CHAPTER 2
Three weeks later I moved into the house. My days now began with an exchange of greetings with Babiker.
‘Sabah al kheer,’ I shouted through the kitchen window as I put the kettle on.
‘Sabah al nour,’ replied Babiker.
‘Keef al hal?’
‘Kwais, alhamdoulillah. Keef inti?’
‘Tamaam.’
‘Alhamdoulillah.’
Each now reassured that the other was well and that Allah had been duly thanked for that happy state of affairs we carried on with our business.
Babiker lived in the garden with his young, heavily-pregnant wife, Miriam. They had a single room, a kind of outbuilding with a corrugated iron roof, but spent all their time outside. They cooked on a charcoal brazier, squatting under my kitchen window, and slept on an angareeb, a Sudanese rope bed.
Although the house had been cleaned and fumigated, the rotting carpet removed and the shower taps replaced, there were still many unwelcome discoveries. Doors and windows either wouldn’t open or wouldn’t close. The air coolers wheezed like old men with emphysema. Arthritic ceiling fans creaked through the hot air in ineffectual circles. In the sitting room and bedroom there were no fans at all. Instead, hanging from the centre of the ceilings were two splendid chandeliers, each bearing about twenty bulbs, none of which worked. ‘No,’ said Fouad, when I asked if the chandeliers could be removed and replaced with fans. ‘Things which are taken down get either broken or lost.’ I would just have to do without fans.
Despite all its shortcomings I loved the house. What it lacked in comfort, it made up for in charm and idiosyncrasy. And I had Babiker, my Sudanese Jeeves, who had a Heath-Robinson type solution to most problems. Time and again he replaced the light bulbs which kept exploding in my face. When my bed collapsed in the middle of the night Babiker padded in and put it together again. But even his ingenuity was put to the test when the water tank on the roof burst. Water gushed down, filling the hoosh (courtyard) at the back of the house and threatening to flood the store room where I had a couple of thousand books in boxes on the floor. We simply had to let it take its course.
When I moved into the house the temperatures were sufficiently low at night to make sleeping outside pleasant. As I lay in the hoosh one night I felt the need to go to the bathroom at about midnight. I got up to go inside. The door wouldn’t open. I pushed it and shook it, I twisted the handle up and down. I rattled it angrily. The lock wouldn’t budge. The bolt had shot home of its own accord. I was wearing only a knee-length tee-shirt, with a sheet to cover me. At three or four in the morning the temperature would drop and I would need a blanket. Besides, I needed to go to the bathroom. I had to get in.
I called over the gate to where Babiker and Miriam slept. Miriam answered my call. My Arabic was limited but I gathered that Babiker had gone AWOL. He would be back at seven in the morning, Miriam said.
I explained the problem as best I could. Miriam brought a knife from her cutlery box and started attacking the lock. She succeeded only in hacking away at the wood. ‘Wait,’ she said, wrapping her thobe round her before going out of the gate. Five minutes later she came back with Babiker; he had slipped off after he thought I had settled down for the night to go and fill in for a neighbour’s ghaffir who was having a night off.
Babiker rummaged around his room and came out with a spear. It was one of the tools of his trade as a ghaffir, he said, bought in the market for 3,000 pounds and useful for deterring burglars.
He slipped the head of the spear in between the door and the jamb, manoeuvring this way and that. He poked with the knife. He tried again with the spear. The lock still wouldn’t give.
‘Ana mashi beet Fouad,’ he said. He would go to Fouad’s house in Garden City. Fouad would have a key and I would be able to get in.
Off he went to look for a taxi. About an hour later Fouad arrived, all bustle and good humour, with a key for only one of the five main doors of the house. He slid it into the lock and turned it. He pushed the door. It wouldn’t budge. It was bolted from the inside.
I clearly couldn’t stay outside all night. No problem, said Fouad. He would take me home for the night and we’d return in the morning with a locksmith.
To me there was a problem. I was dressed in nothing but my tee-shirt – and this in a country where many women covered themselves from head to toe in black with only their eyes showing, and any Muslim woman who appeared in public with her head uncovered could be arrested by the religious police and whipped.
