Sudan Volunteer Programme

Six weeks in Sudan

Aliza6 Comments
Artist showing his work outside the national museum, Khartoum, Sudan.
Artist showing his work outside the national museum, Khartoum, Sudan.

We lived in Khartoum for six weeks. It was supposed to be six months, but as they say, life happens.

When we signed up last year for the Sudan Volunteer Programme, it seemed like an ideal choice as part of our three-year plan to live and volunteer in cultures unfamiliar to us. We’d been reading for a while about SVP, a nonprofit organization that’s been placing volunteer English teachers in Sudanese universities for more than 20 years. We liked the idea of staying in Sudan for months, not just weeks. Alan had wanted to live in an Arabic-speaking country for some time; I wanted the chance to get to know people in a culture wholly different from any I’d known before; and we both wanted to do something purposeful and helpful. We figured that being part of an organized program, and part of a university community, would give us the chance to do all of that.

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Next chapter: Sudan

Aliza2 Comments
Map of Sudan from Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ASudan_regions_map.png
From Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ASudan_regions_map.png

Tomorrow we fly from London to Khartoum, Sudan. This is the piece of our three-year sojourn we planned the most intensively. We will be part of the Sudan Volunteer Programme, a 21-year-old nonprofit that places native (or fully fluent) English speakers around Sudan to teach English conversation to Sudanese university students.

A lot of people have asked us, “Why Sudan?” Now is a good time to answer that question, before we jump in and get so involved that the answer changes, and becomes something else.

 

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