A Story by Randy Olson

Shattered Sudan | Drilling for Oil, Hoping for Peace, National Geographic

Sudan is the largest country in Africa. Two and a half million Sudanese have died—the most casualties anywhere since WWII—in a seemingly endless civil war that finally led to division in 2011.

During the recent civil war, northerners kidnapped southern Africans and forced them to fight their own people. Most in the North acted as if there wasn’t even a war going on because it just didn’t affect them. Meanwhile in the south, brother was killing brother.

It takes years to become an expert. I am not, and this is a very complex country. Facts are elusive. Press releases in the north have conflicting information in Arabic and in English. In the south you can barely get through to rebel offices in …

Shattered Sudan | Drilling for Oil, Hoping for Peace, National Geographic

By Randy Olson

Sudan is the largest country in Africa. Two and a half million Sudanese have died—the most casualties anywhere since WWII—in a seemingly endless civil war that finally led to division in 2011.

In the middle of this assignment, in the middle of this civil war, I had to adjust to whatever came along. The transitions are usually the most difficult.

You leave your comfy, little life . . . and you enter travel hell, which usually includes some Idi Amin look-alike screaming at you to put all 600 rolls of film through a 1950s X-ray machine the size of a semi that looks like it was actually built for time travel. You wonder why part of the machine is battered until the belt stops moving and a guy beats it with a stick to get it going again.

It seems you always land in the same third world airport—always in the dark—with the same weirdly-angled fluorescent tubes flickering on and off, ballasts almost dead and whining away into the night.

When you step off the plane, something WILL hit you. Extreme heat, extreme cold, a certain smell or set of smells that lets you know for certain you’re very, very far from home. Then you remember that wheels on bags don’t help in any of these places but you try to drag your bag along anyway, over chunks of broken concrete with rebar poking through it.

If you are lucky you end up, at least initially, in a hotel, which is often a pile-of-rubble-kind-of-structure. (The one I stayed in was nestled right next to the bombed out shell of owner’s previous hotel.)

Usually by the next morning you’re excited to be in a new place and ready to get to work. But this first morning in Sudan I was greeted with this editorial in the local paper (Translated from Arabic by my fixer):

Photography is prohibited

Dear Sudanese tourist, our country and its unique exotic beauty may entice you; you may elatedly walk about the Nile Avenue, attracted by nature and its grace, which is evident on the riverbank. A sinful hand of yours may then reach for the camera to take a snap of the breathtaking scene, having the Nile as a magnificent background. You must realize then that you have violated an officially impermissible action, that you intentionally and openly subject your own self to criminal interrogation.

Sudan shares borders with nine other countries and there are times when they have been at war with ALL of them. This creates a militarized provincial environment where anyone with a camera is treated as a spy.

Being on assignment for National Geographic Magazine in Sudan posed inconceivable challenges. Imagine that you wanted to photograph a housewife in Poughkeepsie, but to do so you had to call Condoleezza Rice’s personal cell phone and convince her to mobilize her entire staff to first notify the CIA, FBI, local police, NSA, park police, the mayor’s office and all other authorities.

Then Secretary Rice would have to send high-ranking security officers along with you to Poughkeepsie, who would take you to visit the mayor and chief of police. They would show everyone the papers from Secretary Rice, the local officials would then assign a security guy and a PR officer to join your entourage, and off you go to the address in Poughkeepsie.

Five to ten people are with you when you arrive at the poor woman’s house. She makes tea for everyone and you wait for her to get away from the group so you can photograph her . . . she goes outside to hang laundry and you follow. But a neighbor sees you with a camera, and since only spies have cameras, the neighbor calls a relative who is the local dogcatcher. He shows up in the middle of the night with some of his goons and takes all of your cameras and film and tells you to take the next flight out of town. (This actually happened to me.)

When you get back to DC, Condoleezza explains that they really don’t know all of the factions in Poughkeepsie and next time they will send someone with you who knows the dogcatcher personally, so you won’t be in this particular kind of fix again.

