Here's the thing...

Somehow Britain seems an appropriate place to get stuck. The entire place smacks of people on their way to someplace else. It’s foreign, but not foreign enough to be ‘abroad’. Everyone speaks English but not necessarily in such a way as to be understandable. It’s not home but not abroad either. It’s grey and cold and the sky is close and it is stuck off the continent like Ellis Island in New York. London feels to me like a train station or a layover airport. Not a bad place to be but not a final destination either. And so here I am – for the time being – until I get a visa. I’m running out of things to do, of people to see, places to go. And I can’t get off the island, my passport is at the embassy, remember? My training and briefings are finished, I have all my shots, have finished two books, have read as much about Darfur as humanely possible. The only thing I have left is the organization’s logistic manual. A hundred-odd page document written in font Arial 4. It’s shaping up to be ...

Life is full of ironies if you're stupid enough to go looking for them. Take last night for example. I leave for Sudan in three days. It isn't understatement to say that Sudan is awash in guns. And yet last night, after having lived (on and off) rather peaceably in Washington, DC for the past eight years, some friends and I got held up at gunpoint. The first thing that came to mind when the guy pulled out the gun and demanded money was how terribly inconvenient the timing was. I mean, c'mon, I don't have time to cancel and get new credit cards! My first thought was, "are you kidding me? I'm going to a place with 'real' guns and 'real' violence and here I am getting mugged on a quiet DC street? I have to get back to Baltimore to pack! I don't have time for this!" The next thing that sprung to mind was, "gosh, that's a really cool gun!" A glock, silver, the kind with the sliding top to load it. I know because while my friend...

Greetings! Despite enjoying being gainfully unemployed for the past month I was offered a job yesterday and decided to take it. I will be working with Tearfund, a British NGO and their Disaster Management Team in Darfur, Sudan. I'll leave in just under two weeks and will be there for a year. For those who wish to know more, read on. The descriptions of Sudan in the popular guidebooks – if they are even there at all – are brief and usually begin with phrases like, "at present traveling in Sudan is extremely difficult." The only travel book I've found devoted entirely to Sudan, after scouring the library and bookstores obsessively for the past few weeks, describes it like this, "Living among the inhabitants of a country that is dominated by viciously searing heat, stark deserts and monotonously grinding hardship, those of us who come from other cultures might conclude that everyone is by necessity more than just a little mad here." Sounds like my kind of place...