To make myself less conspicuous I took the sheet off the bed and wrapped myself in it. To a casual observer I now looked not unlike a Sudanese woman in a thobe. But it was past curfew time and we had to drive past a military check point. The men who staffed these were not casual observers.
‘Try to look normal,’ muttered Fouad as a soldier brandished his rifle at us, indicating that we should stop. How could I be expected to look normal, alone in a car with a man at two in the morning in Sudan, wearing nothing but a sheet decorated with teddy bears and rocking horses?
Whatever Fouad said to him must have satisfied the soldier. He waved us on.
In the midst of all this I had an organization to run.
To tide me over until ELF found premises of its own, Don Sloan had offered the use of a room in the British Council and this is where I had been operating from while still staying with Tigani.
The British Council did not itself run a teaching operation in Khartoum because it was not their policy to provide courses in countries where they would not be economically viable. It was still, though, inundated with people enquiring about opportunities for learning English. The Council staff directed all those people towards me.
The word spread like wildfire. There was now a British woman offering courses through a British organisation to be taught by British teachers. That was the perception, anyway. In fact, ELF was a Sudanese organisation and I had no idea who the teachers were going to be or where they were going to come from.
Most of the people who came to see me did so out of curiosity, or to practise their English. They sat demurely in my office, enunciating their ill-defined requests for help in improving their English in their soft Sudanese voices. Later, after I had moved into the house, they came ringing the doorbell at all hours, hoping for a chat. They stopped me in the street; they interrupted me as I wrote emails at the British Council computer; they excused themselves apologetically as I caught up with current events with the Council newspapers but expected me nevertheless to stop reading and start talking. They flocked to me wherever I was like flies round a jam jar. Could I advise them on the best way of improving their speaking? Could I help them to get a visa? Could I give their children lessons? Would I please read this poem they had written? What did I think of Sudan? What did I think of the weather in Sudan? What did I think of Sudanese people?
What sort of services could I offer them, I wondered. What courses? How much could people afford to pay? What sort of disposable income did they have? How should I test them? What were the overheads going to be? Where would I get books? How long should the courses be? Where would they be held? How much should I pay the teachers? What was the value of a Sudanese pound in terms of what it could buy?
These questions were pressing. Bringing money in was imperative; not only did I have to cover costs, I also had to generate profit to fund the charitable activities which were the raison d’etre of ELF. And then, what sort of charitable activities could I devise that would make any impact on the parlous state of English teaching in Sudan? But for the moment this question was less pressing as, before implementing any activities, I first had to make the money to pay for them.
For some months Shane, with the help of the occasional teacher, had been running courses for the IELTS exam, an English language proficiency test taken by people hoping to study or work in the UK. She had devised a 12-hour programme intended as a kind of rehearsal for the real thing. To get the ball rolling, it seemed a good idea for me to carry on with this.
I compiled a list of possible teachers.
It had somehow been assumed all along that the teaching would be done by native English speakers, an assumption which ignored that fact that native English speakers with teaching experience or qualifications were about as scarce as hen’s teeth in Khartoum.
There was Karen, a young American chemist who had come to Sudan as a volunteer with a Christian charity and stayed on to marry a Sudanese Muslim. Karen had already done some IELTS courses for Shane. Then there was Michael, the New Zealand husband of a German Embassy employee who had also done some IELTS work. But by the time I contacted him he had defected to teach at the German Cultural Centre and doubted that he would have time for anything else. There was also Farida, a blowsy and excitable Pakistani woman. She needed the money, Shane said; it would be good if I could give her some work. And there was Sarah. Sarah had just arrived in Khartoum with her partner who worked for the International Rescue Committee. She was a qualified English teacher with several years’ experience. The only worry was that she suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome. As well as those, some of the SVPs might be able to help out.
Very soon I had a group of twelve IELTS candidates ready to start. We fixed a schedule with six midday sessions spread over two weeks. The course was to be taught by Karen and held in the British Council as I had not yet moved into the house.
