AT HOME IN KHARTOUM
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 1
Dear Miss Hilda,
It is with great pleasure that I wish to inform you that, after careful consideration, English Language Foundation (ELF) has decided to appoint you as Team co-ordinator of ELF. Your employment history, qualifications and experience reveal that you have not only an impressive academic background, but also a unique professional experience which will make you eminently suitable for the post.
ELF is confident that you will bring vigour to its programmes. There is no doubt in the mind of the ELF steering committee that in discharging your responsibilities you will do credit and valuable work in helping to promote learning English language, not only to the Sudan but to your country.
Accept my best regards
O.E. Hassan Schumeina
Advocate, Khartoum
This resounding vote of confidence helped to silence some of the alarm bells which were already going off in my mind. I had been recruited in London by a Sudanophile whose enthusiasm swept aside all obstacles. What did the job entail, I asked? Briefly, attempting to halt the decline of the English language in Sudan, he said. For full details, I would have to wait until I got there. In any case, I would be able to do things more or less as I pleased, he added. It was a delightful place, everyone loved it and so would I. All further questions received similarly insouciant replies.
David Wolton ran the Sudan Volunteer Programme, a fairly informal organisation which sent people out to Sudanese schools and universities to teach English. He had been asked to find someone to run the recently created English Language Foundation, an educational charity set up by the British Ambassador to Sudan, Alan Goulty, and his wife, Lillian Craig Harris. It was essentially a national NGO, with a number of prominent Sudanese people on the Board. Up to this time, the Board’s activities had been restricted mainly to the discussion of ideas about what the Foundation should do. They had now decided that the thing to do was to hire someone to do things.
I came across the advertisement while I was taking some time out back in the UK after spending a couple of years working for a newspaper in Vietnam. I had worked abroad for about twenty years, in various countries, doing a variety of jobs, and in conditions of varying degrees of stress and privation. The jobs had included four years of teaching English in France and two years of developing course materials in Malaysia. It was the kind of background which pretty well suited the job on offer. I was hired.
The Ambassador and his wife filled in more details over lunch in their Piccadilly club. As in a number of other countries where English had once been the medium of instruction in schools and universities, the level of English in Sudan had deteriorated drastically following the decision to switch to Arabic. Added to that, as a result of Sudan’s dire economic situation the educational system was in a lamentable state. The teaching of English, in particular, was badly affected, with few resources and inadequately trained teachers. The English Language Foundation had been set up with a view to halting this decline. The idea was that suitable projects would be devised and implemented in an attempt to improve the standard of English nationwide - a tall order.
At that time - late 1998 - the British Ambassador had been obliged to leave Sudan after the Americans, with the support of the British, bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum in the belief that it was being used for the manufacture of chemical weapons. This meant that he and his wife, the energising forces of ELF, were kicking their heels back in the UK, impatient to get back to Sudan, but at the mercy of international politics. It also meant that attempts to get things prepared for me at the Khartoum end met with zero response. The Sudanese, although friendly, gracious and hospitable, are laid back to the point of inertia and even when galvanised into action are among the world’s worst organisers. Nothing had been done about either living or working accommodation for me. Nobody seemed to be arranging anything. It was my introduction to IBM, the inshallah, bukra, maalesh syndrome so prevalent in Sudan.
‘Just go!’ cried David blithely when week after week passed with no response from the steering committee in Khartoum. ‘They’re dying to have you. Just get on the plane and go. They’ll be thrilled to see you and then things’ll start happening.’
I was beginning to doubt if anything was ever going to start happening when I received an email from Shane Abdel Nour in Khartoum. Shane had been living in Sudan for about thirty years and was married to the Sudanese Minister of Agriculture. She worked in the English department of Khartoum University and was on the ELF Board. She gave no indication that anyone was getting a move on, only practical advice about such matters as suitable clothing (1970s-style flower child skirts) and food availability (lots of spices but not much veg in summer).
Then out of the blue I received a phone call from a man called Tigani in Khartoum. He was a member of the ELF Steering Committee and I would be staying with him when I arrived, he explained. We exchanged greetings and settled a few practicalities. A few emails later everything was finalised and a plane ticket was on its way to me.
Buff, beige, biscuit, ochre, sand, oatmeal - the shades of the cityscape below vied subtly with each other like the squares on a Dulux paint chart. The plane wafted down towards Khartoum airport.