Next you decide it’s important to photograph the wild horse roundup at Chincoteague, so you call Donald Rumsfeld on his personal cell phone because he knows more security people in Chincoteague than any of the other ministers . . .

And the process starts all over again.

Oh, and its 130 degrees and the light sucks all day long. And, my problems were minor when compared with what the average Sudanese deals with on a daily basis. What is their story really about?

Every newspaper and magazine article on Sudan that I’ve seen begins with the phrase: “The Islamic North vs. Christian Animist South,” basically framing it as a simplistic war of ideology.

Ideology is clearly a component, but I think it is more accurate to say it is primarily a war about resources. Either way, the suffering of the citizens continues. Those in power there don’t seem to care.

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Starving Dinka Girl in Juba Garrison Town | South Sudan
A starving Dinka girl came to the garrison town of Juba as a last resort. Still living in fear, she hides with her family on this island in the middle of the Nile. She hopes to escape harassment by the northern government of Sudan.
From my journal:
This is my last day… the light is bad… what else is new…
I’m sitting in this UN truck and 4300 women are dividing up 286 metric tons of wheat that just dropped from the air on this dusty landing strip. There are men with sticks beating back the crowds. I tried to help an old woman lift a 50K bag onto her head. I couldn’t lift it without her help—and she has a 2 day walk back to her village in the blazing sun. And yet these people are happy—and so polite—maybe if they were angrier and uglier about their situation we would know about them. Or… maybe if they just had wealthy relatives in the US.
Often the mechanics of photography insulate you from what you are actually seeing. The plane will land in an hour and I will start staging out of Africa –from here to Loki, to Nairobi, to Amsterdam to the states. I am not going to miss this place, but I am in awe of it—4300 women stretched across the horizon arranged in rows according to village—each row kept 200 meters away from the distribution point. They are all just quietly waiting in the hot sun. So many people—Just January of last year more people than this lay dead in the battlefields encircling this airstrip.
WFP gave me a huge trunk for a pillow, two sheets and some kind of fluorescent light—typical government work kind of project. We are packing this worthless trunk (that they then try to charge me by the kilo for…) pack my tent and get ready for the cargo plane.
The very day I flew out of Ruweng County, Khartoum flight denied the entire western upper Nile. No one will get back in there for a long time. The pilots for the MIGS they just bought are being trained and they are patrolling further with the 20 gun ships to harass flights that are non-OLS—the SPLA sympathizer/gun runners like the folks who got me in here.

Five Wounded South Sudanese Rescued By Media Flight in “No-Fly” Zone
This part of the coverage turned into an aid flight as well as photography.
We were the first aid flight since February 1st. When I say aid flight I mean that I was trying to get here but since I had an entire airplane for myself I am also carrying 3 tons of corn that I bought for a hundred dollars a ton and medical supplies from MedAir—the only NGO operating in this area. Since February people have the 3-4,000 people here have only had 25 50 kg bags of maize and 75% of that went to the army.
I’ve made the decision to allow this flight to pick up wounded at Jiech. They tell me the fighting is over there and guys with gut wounds have been waiting 5 days to be picked up. I am assured it is safe and Kevin is sending an SRRA commander to make sure it goes smoothly. But this also means we won’t have room for many of the folks walking here now. I am proud this charter is also bringing 1.5 ton of food, medical etc… It won’t make much of a dent, but it’s the best I can do.
The very day I flew out of Ruweng County, Khartoum flight denied the entire western upper Nile. No one will get back in there for a long time. The pilots for the MIGS they just bought are being trained and they are patrolling further with the 20 gun ships to harass flights that are non-OLS—the SPLA sympathizer/gun runners like the folks who got me in here.
From my journal:
There are hills at the base of Sudan and over toward Ethiopia. If you look at a topographic map of Sudan it looks like they decided to put the entire wretched desert in one country. We will fly early tomorrow so I can shoot aerials of these bordering mountains. There is not only the S P L A and N G O S in this war zone, but also the L R A and some autonomous militia. At 8,000 ft. you are above a AK fire from the valley and they don’t have stingers here. There is one crazy independent militia up in the mountains that we have to avoid. We also have to give 10 mi. clearance of any government garrison towns. These garrison towns dot the landscape all the way up the Nile until you come to Ruweng County. Ruweng is the last outpost of the SPLA near the established oil area. It has been designated a no-fly area by Khartoum. So no NGO’s with aid are coming in here—many people are so desperate they are eating leaves. This is all based on the strange situation that Khartoum decides flight schedules for relief flights. The United Nations formed a conglomerate of aid organizations called O.L.S., Operation Lifeline Sudan. OLS only flies to places Khartoum says it’s safe for them to go—This is as much political as for their safety. Khartoum is in the business of displacing civilians out of oil field areas. They like to deny aid flights because it forces people out of the areas where they want to explore for oil. People have to move be killed by gun ships or starve to death.