I dropped in halfway through the first session to say hello and to see how things were going. They hadn’t started; they were discussing a rescheduling of the class. It transpired that Karen now had the offer of some other work around midday and wanted to shift the class to late afternoon. Half of the students couldn’t come at that time so Karen had suggested dividing the class into two groups, with her taking one group from four to six, starting straight away, and the others, who couldn’t come from four to six, waiting for a couple of weeks when she would again be free from twelve to two.
This put the cat among the pigeons. Karen’s proposal meant that I would have to pay her for 24 hours, twice as much as originally planned but with the same income from the students, so I would be running the course at a loss. Of course, I couldn’t raise this delicate question in front of them. I racked my brains for a solution as the students carried on an amiable argument about what should be done to accommodate their diverse schedules. I decided to call Sarah to ask if she could take over the class.
Alhamdoulillah, Sarah was free and willing. Karen was miffed, but the students were happy.
Sara took the second session. All went well. Ditto the third. On the morning of the fourth she called me. She was again prostrate with CFS and couldn’t carry on. Profuse apologies but there was no way she could stand up, she said, let alone stand in front of a class of students.
The cat was back among the pigeons. Michael wasn’t available, Farida couldn’t be reached. I decided to try Shane, although she had said she was inundated with work and family obligations and wouldn’t be able to do any more teaching. She agreed to do sessions four and five but wasn’t free for session six. Too bad, I would do it myself although I knew nothing about the IELTS exam, never having heard of it before I came to Sudan.
In the midst of arranging the move into the house I mugged up on the IELTS material. The house would be operational by the last day of the course so I decided to hold the session there. I gave the students instructions on how to get to there, no easy matter in Sudan where many streets have no names and houses no numbers.
No one turned up on time. The first hour had gone by the time they were all in place. Some hadn’t been able to follow the instructions and had been wandering around searching for a single-storey yellow house with a black and white gate in an area where just about all the houses were single-storey, yellow and with black and white gates.
They were cross about the change of venue. Hadn’t they had enough disruption with all the changes of teacher? I agreed with them and hurried them on to a listening exercise.
The cassette was at the wrong place. Try as I might, I could not find the dialogue which corresponded to the activity we were doing. I was furious with myself. Setting the cassette to the right place was an essential element of preparation for any listening activity. How could I have omitted to do this?
Backward. Forward. Backward again. The students were getting fractious. There was muttering. I apologized. Back to the cassette. Further forward this time. No joy. I was sweating with embarrassment. The muttering had stopped but the silence was a grim one. I checked the dialogue against the tapescript. Forward again. Too far. Back a little. At last!
To quell the unrest I extended the session by another hour. Feeling that that was insufficient to compensate them for all the inconvenience, I invited them back for an extra free session the following week. At the end of that they all seemed happy enough. Alhamdoulillah!
Now that I had moved into the house I had to generate enough income to pay a monthly rent of $1,000 in addition to my salary, Babiker, telephone, utilities, and other incidental expenses before I could even begin to start funding a programme of charitable work.
The school holidays were coming up. Desperate to get some money coming in fast I decided to run summer classes for children. Although Sudan is one of the poorest countries in the world it nevertheless has a fair number of relatively well-off, and such people are keen for their children to learn English, seeing it as the gateway to a better tertiary education.
‘Great idea,’ said Cathy Moghrabi when I mentioned the summer school to her. Together we brainstormed how best to go about it.
Even with Cathy’s help it was difficult to work out a fee which would be both affordable to enough people to make the enterprise worthwhile and substantial enough to make the project justifiable as an income generator. It was a question of guesswork and hoping for the best.
Cathy drove me round a number of private schools where I did my sales pitch to the head teacher, dropped off the flyer I’d prepared and promised that yes, of course, I’d visit them at the start of the next school year. We went to the various clubs frequented by expatriates and middle-class Sudanese and put announcements on their noticeboards. We stuck notices up at Disney Ice and Pizza Hot, two of the focal points of Sudanese teenage night life.
I roped in two of the SVPs as teachers: the ebullient Lester, an economics graduate, and Susie, a science teacher. We turned the house into a child-friendly environment with home-made posters on the walls and the rousing, upbeat music of The Ugly Bug Ball playing non-stop.
