar in Sudan’. Sally is a medical worker right now in war torn southern Sudan.
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I was working as an entomologist in the northern Sudan in May 1990:
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I’m the one in blue jeans and blue shirt. There was no beer or cigarette for me then. Alcohol was, and I think still is, banned in northern Sudan. I survived on the meal a day I got, if we got, to the next Forestry Research Station by about 11am.
I was travelling along the Blue Nile with a couple of Sudanese foresters. We survived on chai tea in the evening. Since that trip to the Sudan in 1990 I’ve been grateful for a meal in the evening. I remember going to bed feeling so hungry!
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
