Common Courtesy
12/19/2004 4:18AM (2:18PM Khartoum)
I have, in my time here, been a little bit tight-lipped. I know this. I know that I've been somewhat laconic in my posts, and there is a reason, I assure you. It was due to an internal struggle, the harrowing details of which I will share with you now. Writing about my country (and I still consider it my country mind you) is a difficult thing. It is in many ways, a wonderful place, full of wonderful people, who are intelligent, loving and fun to be with. It is also, unfortunately, the land of a thousand and one maddening things. But as a native son made good, it is difficult for me to discuss the bad side of living in the Sudan. Not because I deny that there is anything wrong with the country - far from it! I am quite open about the problems facing the country as a whole, and the irritating (or down right self-destructive) habits that its people have. Yet I feel that it is the height of poor breeding and the sign of a bad upbringing to be mean about your country. More than that, I realize that many of you have never been to the Sudan, and have no impression other than the ones you get from:
a- your church
b- Fox News
c- reading this so-called blog
and not necessarily in that order. So I want to make sure that I don't give you to many bad impressions. It's a thin line that I am walking of course, and it is made more difficult by the fact that the Sudan is quite familiar to me, which makes it more difficult for me to notice the everyday magic that I would notice in another place. In short, the bad things stand out, and are more likely to make it to the blog, but they are by no means the representative face of the country.
After that lengthy disclaimer I can talk a little bit about a lecture I went to yesterday morning. The lecture was entitled "Assessment of conflict affected populations in Kabkabiya & Kutum Localities, North Darfur State" [all capitals theirs], and was based on a report compiled by the Sudanese Environmental Conservation Society (SECS, which is an unfortunate acronym if I ever saw one). Gil, you'll get to read it when I get back. Specifically the report was put together by a Gallagher look-alike, Prof Muawia Shaddad. I will state up front that the findings of the report are quite interesting and I think also useful for aid agencies in the region. The data was collected well and I have few complaints with the results of their analysis.
Where I do start to take exception is in the presentation of the data. The presentation I saw was one of the worst I have ever run across in my life. Mind you, I've spent the better part of the last decade in engineering departments, where Comic Sans was the font of choice. I certainly didn't expect to see it in a forum such as this. The bulk of the presentation involved cutting and pasting the text of the report onto slides, with some sort of terrible color scheme with a graded gray diamond motif (horrid). The tables that were shown took up the entire slide, but managed to use a font so small that I could barely make out headings and numbers, despite the fact that I was in the front row. The graphs that were used consisted of dark blue bar graphs with black numbers - on the bars. Frankly if I didn't have the report in front of me I would have been lost. To compound the confusion, the laptop was manned by some guy with a type of digital epilepsy that caused him to advance the PowerPoint part of the presentation far ahead of the actual presenter.
I could have dealt with all that, I really could. After all, as I said, the data itself was sound, and the report was remarkably type-free. What made the entire thing maddening was a combination of two unforeseen factors. The first was a hitherto unknown Sudanese propensity towards particularly garish and obnoxious ring tones, coupled with the fact that people left their ringers on. The very height of unprofessional behavior, if you ask me. The second problem, is the willful insistence of people to remain ignorant of the effect of the damned ringing. Once the first damned phone call has disturbed the talk, people ought to be looking to their cells to make sure that they're turned off or to vibrate or whatever. Instead, the phones keep ringing and - get this - people keep answering them in the hall itself. I about slapped a couple of people, but in the interests of peace in Darfur I kept the proverbial "it" in my proverbial "pants" and sat it out. It was a long long lecture...
The whole thing was made worse at the end. The poorly equipped chair of the panel opened the floor for questions, and that set off the peanut gallery's inane questions. Everyone would begin by thanking the panel sincerely for the "excellent report"; a report that they obviously hadn't read, considering the questions they asked. The whole thing put me of a mind of any one of a thousand seminars I had to sit through in college, except these people had no real excuse for their terrible questions. They managed to sound even more ignorant as they took the findings of the report terribly personally, which was entirely beyond the point. The thing that Gallagher did right was to answer the questions clearly and concisely, and to bring up the point that we in the Sudan have a tendency to blind ourselves to problems, and to take those problems way too personally. I'm sure you all have your own anecdotes regarding that and me.