The news got around and I was soon doing a brisk trade in summer school places. I divided the thirty children into two classes – seven- to ten-year olds and eleven- to fourteen year olds – which were to run simultaneously three nights a week. We put together a programme of ‘fun and games’ activities and Babiker set up a sweet shop in the garden with his goodies displayed on top of an upturned cardboard box. We were in business.
The older kids loved the cassettes of The Demon Headmaster and Around the World in Eighty Days. They had quizzes and songs. They worked together on a communal story which they wrote in large letters and stuck up on a wall. A caterpillar of birthday data created by the younger ones crawled across another wall. For a clothes project they cut out and coloured garments and stuck them up on a washing line suspended from the ceiling. Using yoghurt pots, toilet roll tubes, plastic bags, cotton wool and whatever bits and pieces we could find they sat round the kitchen table making witches and fairies.
Then one night the house was suddenly plunged into darkness and sweltering chaos. It was the first power cut of the summer and I was taken unawares, without even a torch in the house. The maze-like layout of the house, with every room having at least two doors, added to the confusion. The children swarmed around in the pitch blackness, piercing it with shrieks of glee and whimpers of distress.
We managed to get them out into the garden where we quickly organized a miming game by the light of the moon. But they were over-excited now and would have none of it. Some of them were back inside, rampaging around the sitting room.
Babiker arrived back from the shop with a box of candles. I lit several, placed them on top of Fouad's ancient piano, and started to play Ten Fat Monkeys. Lester and Susie rounded the children up and taught them the words.
‘There were ten fat monkeys sleeping in the sun, ten fat monkeys sleeping in the sun, then along came a tiger looking for some fun….’
I pressed my foot down hard on the loud pedal of the ancient piano, trying to infuse the children with enthusiasm for the song. By the time only one fat monkey was left sleeping in the sun they had settled down and we started it all over again. By the end of the second rendering parents were arriving to take the children home.
After three months we packed up. The following week they would be back at their regular schools. I had made ten million Sudanese pounds and everyone had had a good time.
CHAPTER 3
‘Sabah al kheer,’ I shouted through the kitchen window as I put the kettle on.
‘Sabah al nour,’ replied Babiker.
‘Keef al hal?’
‘Kwais, alhamdoulillah. Keef inti?’
‘Tamaam.’
‘Alhamdoulillah.’
Each now reassured that the other was well and that Allah had been duly thanked for that happy state of affairs we carried on with our business.
Babiker lived in the garden with his young, heavily-pregnant wife, Miriam. They had a single room, a kind of outbuilding with a corrugated iron roof, but spent all their time outside. They cooked on a charcoal brazier, squatting under my kitchen window, and slept on an angareeb, a Sudanese rope bed.
Although the house had been cleaned and fumigated, the rotting carpet removed and the shower taps replaced, there were still many unwelcome discoveries. Doors and windows either wouldn’t open or wouldn’t close. The air coolers wheezed like old men with emphysema. Arthritic ceiling fans creaked through the hot air in ineffectual circles. In the sitting room and bedroom there were no fans at all. Instead, hanging from the centre of the ceilings were two splendid chandeliers, each bearing about twenty bulbs, none of which worked. ‘No,’ said Fouad, when I asked if the chandeliers could be removed and replaced with fans. ‘Things which are taken down get either broken or lost.’ I would just have to do without fans.
Despite all its shortcomings I loved the house. What it lacked in comfort, it made up for in charm and idiosyncrasy. And I had Babiker, my Sudanese Jeeves, who had a Heath-Robinson type solution to most problems. Time and again he replaced the light bulbs which kept exploding in my face. When my bed collapsed in the middle of the night Babiker padded in and put it together again. But even his ingenuity was put to the test when the water tank on the roof burst. Water gushed down, filling the hoosh (courtyard) at the back of the house and threatening to flood the store room where I had a couple of thousand books in boxes on the floor. We simply had to let it take its course.