A recent article in the London Evening Standard had included Sudan in its black list of countries not to be visited on any account. The Lonely Planet travel guide was equally discouraging, with grim warnings about war and bandits. Even the British Ambassador had felt obliged to say to me (albeit partly tongue in cheek), ‘It is, of course, my duty as a member of the Foreign Office to advise you that you shouldn’t go to Sudan.'
Sudan, the biggest country in Africa and one of the hottest in the world, was riven by a civil war between the Muslim north and the Christian and animist south which had been going on for years. It was run by an Islamic government which cracked down hard on any political stepping out of line as well as on any deviation from the personal codes of behaviour stipulated by sharia law.
From this height it all looked innocent enough.
The arrival procedures were surprisingly straightforward for a country with such a bad reputation. Ten minutes of queuing for the immigration formalities, three brisk thuds of the official’s stamp, a cursory glance at my currency control form and I was through to the luggage carousel. A tall man in his late fifties with bushy hair and a languorous step strolled towards me and introduced himself as Tigani. He steered me through customs, out into the dazzling 8 am sunlight and into his car.
Khartoum Airport is not a busy one; fortunately, as it is situated more or less in the centre of town. I took in a jumble of details as we drove along: flat-roofed, sand-coloured buildings; the violet and roseate shades of bougainvillea; scampering goats; roadside stalls piled high with oranges, bananas, grapefruit and mangoes, all stashed around watermelons sized like the breasts of a Brobingnagian fertility goddess; tea ladies squatting beside braziers; women swathed in coloured shrouds, men in flapping white jellabiyahs.
We arrived at Tigani’s villa, crossed a nicely manicured garden with a swimming pool, and entered the house where his wife, Roda, a tall, graceful and impeccably hospitable woman, was waiting for us with a breakfast of coffee and biscuits. We chatted about my trip, about her children, about Sudan. She showed me to my room, a secluded little unit with an attached bathroom, on the ground floor. I slept for the rest of the day.
That evening Don Sloan, Director of the British Council and a Board member of ELF, hosted a welcome party for me. Like the Ambassador, Don too had been banished back to the UK in the wake of the American aggression but was able to travel back and forth on regular visits.
The first people I talked to when I arrived were a group of the SVPs I had met at an orientation session organized by David Wolton in London. They introduced me to Shane, a rather singular looking woman in her late fifties with black hair reaching down past her shoulders and a gimlet look to her eye – not at all what I had imagined from her chatttily entertaining emails. She sized me up in a way which was neither friendly nor unfriendly, suggesting only that she was going to ‘wait and see’.
Don then moved me on to meet another Board member, John Abaza, Professor of English Literature at Khartoum University. Whisky in hand and rather frosty-looking, he reminisced about his thirty-five years in Sudan. John, although half-Egyptian, was the epitome of a British colonial of the old school. Talking with him, I felt as if I might just have stepped into the pages of a Somerset Maugham short story. At the same time, as with Shane, I sensed a guardedness and I began to suspect that David Wolton’s enthusiasm may not have been entirely justified.
I chatted with the SVPs as we queued for the buffet dinner. ‘You’ll love it,’ enthused Vince, a foxy-faced young man with a pony tail. ‘You’ll just love it.’ His friend Lester was equally positive. They had both been in Khartoum for just a few weeks, having recently graduated from universities in the UK, and were thrilled to find themselves in such an exotic environment.
We ate in the garden. The food was excellent (of all the expatriates in Khartoum, Don had one of the best cooks) and the wine an unexpected treat. Since the application of sharia law in 1983, Sudan has been a ‘dry’ country. But alcohol was apparently not the only forbidden pleasure to be found in Khartoum.
‘We were warned before we came that there’d be no alcohol, no sex and no drugs,’ said Alison, one of the SVPs. ‘Within a week we’d found all three.’
Alison looked chic in a tee-shirt and slinky long skirt. I was beginning to feel anachronistic in the ample silk blouse and voluminous embroidered skirt I had bought from an Indian shop in Wood Green. Looking around at the other women I felt that Shane’s advice about clothes had perhaps been a bit on the safe side.
Steve (another SVP), who had already consumed more wine than was good for him, rhapsodized about the metaphysical poets whom he had discovered in the course of his conversation classes with Sudanese university students. It seemed that here in Sudan he had stumbled upon his own intellectual holy grail.