Wounded South Sudanese Rescued By Media Flight in “No-Fly” Zone
A wounded soldier hangs on to a pole to assist in his rescue while being carried to a waiting plane. He was one of five soldiers who waited on the runway for five days with gunshot wounds hoping a plane would come through. In the town of Jiech, the northern government of Sudan allows no flights, and planes are routinely shot down in this corridor. Rebels fight MIGS and helicopter gun ships with tractors and Kalashnikovs.
From the journal:
I tell Commander George that I’ve called in the plane for the afternoon. George says its good for the afternoon but the morning was bad—we heard gunships all morning and some on the horizon as well.
George’s military camp has a couple of huts with radios run on solar panels and they are good at deciphering GOS codes so they know exactly where bombing and airships will be.
It is a 2-hour walk to the airstrip in the sun on hard cracked ground. I’ve been lancing blisters and patching my feet, but my legs and feet aren’t in the best shape anymore. I’ve tried to keep my return flight a secret from the village—But as I sit on the airstrip I see a line of people headed towards us along the horizon. I’ve made the decision to allow this flight to pick up wounded at Jiech. They tell me the fighting is over there and guys with gut wounds have been waiting 5 days to be picked up. I am assured it is safe and Kevin is sending an SRRA commander to make sure it goes smoothly. But this also means we won’t have room for many of the folks walking here now. I am proud this charter is also bringing 3 ton of food, medical etc… It won’t make much of a dent, but it’s the best I can do.