When I moved into the house the temperatures were sufficiently low at night to make sleeping outside pleasant. As I lay in the hoosh one night I felt the need to go to the bathroom at about midnight. I got up to go inside. The door wouldn’t open. I pushed it and shook it, I twisted the handle up and down. I rattled it angrily. The lock wouldn’t budge. The bolt had shot home of its own accord. I was wearing only a knee-length tee-shirt, with a sheet to cover me. At three or four in the morning the temperature would drop and I would need a blanket. Besides, I needed to go to the bathroom. I had to get in.
I called over the gate to where Babiker and Miriam slept. Miriam answered my call. My Arabic was limited but I gathered that Babiker had gone AWOL. He would be back at seven in the morning, Miriam said.
I explained the problem as best I could. Miriam brought a knife from her cutlery box and started attacking the lock. She succeeded only in hacking away at the wood. ‘Wait,’ she said, wrapping her thobe round her before going out of the gate. Five minutes later she came back with Babiker; he had slipped off after he thought I had settled down for the night to go and fill in for a neighbour’s ghaffir who was having a night off.
Babiker rummaged around his room and came out with a spear. It was one of the tools of his trade as a ghaffir, he said, bought in the market for 3,000 pounds and useful for deterring burglars.
He slipped the head of the spear in between the door and the jamb, manoeuvring this way and that. He poked with the knife. He tried again with the spear. The lock still wouldn’t give.
‘Ana mashi beet Fouad,’ he said. He would go to Fouad’s house in Garden City. Fouad would have a key and I would be able to get in.
Off he went to look for a taxi. About an hour later Fouad arrived, all bustle and good humour, with a key for only one of the five main doors of the house. He slid it into the lock and turned it. He pushed the door. It wouldn’t budge. It was bolted from the inside.
I clearly couldn’t stay outside all night. No problem, said Fouad. He would take me home for the night and we’d return in the morning with a locksmith.
To me there was a problem. I was dressed in nothing but my tee-shirt – and this in a country where many women covered themselves from head to toe in black with only their eyes showing, and any Muslim woman who appeared in public with her head uncovered could be arrested by the religious police and whipped.
To make myself less conspicuous I took the sheet off the bed and wrapped myself in it. To a casual observer I now looked not unlike a Sudanese woman in a thobe. But it was past curfew time and we had to drive past a military check point. The men who staffed these were not casual observers.
‘Try to look normal,’ muttered Fouad as a soldier brandished his rifle at us, indicating that we should stop. How could I be expected to look normal, alone in a car with a man at two in the morning in Sudan, wearing nothing but a sheet decorated with teddy bears and rocking horses?
Whatever Fouad said to him must have satisfied the soldier. He waved us on.
In the midst of all this I had an organization to run.
To tide me over until ELF found premises of its own, Don Sloan had offered the use of a room in the British Council and this is where I had been operating from while still staying with Tigani.
The British Council did not itself run a teaching operation in Khartoum because it was not their policy to provide courses in countries where they would not be economically viable. It was still, though, inundated with people enquiring about opportunities for learning English. The Council staff directed all those people towards me.
The word spread like wildfire. There was now a British woman offering courses through a British organisation to be taught by British teachers. That was the perception, anyway. In fact, ELF was a Sudanese organisation and I had no idea who the teachers were going to be or where they were going to come from.
Most of the people who came to see me did so out of curiosity, or to practise their English. They sat demurely in my office, enunciating their ill-defined requests for help in improving their English in their soft Sudanese voices. Later, after I had moved into the house, they came ringing the doorbell at all hours, hoping for a chat. They stopped me in the street; they interrupted me as I wrote emails at the British Council computer; they excused themselves apologetically as I caught up with current events with the Council newspapers but expected me nevertheless to stop reading and start talking. They flocked to me wherever I was like flies round a jam jar. Could I advise them on the best way of improving their speaking? Could I help them to get a visa? Could I give their children lessons? Would I please read this poem they had written? What did I think of Sudan? What did I think of the weather in Sudan? What did I think of Sudanese people?
What sort of services could I offer them, I wondered. What courses? How much could people afford to pay? What sort of disposable income did they have? How should I test them? What were the overheads going to be? Where would I get books? How long should the courses be? Where would they be held? How much should I pay the teachers? What was the value of a Sudanese pound in terms of what it could buy?