Later in the evening Tigani introduced me to another Board member, Osama Daoud. He, Tigani and another Sudanese business tycoon, Anis Haggar, whom I had already met in London, were the financial power behind ELF, the ones who were helping to subsidize it until it could become independent. Osama was plumpish and sleek, and spoke with a lazy drawl. Toying idly with his after-dinner drink, he hinted at the dormant power of a basking tiger. He was one of the richest men in Africa.
As we left, Steve was being carried through the gate, an SVP under each arm and legs like rubber bands, still ranting about John Donne and Andrew Marvell. ‘Had we but world enough, and time’ floated back to me as he was eased into a taxi.
The next day Don took me on a whistle-stop tour of a number of people considered to be key figures on the Khartoum English language teaching scene: the director of SELTI, the main national institute for teaching English and training teachers; Bill Strath, the headmaster of Unity High School, a private English-medium school where expatriates and the cream of Sudanese society sent their children; and Cathy Moghrabi, the British headmistress of an English-medium pre-school who was to be a tower of strength and an oasis of sanity to me during the brief period that our presences in Sudan were to coincide.
That evening Tigani invited a number of the Board members, including some I hadn’t yet met, to his house for an informal meeting. There was much talk about running courses, the idea being that the profit from this would subsidise other activities, such as teacher training, provision of books and so on. But no one seemed to have any idea of how this could be achieved, either practically or financially; nor had anyone stopped to consider that the reason the British Council did not at the time run a commercial teaching operation in Sudan was that they could not expect to break even there.
Now that I had arrived, accommodation had become a pressing problem. There was no clear idea about what was wanted. Was it to be somewhere for me to live and a separate office elsewhere? Were classrooms required as well? What kind of activities would have to be catered for? Was everything to be under one roof?
The following morning someone arranged for an estate agent to take me to visit three flats. The first was on the sixth floor of a block of service flats near Street Fifteen where all the up-market mini-marts (the nearest Khartoum got to a supermarket) were concentrated. Sitting room, open-plan kitchen, bedroom and bathroom, all rather box-like with indifferent decor and plumbing fixtures that didn’t inspire confidence. The rent was $800 a month, justified by the service, said the agent. Someone would always be on hand to change a light bulb or sort out any other little problem. The building had its own generator and the air conditioning operated at all times. It didn’t appeal to me, but then I had no idea what to expect for $800 a month in Khartoum.
We moved on to flat number two: three rooms, kitchen and bathroom, furnished in a kind of latter-day Georgian style and covering an area about the size of a football pitch. Clearly unsuitable for any of ELF’s purposes.
Flat number three was the least unlikely: the upper floor of a villa, spacious and comfortable. Still, at $1000 a month - much bigger than I needed for personal accommodation but not big enough for anything else - it wasn’t really ideal. Couldn’t we find something else? We’d think about it, said Tigani.
A few days later as we were driving through the centre of Khartoum Tigani pointed to a house we were passing.
‘We had a look at that house but decided not to take it.’
‘Why not?’ I asked
‘It’s opposite a Security building.’
The Security people were hated and feared by the Sudanese. Agents of a repressive regime, they pounced on anyone suspected of deviating from the hard-line norm, often for the most trivial or capricious of reasons, and subjected them to punishing treatment in their premises or in the many ‘ghost houses’ scattered across Khartoum. But as a non-Sudanese I felt I had nothing to worry about and it seemed clear that if I didn’t find an alternative soon I would end up in one of the three eminently unsuitable flats we had already looked at. I said I didn’t mind having the Security people as neighbours and would like to see the house.
Tigani called the landlord and made an appointment. It was a lovely single-storey rabbit warren of a house, with seven rooms all leading into one another from different directions, like parts of a maze. It was dirty and dilapidated and the plumbing arrangements looked daunting but it was full of the local character which the flats I’d seen had lacked. And so was the landlord – Fouad – a bustling, jovial teddy bear of a man. It would be ideal, I thought, once it was cleaned up. Living accommodation, office space and classrooms all under one roof. It also had a resident ghaffir, Babiker, a kind of guard-cum-cleaner-cum-odd-job man, and a uniquely idiosyncratic, comical and endearing character. We struck a deal with Fouad and took the house.