Rebels With Ancient Machine Gun | Ruweng County | South Sudan
Ruweng county is an island surrounded by enemies… it is the last stand for the rebs in the existing oil field area. They hike in their plastic shoes that are taped and tied and slog thru swamps trying to put a mortar shell or two into an existing oil operation.
Refugees have gathered around George’s camp because they know he has some anti air and anti tank protection.
George has one motor vehicle—an Allis Chalmers tractor. I guess he can transport a mortar or something like it for a short distance into the swamp. These soldiers wear simple green tunics and most have the cheapest, white plastic shoes I’ve ever seen. These shoes are held together by tape and bits of twine—many are barefoot.
From my journal: Excerpt about getting permission to go to rebel controlled areas.
The flight to Nairobi is a real scene–flight attendants on the Kenya Airways are African Christians with names like Peter and Robert. And there’s a group of 20 or so fundamentalist Islamic folks on the flight–some with black turbans (they believe they are direct descendants of Mohammad). The Christian flight attendants are just trying to serve stale croissants and orange juice when the Muslims realize the sun is going to come up. They go into a panic. Most have never flown before, can’t operate a seat belt, squat in the airline seat as they try to use a piece of the stale croissant to pick up other food on their tray, and now there are 4-6 of them hovering, panicked, behind the drink cart. They are staring holes through the back of the flight attendants heads—a few of them have made it back to the bathrooms were they must wash their feet hands face etc..
They have completely hosed down both bathrooms and there is water coming underneath the doors. The poor flight attendants try to make little Kleenex dams to keep water out of the aisle. Then they realize they don’t have a good place to pray so they pull the first-class curtain back and break into that area and take turns, two at a time praying and facing the proper direction as the sun comes up.
I’ve never seen such a group of panicked folks in my entire life. I don’t get to the hotel until late. And then I just have to sleep. I have one hour with Julie Flint, Paul’s fixer. She knows all the rebels and has been working here for years. We have dinner. This is my first wine in two months. She talks, I listen. This woman can definitely talk; she’s had an interesting life though–she tells me about phone calls with Leni Riefenstall and how they went by foot through the Nuba mountains by night (many nights) evading government garrisons and also about being captured. All in all–an interesting life that she has spent mostly living in war zones reporting for The Guardian or BBC. She gives me a map to the rebels’ headquarters, which is on a lonely road outside Nairobi and tells me to talk to the No. 2 man because John Garang is out of town. My problem is I only have one passport, unlike Paul who had two passports, I have a Khartoum visa—This makes the rebels very paranoid and I need a letter from this guy to make everything OK.
I wake up in the middle of the night realizing I am in a strange country with lots of crime and I will be going alone to meet rebels in a lonely place to try to prove I am not a spy. All I have is a mobile phone number for a driver and a map to rebel headquarters. It is impossible to keep the Daniel Pearl story out of your head. There were two competing rebel factions S P D F and S P L A. Julie called the leader of S P D F for me and he wanted to chat and joke with me on the phone. Julie called him a war criminal and he joked back that National Geographic was in imperialist publication. He gave me directions to the rebel headquarters even though I have never been in this country before. He kept asking me on the phone if I knew where various landmarks were. Julie has trouble with their phones and offices because they are constantly shifting around. S P L A and S P D F are now in the process of merging but at the moment they maintain separate offices and separate control of different areas. Even though the leaders have settled differences, soldiers in the field are still suspicious, so I will have to be careful which pass I show which rebel group.
The driver takes me to a wealthy area of Nairobi with beautiful gardens outside electrified razor wire. This is so different from the dust up north. S P L A headquarters is at the end of this narrow lane. A guy with an incredibly dirty T-shirt opens the double gates—obviously S P L A has some money–this would be a relatively expensive home. I am told to wait in the living room and kitchen area. This area has a lot of plywood cut into arbitrary geometric shapes with round bulbs as decoration. This must be some tribal architectural period of sorts. Eventually I am brought upstairs to Martin Okerruk. He puts me off guard immediately—“ how are you? “ This accountant-like guy says. We eventually get around to my problem and he wants to see my passport to make sure I am stamped out of the country. The only hang-up is he wants to know exactly where I am going. I say it varies—W F P changes their itinerary week to week—He says we need the entire list of options—So I point to his phone on his desk and ask to call. He says their land phones don’t work anymore and he has no credits on his cell phone—but there is a gas station at the corner and a pay phone. I have to change money in a long bank line to get a few coins and about two hours later have a list of places I want to visit in the rebel controlled South.
I’ve gone to their administrative Office with my memo from Martin–the travel authority functionary reads them all over and over—his lips moving slowly as he reads. Then he reads every page in my passport—finally he fills the remaining blanks and signs my travel permit authorization form. But he doesn’t put down the whole list of towns that took so long to get. He points to one part of the memo that says “oil area” and says all these towns aren’t in the oil area—only Ruweng County. I point to a line that says humanitarian relief and finally get my way. I realize why Martin said over and over while writing this I must make this clear. Our next stop is to register my satellite phone for $225–what a racket—people who are just bringing them food for free have to pay all these stupid fees as well. It is almost 4:00 p.m. By the time I get to the S P D F they say we thought you were coming at 9:00 a.m.—we have been waiting—the guy I talked to on the cellphone was the leader of the S P D F and he has had them waiting all day. They know I have been to the north and say the only thing that is important is that I come up with a balanced story. I get a permit in 10 minutes, all the while having pleasant chats with these guys—reinforcing how crazy the North was—I know these folks don’t have as much to lose but they sure are more pleasant to deal with.

