Reasons NOT to move to Blue Nile State

I have been traveling a lot for work recently. Which makes me very happy. Unfortunately, it has taken me a long time to update this blog on my travels.

Now, if I were going to do this chronologically, my first stop would have to be Nyala, South Darfur. I visited Nyala between April 29 and May 5, 2008. However, because I have less to say about Damazin, Blue Nile State, which I visited from May 20 to 22, I think I'll start there.

Blue Nile State is one of the Three Protocol Areas, along with South Kordofan State and Abyei, which I visited in September 2007. Blue Nile is located on the border with Ethiopia in Eastern Sudan. As the name suggests, the Blue Nile begins in Ethiopia and runs through Blue Nile State on it's way to Khartoum, where it joins the White Nile. The Rosereis Dam, located in Blue Nile State, produces the vast majority of Sudan's electricity and happens to be a popular honeymoon destination for Sudanese.

Like the other Protocol Areas, Blue Nile State was on the front lines during Sudan's North-South Civil War. Despite severe devastation, Blue Nile State has generally been more successful in implementing the terms of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement than have the other two Protocol Areas.

My recent trip to Damazin, the capital of Blue Nile State, was shorter than intended. I was originally scheduled to arrive on Monday May 19 and depart on Thursday May 22. Unfortunately, as often happens when someone from a UN agency tries to fly with one of the mission flights (UNMIS or UNAMID), I didn't make it on. Thus, I was forced to delay my departure until the next day. This meant that the days that I was in Damazin were quite busy, but in the end I got most of what I wanted to done.

But I'm not going to talk about work. Rather, I'm going to talk about snakes, because you all know how much I love snakes. So, on my first day in Damazin, we drove out of town to the United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) compound in order to meet with someone in their human rights unit. While the meeting was productive, by far the most memorable part of that meeting was the drive back to UNDP.

We were about half of the way back when Abbas, the National Rule of Law Officer in Damazin, yelled to the driver to stop. Off to our left, a village woman was carrying a dead snake on the end of a machete. The driver stopped, and we (Jennifer, the Project Manager in Damazin; Abbas; and I) jumped out the vehicle and approached the woman, asking if we could photograph the snake. The result was the following photos.



Now, hopefully I'm not alone in thinking that this is a big snake. Moreover, apparently it's very poisonous. But at least it was dead. On the other hand, when we got back in the car, Jennifer proceeded to tell me how she was nearly bitten by a highly-deadly black snake of similar size...wait for it...in the UNDP office/guesthouse compound (pictured below)! She followed that up by saying that, yes, there are a fair number of snakes in Damazin, if I want to see a lot of snakes, I should go to Kurmuk, another town in Blue Nile State. Yeah, I don't think I'm going to go work in Blue Nile any time soon!


And finally, I would like to leave you with this photo of the "Damazin Cinema." I was blown away when I saw this. I realize for many of you out there in the world, a cinema is not worth a photograph. But that just means you haven't been to Sudan. You have to understand the context. I am only aware of one cinema in Khartoum, a city of at least 5 million people. There are probably more, but they certainly aren't ubiquitous. So I certainly didn't expect to find one in Damazin, a state capital that's little more than a village.