These questions were pressing. Bringing money in was imperative; not only did I have to cover costs, I also had to generate profit to fund the charitable activities which were the raison d’etre of ELF. And then, what sort of charitable activities could I devise that would make any impact on the parlous state of English teaching in Sudan? But for the moment this question was less pressing as, before implementing any activities, I first had to make the money to pay for them.
For some months Shane, with the help of the occasional teacher, had been running courses for the IELTS exam, an English language proficiency test taken by people hoping to study or work in the UK. She had devised a 12-hour programme intended as a kind of rehearsal for the real thing. To get the ball rolling, it seemed a good idea for me to carry on with this.
I compiled a list of possible teachers.
It had somehow been assumed all along that the teaching would be done by native English speakers, an assumption which ignored that fact that native English speakers with teaching experience or qualifications were about as scarce as hen’s teeth in Khartoum.
There was Karen, a young American chemist who had come to Sudan as a volunteer with a Christian charity and stayed on to marry a Sudanese Muslim. Karen had already done some IELTS courses for Shane. Then there was Michael, the New Zealand husband of a German Embassy employee who had also done some IELTS work. But by the time I contacted him he had defected to teach at the German Cultural Centre and doubted that he would have time for anything else. There was also Farida, a blowsy and excitable Pakistani woman. She needed the money, Shane said; it would be good if I could give her some work. And there was Sarah. Sarah had just arrived in Khartoum with her partner who worked for the International Rescue Committee. She was a qualified English teacher with several years’ experience. The only worry was that she suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome. As well as those, some of the SVPs might be able to help out.
Very soon I had a group of twelve IELTS candidates ready to start. We fixed a schedule with six midday sessions spread over two weeks. The course was to be taught by Karen and held in the British Council as I had not yet moved into the house.
I dropped in halfway through the first session to say hello and to see how things were going. They hadn’t started; they were discussing a rescheduling of the class. It transpired that Karen now had the offer of some other work around midday and wanted to shift the class to late afternoon. Half of the students couldn’t come at that time so Karen had suggested dividing the class into two groups, with her taking one group from four to six, starting straight away, and the others, who couldn’t come from four to six, waiting for a couple of weeks when she would again be free from twelve to two.
This put the cat among the pigeons. Karen’s proposal meant that I would have to pay her for 24 hours, twice as much as originally planned but with the same income from the students, so I would be running the course at a loss. Of course, I couldn’t raise this delicate question in front of them. I racked my brains for a solution as the students carried on an amiable argument about what should be done to accommodate their diverse schedules. I decided to call Sarah to ask if she could take over the class.
Alhamdoulillah, Sarah was free and willing. Karen was miffed, but the students were happy.
Sara took the second session. All went well. Ditto the third. On the morning of the fourth she called me. She was again prostrate with CFS and couldn’t carry on. Profuse apologies but there was no way she could stand up, she said, let alone stand in front of a class of students.
The cat was back among the pigeons. Michael wasn’t available, Farida couldn’t be reached. I decided to try Shane, although she had said she was inundated with work and family obligations and wouldn’t be able to do any more teaching. She agreed to do sessions four and five but wasn’t free for session six. Too bad, I would do it myself although I knew nothing about the IELTS exam, never having heard of it before I came to Sudan.
In the midst of arranging the move into the house I mugged up on the IELTS material. The house would be operational by the last day of the course so I decided to hold the session there. I gave the students instructions on how to get to there, no easy matter in Sudan where many streets have no names and houses no numbers.
No one turned up on time. The first hour had gone by the time they were all in place. Some hadn’t been able to follow the instructions and had been wandering around searching for a single-storey yellow house with a black and white gate in an area where just about all the houses were single-storey, yellow and with black and white gates.
They were cross about the change of venue. Hadn’t they had enough disruption with all the changes of teacher? I agreed with them and hurried them on to a listening exercise.