Ruweng County War Zone | Only Leaves and Swamp Water | South Sudan
This war zone in South Sudan has been so hammered by the Northern Government that they have no supplies. They have eaten all the leaves out of the bottom areas of the trees – now they are in the tops of the trees to get the last leaves to eat – They only have this and some rancid swamp water to boil them.
From my journal:
Gabrielle shows up and says, “Is it ok if we go to where people are eating leaves?” Ruweng County is an island surrounded by enemies—now that SPLA and SPDF are joining (SPLA is Dinka and SPDF is Nuer) there is one less threat. But these are people that have nowhere to go.
I call Melissa on the sat phone—I have about 200 flies on my body as I am talking to her—periodically I breathe in and swallow one or two. I tell her “this is the sound byte for what I’m doing. I’ve moved 3 tons of food and medical aid into an area the UN is afraid to fly into, where people are starving and only have leaves to eat. My satellite phone hit her cell phone in Lexington KY where she is in an air-conditioned, cupola topped, chandeliered barn photographing a 72 million dollar racehorse—we couldn’t be in two different worlds.

Ruweng County War Zone | Only Leaves to Eat | South Sudan
This war zone in South Sudan has been so hammered by the Northern Government that they have no supplies. They have eaten all the leaves out of the bottom areas of the trees – now they are in the tops of the trees to get the last leaves to eat – They only have this and some rancid swamp water to boil them.
From my journal:
Gabrielle shows up and says, “Is it ok if we go to where people are eating leaves?” Ruweng County is an island surrounded by enemies—now that SPLA and SPDF are joining (SPLA is Dinka and SPDF is Nuer) there is one less threat. But these are people that have nowhere to go.
I call Melissa on the sat phone—I have about 200 flies on my body as I am talking to her—periodically I breathe in and swallow one or two. I tell her “this is the sound byte for what I’m doing. I’ve moved 3 tons of food and medical aid into an area the UN is afraid to fly into, where people are starving and only have leaves to eat. My satellite phone hit her cell phone in Lexington KY where she is in an air-conditioned, cupola topped, chandeliered barn photographing a 72 million dollar racehorse—we couldn’t be in two different worlds.
I visit commander George again and he says this wet season is critical to his cause—his men are wet season fighters who know the swamps and are dealing with desert Arabs. I get the feeling from him that if he doesn’t shut down the oil operation this wet season, it will be over for him. I think of the folks I met on the rigs as a guest of the north—I could almost walk there from here.
George is saying he must kill these people if his side is to have a chance—he will be killing many of his own people who migrate thru the war zone to work on the rigs. If he’s lucky he says, he will also get a few of the Canadian roughnecks who are just trying to make more money by working in hazardous areas. The other side of this equation is that there are 78,000 people reaching the point of starvation because north burns their crops and harasses them with gun ships.
Gabrielle shows up at 6am and says, “Is it ok if we go to where the soldiers are marching?” Such understatement from this man who is starving and can barely ask for a water bottle are strange to me. I have been waiting for months to photograph the military—it is impossible in the north—and this morning is only by special approval by commander George.
We walk an hour in the moonlight and then they appear across the savannah—all lined up waving their AK’s. The marching songs they sing in Dinka are the same beat as in any army.
Refugees have gathered around George’s camp because they know he has some anti air and anti tank protection. And they won’t be as harassed here. I don’t know how long these folks have been drilling but as we head to them there are soldiers working on a large machine gun—I stop to take a few frames—and get in trouble. This has to be cleared with George—eventually it does and they march me around to show all the guns.
George has only one motorized vehicle—an Allis Chalmers tractor. I guess he can transport a mortar or something like it for a short distance into the swamp. These soldiers wear simple green tunics and most have the cheapest, white plastic shoes I’ve ever seen. These shoes are held together by tape and bits of twine—many are barefoot. All the soldiers are young, polite and dignified.
You want to give everyone something, but from working in this kind of situation before, I know if I start it will get out of control. I have to pre-allocate all of my personal stuff and leave Benjamin to sort it out. I have a lot of stuff for just a few days of work. I brought 4 cases of water (24 1 litre bottles per case). Even the empty bottles are precious to anyone here. Six cans of tuna, six cans of Echira (local beans), a big box with many bars of soap to give away, a bag of rice, bag of beans, box of onions, can of doom to spray around bug net to keep flesh eating parasite fleas away.
When a few of the soldiers find out I have a satellite phone, they bring the phone numbers of their family in states or Nairobi. They haven’t heard from any of these people in years and yet I only have one spare battery and there is no way to charge anything out here. I figure I will let a few of them call after I have called in the plane to get out of here.
I tell Commander George that I’ve called in the plane for the afternoon. George says its good for the afternoon but the morning was bad—we heard gunships all morning and some on the horizon as well.
George’s military camp has a couple of huts with radios run on solar panels and they are good at deciphering GOS codes so they know exactly where bombing and airships will be.
It is a 2-hour walk to the airstrip in the sun on hard cracked ground. I’ve been lancing blisters and patching my feet, but my legs and feet aren’t in the best shape anymore. I’ve tried to keep my return flight a secret from the village—But as I sit on the airstrip I see a line of people headed towards us along the horizon. I’ve made the decision to allow this flight to pick up wounded at Jiech. They tell me the fighting is over there and guys with gut wounds have been waiting 5 days to be picked up. I am assured it is safe and Kevin is sending an SRRA commander to make sure it goes smoothly. But this also means we won’t have room for many of the folks walking here now. I am proud this charter is also bringing 3 ton of food, medical etc… It won’t make much of a dent, but it’s the best I can do.

