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8:00 A.M. We are up early. We board the bus and move out to the village of President Bashir. It will be a two-hour trek through the backcountry and sand roads of Sudan. After you leave the big city of Khartoum, there is very little infrastructure development. All the roads appear to be sand based. One hour into the trip to the President’s village, the bus is stuck in the sand. Everyone gets out of the bus to push it out of its “stuck” position. It seems hopeless at first. We push and push and the bus only moves forward slightly but still stuck in the sand. Amazingly, Mtume joins in the push. Eventually, someone gets the bright ideal to place a large tree branch underneath the right rear wheel tire in order to give the bus enough traction to move forward out of the sand hole. It worked! We are out of the sand hole and again back on the road toward the President’s home village.
10:00 A.M. We arrive in the President’s home village and are greeted warmly by a very large crowd of men, women, children and a local band dressed up in red uniforms. The Band’s red uniforms seem out of place in this remote desert setting. We move about the crowd and talk to them about their country. They seem like a happy and kind people. We stand around waiting for the President to arrive. The President finally arrives and is greeted in a celebratory fashion as if he was a conquering hero. The female members of his village wave their hands in the air as he arrives and shout in a rhythmic manner to welcome him home. It is an amazing site to see. Spontaneous dancing breaks out among members of the crowd. President al-Bashir comes through the crowd with a big smile on his face. Mtume and brother, the delegation leader, greet the President. The President greets Mtume as if meeting an old friend. The President speaks and welcomes the delegation to his home village. He talks very briefly about the country, his hopes for the country and the crisis in Darfur. The reception breaks up and we move into a private meeting with the President. The meeting ends abruptly because the President is required to pray. The private meeting will resume shortly. We again meet with the President privately after his prayer and ask a number of critical questions about the crisis in Darfur. Again, we get the talking points: The government is not involved in supporting the bandits and criminals known as the Janjawee, the number of deaths in Darfur does not exceed 9,000 people and the total persons displaced as a result of the crisis is no more than 1 million. Very interesting. Our private meeting breaks up and the President goes off to meet with the BET News and TV One News crews for his interviews. The interviews will take about two hours. I decide to visit the entire village by taking a walking tour of the village and its people. I take a lot of pictures and talk with a number of refugees in the village. I arrive back at the reception center only to find out that the President has completed his BET interview but did not have time to be interviewed by the TV One crew. Jackie Reid, the news anchor and reporter with TV One News, is understandably upset that the TV One interview did not take place. Mtume tries to console her about the interview and promises her that he will workout another opportunity for her to interview the President later in the week. We have two more days left in our fact-finding mission. Mtume is a man of his word. That interview will happen. Keep the faith, Jackie Reid.
5:00 P.M. The President departs the reception area with his security entourage. We board the bus and head back to Khartoum on the sand roads leading from the village. It is another two-hour ride and we have not eaten dinner yet. We stop off at a gasoline rest stop to rendezvous with some other members of our delegation who visited another village area. We resume our trek back to Khartoum. Our delegation leader, brother Akbar, tells us as we approach the outskirts of Khartoum that we had been invited to attend two special events in Khartoum: The first is a political rally by the national party in power and the second is a cultural festival featuring the music and dancers from the Darfur region. Interesting events. A number of people in the delegation mumble about attending these two previously unannounced events. They are tired and hungry. We are told that we have to attend the events as a courtesy to our hosts. We arrive at the national party political rally at a large hall in Khartoum. We enter the hall to a very large crowd chanting and waving their arms in celebration of some anticipated political victory. Men dressed in all white traditional Muslim dress from head to toe occupy the front part of the hall. Women also dressed in traditional Muslim dress occupy the back part of the hall. The women are chanting and yelling frantically. That’s the way it is in an Islamic country. This is very interesting. Our next stop is the conventional center in Khartoum to see the cultural exhibition of dance and music from the Darfur region.
9:00 P.M. We arrive at the convention center and enter a nearly packed auditorium to witness some fantastic dancing and cultural singing. The performances were incredible and colorful. We observe the full range of the color rainbow of the Sudanese people in this cultural exhibition from coffee with cream to purple black. Beautiful people. We return to the hotel after a short dinner on the front lawn area of the convention center. I am tired. Long day. |