Chapter 2
It is with great pleasure that I wish to inform you that, after careful consideration, English Language Foundation (ELF) has decided to appoint you as Team co-ordinator of ELF. Your employment history, qualifications and experience reveal that you have not only an impressive academic background, but also a unique professional experience which will make you eminently suitable for the post.
ELF is confident that you will bring vigour to its programmes. There is no doubt in the mind of the ELF steering committee that in discharging your responsibilities you will do credit and valuable work in helping to promote learning English language, not only to the Sudan but to your country.
Accept my best regards
O.E. Hassan Schumeina
Advocate, Khartoum
This resounding vote of confidence helped to silence some of the alarm bells which were already going off in my mind. I had been recruited in London by a Sudanophile whose enthusiasm swept aside all obstacles. What did the job entail, I asked? Briefly, attempting to halt the decline of the English language in Sudan, he said. For full details, I would have to wait until I got there. In any case, I would be able to do things more or less as I pleased, he added. It was a delightful place, everyone loved it and so would I. All further questions received similarly insouciant replies.
David Wolton ran the Sudan Volunteer Programme, a fairly informal organisation which sent people out to Sudanese schools and universities to teach English. He had been asked to find someone to run the recently created English Language Foundation, an educational charity set up by the British Ambassador to Sudan, Alan Goulty, and his wife, Lillian Craig Harris. It was essentially a national NGO, with a number of prominent Sudanese people on the Board. Up to this time, the Board’s activities had been restricted mainly to the discussion of ideas about what the Foundation should do. They had now decided that the thing to do was to hire someone to do things.
I came across the advertisement while I was taking some time out back in the UK after spending a couple of years working for a newspaper in Vietnam. I had worked abroad for about twenty years, in various countries, doing a variety of jobs, and in conditions of varying degrees of stress and privation. The jobs had included four years of teaching English in France and two years of developing course materials in Malaysia. It was the kind of background which pretty well suited the job on offer. I was hired.
The Ambassador and his wife filled in more details over lunch in their Piccadilly club. As in a number of other countries where English had once been the medium of instruction in schools and universities, the level of English in Sudan had deteriorated drastically following the decision to switch to Arabic. Added to that, as a result of Sudan’s dire economic situation the educational system was in a lamentable state. The teaching of English, in particular, was badly affected, with few resources and inadequately trained teachers. The English Language Foundation had been set up with a view to halting this decline. The idea was that suitable projects would be devised and implemented in an attempt to improve the standard of English nationwide - a tall order.
At that time - late 1998 - the British Ambassador had been obliged to leave Sudan after the Americans, with the support of the British, bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum in the belief that it was being used for the manufacture of chemical weapons. This meant that he and his wife, the energising forces of ELF, were kicking their heels back in the UK, impatient to get back to Sudan, but at the mercy of international politics. It also meant that attempts to get things prepared for me at the Khartoum end met with zero response. The Sudanese, although friendly, gracious and hospitable, are laid back to the point of inertia and even when galvanised into action are among the world’s worst organisers. Nothing had been done about either living or working accommodation for me. Nobody seemed to be arranging anything. It was my introduction to IBM, the inshallah, bukra, maalesh syndrome so prevalent in Sudan.
‘Just go!’ cried David blithely when week after week passed with no response from the steering committee in Khartoum. ‘They’re dying to have you. Just get on the plane and go. They’ll be thrilled to see you and then things’ll start happening.’
I was beginning to doubt if anything was ever going to start happening when I received an email from Shane Abdel Nour in Khartoum. Shane had been living in Sudan for about thirty years and was married to the Sudanese Minister of Agriculture. She worked in the English department of Khartoum University and was on the ELF Board. She gave no indication that anyone was getting a move on, only practical advice about such matters as suitable clothing (1970s-style flower child skirts) and food availability (lots of spices but not much veg in summer).
Then out of the blue I received a phone call from a man called Tigani in Khartoum. He was a member of the ELF Steering Committee and I would be staying with him when I arrived, he explained. We exchanged greetings and settled a few practicalities. A few emails later everything was finalised and a plane ticket was on its way to me.
Buff, beige, biscuit, ochre, sand, oatmeal - the shades of the cityscape below vied subtly with each other like the squares on a Dulux paint chart. The plane wafted down towards Khartoum airport.