The cassette was at the wrong place. Try as I might, I could not find the dialogue which corresponded to the activity we were doing. I was furious with myself. Setting the cassette to the right place was an essential element of preparation for any listening activity. How could I have omitted to do this?
Backward. Forward. Backward again. The students were getting fractious. There was muttering. I apologized. Back to the cassette. Further forward this time. No joy. I was sweating with embarrassment. The muttering had stopped but the silence was a grim one. I checked the dialogue against the tapescript. Forward again. Too far. Back a little. At last!
To quell the unrest I extended the session by another hour. Feeling that that was insufficient to compensate them for all the inconvenience, I invited them back for an extra free session the following week. At the end of that they all seemed happy enough. Alhamdoulillah!
Now that I had moved into the house I had to generate enough income to pay a monthly rent of $1,000 in addition to my salary, Babiker, telephone, utilities, and other incidental expenses before I could even begin to start funding a programme of charitable work.
The school holidays were coming up. Desperate to get some money coming in fast I decided to run summer classes for children. Although Sudan is one of the poorest countries in the world it nevertheless has a fair number of relatively well-off, and such people are keen for their children to learn English, seeing it as the gateway to a better tertiary education.
‘Great idea,’ said Cathy Moghrabi when I mentioned the summer school to her. Together we brainstormed how best to go about it.
Even with Cathy’s help it was difficult to work out a fee which would be both affordable to enough people to make the enterprise worthwhile and substantial enough to make the project justifiable as an income generator. It was a question of guesswork and hoping for the best.
Cathy drove me round a number of private schools where I did my sales pitch to the head teacher, dropped off the flyer I’d prepared and promised that yes, of course, I’d visit them at the start of the next school year. We went to the various clubs frequented by expatriates and middle-class Sudanese and put announcements on their noticeboards. We stuck notices up at Disney Ice and Pizza Hot, two of the focal points of Sudanese teenage night life.
I roped in two of the SVPs as teachers: the ebullient Lester, an economics graduate, and Susie, a science teacher. We turned the house into a child-friendly environment with home-made posters on the walls and the rousing, upbeat music of The Ugly Bug Ball playing non-stop.
The news got around and I was soon doing a brisk trade in summer school places. I divided the thirty children into two classes – seven- to ten-year olds and eleven- to fourteen year olds – which were to run simultaneously three nights a week. We put together a programme of ‘fun and games’ activities and Babiker set up a sweet shop in the garden with his goodies displayed on top of an upturned cardboard box. We were in business.
The older kids loved the cassettes of The Demon Headmaster and Around the World in Eighty Days. They had quizzes and songs. They worked together on a communal story which they wrote in large letters and stuck up on a wall. A caterpillar of birthday data created by the younger ones crawled across another wall. For a clothes project they cut out and coloured garments and stuck them up on a washing line suspended from the ceiling. Using yoghurt pots, toilet roll tubes, plastic bags, cotton wool and whatever bits and pieces we could find they sat round the kitchen table making witches and fairies.
Then one night the house was suddenly plunged into darkness and sweltering chaos. It was the first power cut of the summer and I was taken unawares, without even a torch in the house. The maze-like layout of the house, with every room having at least two doors, added to the confusion. The children swarmed around in the pitch blackness, piercing it with shrieks of glee and whimpers of distress.
We managed to get them out into the garden where we quickly organized a miming game by the light of the moon. But they were over-excited now and would have none of it. Some of them were back inside, rampaging around the sitting room.
Babiker arrived back from the shop with a box of candles. I lit several, placed them on top of Fouad's ancient piano, and started to play Ten Fat Monkeys. Lester and Susie rounded the children up and taught them the words.
‘There were ten fat monkeys sleeping in the sun, ten fat monkeys sleeping in the sun, then along came a tiger looking for some fun….’
I pressed my foot down hard on the loud pedal of the ancient piano, trying to infuse the children with enthusiasm for the song. By the time only one fat monkey was left sleeping in the sun they had settled down and we started it all over again. By the end of the second rendering parents were arriving to take the children home.
After three months we packed up. The following week they would be back at their regular schools. I had made ten million Sudanese pounds and everyone had had a good time.
CHAPTER 3