A recent article in the London Evening Standard had included Sudan in its black list of countries not to be visited on any account. The Lonely Planet travel guide was equally discouraging, with grim warnings about war and bandits. Even the British Ambassador had felt obliged to say to me (albeit partly tongue in cheek), ‘It is, of course, my duty as a member of the Foreign Office to advise you that you shouldn’t go to Sudan.'
Sudan, the biggest country in Africa and one of the hottest in the world, was riven by a civil war between the Muslim north and the Christian and animist south which had been going on for years. It was run by an Islamic government which cracked down hard on any political stepping out of line as well as on any deviation from the personal codes of behaviour stipulated by sharia law.
From this height it all looked innocent enough.
The arrival procedures were surprisingly straightforward for a country with such a bad reputation. Ten minutes of queuing for the immigration formalities, three brisk thuds of the official’s stamp, a cursory glance at my currency control form and I was through to the luggage carousel. A tall man in his late fifties with bushy hair and a languorous step strolled towards me and introduced himself as Tigani. He steered me through customs, out into the dazzling 8 am sunlight and into his car.
Khartoum Airport is not a busy one; fortunately, as it is situated more or less in the centre of town. I took in a jumble of details as we drove along: flat-roofed, sand-coloured buildings; the violet and roseate shades of bougainvillea; scampering goats; roadside stalls piled high with oranges, bananas, grapefruit and mangoes, all stashed around watermelons sized like the breasts of a Brobingnagian fertility goddess; tea ladies squatting beside braziers; women swathed in coloured shrouds, men in flapping white jellabiyahs.
We arrived at Tigani’s villa, crossed a nicely manicured garden with a swimming pool, and entered the house where his wife, Roda, a tall, graceful and impeccably hospitable woman, was waiting for us with a breakfast of coffee and biscuits. We chatted about my trip, about her children, about Sudan. She showed me to my room, a secluded little unit with an attached bathroom, on the ground floor. I slept for the rest of the day.
That evening Don Sloan, Director of the British Council and a Board member of ELF, hosted a welcome party for me. Like the Ambassador, Don too had been banished back to the UK in the wake of the American aggression but was able to travel back and forth on regular visits.
The first people I talked to when I arrived were a group of the SVPs I had met at an orientation session organized by David Wolton in London. They introduced me to Shane, a rather singular looking woman in her late fifties with black hair reaching down past her shoulders and a gimlet look to her eye – not at all what I had imagined from her chatttily entertaining emails. She sized me up in a way which was neither friendly nor unfriendly, suggesting only that she was going to ‘wait and see’.
Don then moved me on to meet another Board member, John Abaza, Professor of English Literature at Khartoum University. Whisky in hand and rather frosty-looking, he reminisced about his thirty-five years in Sudan. John, although half-Egyptian, was the epitome of a British colonial of the old school. Talking with him, I felt as if I might just have stepped into the pages of a Somerset Maugham short story. At the same time, as with Shane, I sensed a guardedness and I began to suspect that David Wolton’s enthusiasm may not have been entirely justified.
I chatted with the SVPs as we queued for the buffet dinner. ‘You’ll love it,’ enthused Vince, a foxy-faced young man with a pony tail. ‘You’ll just love it.’ His friend Lester was equally positive. They had both been in Khartoum for just a few weeks, having recently graduated from universities in the UK, and were thrilled to find themselves in such an exotic environment.
We ate in the garden. The food was excellent (of all the expatriates in Khartoum, Don had one of the best cooks) and the wine an unexpected treat. Since the application of sharia law in 1983, Sudan has been a ‘dry’ country. But alcohol was apparently not the only forbidden pleasure to be found in Khartoum.
‘We were warned before we came that there’d be no alcohol, no sex and no drugs,’ said Alison, one of the SVPs. ‘Within a week we’d found all three.’
Alison looked chic in a tee-shirt and slinky long skirt. I was beginning to feel anachronistic in the ample silk blouse and voluminous embroidered skirt I had bought from an Indian shop in Wood Green. Looking around at the other women I felt that Shane’s advice about clothes had perhaps been a bit on the safe side.
Steve (another SVP), who had already consumed more wine than was good for him, rhapsodized about the metaphysical poets whom he had discovered in the course of his conversation classes with Sudanese university students. It seemed that here in Sudan he had stumbled upon his own intellectual holy grail.
Later in the evening Tigani introduced me to another Board member, Osama Daoud. He, Tigani and another Sudanese business tycoon, Anis Haggar, whom I had already met in London, were the financial power behind ELF, the ones who were helping to subsidize it until it could become independent. Osama was plumpish and sleek, and spoke with a lazy drawl. Toying idly with his after-dinner drink, he hinted at the dormant power of a basking tiger. He was one of the richest men in Africa.
As we left, Steve was being carried through the gate, an SVP under each arm and legs like rubber bands, still ranting about John Donne and Andrew Marvell. ‘Had we but world enough, and time’ floated back to me as he was eased into a taxi.
The next day Don took me on a whistle-stop tour of a number of people considered to be key figures on the Khartoum English language teaching scene: the director of SELTI, the main national institute for teaching English and training teachers; Bill Strath, the headmaster of Unity High School, a private English-medium school where expatriates and the cream of Sudanese society sent their children; and Cathy Moghrabi, the British headmistress of an English-medium pre-school who was to be a tower of strength and an oasis of sanity to me during the brief period that our presences in Sudan were to coincide.
That evening Tigani invited a number of the Board members, including some I hadn’t yet met, to his house for an informal meeting. There was much talk about running courses, the idea being that the profit from this would subsidise other activities, such as teacher training, provision of books and so on. But no one seemed to have any idea of how this could be achieved, either practically or financially; nor had anyone stopped to consider that the reason the British Council did not at the time run a commercial teaching operation in Sudan was that they could not expect to break even there.
Now that I had arrived, accommodation had become a pressing problem. There was no clear idea about what was wanted. Was it to be somewhere for me to live and a separate office elsewhere? Were classrooms required as well? What kind of activities would have to be catered for? Was everything to be under one roof?
The following morning someone arranged for an estate agent to take me to visit three flats. The first was on the sixth floor of a block of service flats near Street Fifteen where all the up-market mini-marts (the nearest Khartoum got to a supermarket) were concentrated. Sitting room, open-plan kitchen, bedroom and bathroom, all rather box-like with indifferent decor and plumbing fixtures that didn’t inspire confidence. The rent was $800 a month, justified by the service, said the agent. Someone would always be on hand to change a light bulb or sort out any other little problem. The building had its own generator and the air conditioning operated at all times. It didn’t appeal to me, but then I had no idea what to expect for $800 a month in Khartoum.
We moved on to flat number two: three rooms, kitchen and bathroom, furnished in a kind of latter-day Georgian style and covering an area about the size of a football pitch. Clearly unsuitable for any of ELF’s purposes.
Flat number three was the least unlikely: the upper floor of a villa, spacious and comfortable. Still, at $1000 a month - much bigger than I needed for personal accommodation but not big enough for anything else - it wasn’t really ideal. Couldn’t we find something else? We’d think about it, said Tigani.
A few days later as we were driving through the centre of Khartoum Tigani pointed to a house we were passing.
‘We had a look at that house but decided not to take it.’
‘Why not?’ I asked
‘It’s opposite a Security building.’
The Security people were hated and feared by the Sudanese. Agents of a repressive regime, they pounced on anyone suspected of deviating from the hard-line norm, often for the most trivial or capricious of reasons, and subjected them to punishing treatment in their premises or in the many ‘ghost houses’ scattered across Khartoum. But as a non-Sudanese I felt I had nothing to worry about and it seemed clear that if I didn’t find an alternative soon I would end up in one of the three eminently unsuitable flats we had already looked at. I said I didn’t mind having the Security people as neighbours and would like to see the house.
Tigani called the landlord and made an appointment. It was a lovely single-storey rabbit warren of a house, with seven rooms all leading into one another from different directions, like parts of a maze. It was dirty and dilapidated and the plumbing arrangements looked daunting but it was full of the local character which the flats I’d seen had lacked. And so was the landlord – Fouad – a bustling, jovial teddy bear of a man. It would be ideal, I thought, once it was cleaned up. Living accommodation, office space and classrooms all under one roof. It also had a resident ghaffir, Babiker, a kind of guard-cum-cleaner-cum-odd-job man, and a uniquely idiosyncratic, comical and endearing character. We struck a deal with Fouad and took the house.
Chapter 2