$Dinka Oil Workers With Scarification | Oil Fields, Southern Sudan Oil is the new currency in Sudan… not enough to be a world power, but enough to get some respect. With huge IMF debt overhangs, Northern Sudan has to continue exploration and acquisition of oil in rebel territory to pay down the debt. This platform is part of that exploration… Rig 15 can be put up in 24 hours. It is 50 semi trailers of stuff—they’ve been drilling for five days and have four more to go in this spot. Then they pack the whole platform and move again. From my journal: We’ve arranged to fly back by cargo plane. It’s supposed to leave at 10 or 11 but this is an Aleutian and it takes longer to load—truck after truck of military supplies come off this thing. They let us on and I think we will take off, but they just keep loading the plane. They pull a big lift truck into the middle of the plane and then start stuffing things under and around it—furniture, luggage etc. I am wondering how well these teenagers are taught load management and whether the truck will plow thru the front cabin on takeoff. We have the only 3 good seats on the plane—they have worn red material and broken spines and are jammed backwards against the instruments that open and close the cargo doors—any bump and your head will go up into the hard edges of the instrument panels. The army finishes loading and are sweating and squirming around in front, at our feet, trying to get comfortable. When the plane takes off the hull twists and cracks and snaps and lurches. One of the soldiers has his wife and young girls—the youngest is completely terrified—she’s never flown before. It’s still about a hundred degrees in the plane and pressurization is slow in this huge open area—so this is what dogs feel like in cargo holds. My head is starting to feel light. I lean back, close my eyes and need to go somewhere safe. The navigator invites us up and we sit over the bottom of the Soviet nose cone that is completely made of a floor of glass panels. I figure this will be my one and only view of the swamps of the Sud. These dusty villages look so bleak from the air. The washes off the Amazon form fractal like patterns. They allow us to land while I am still sitting on the glass floor of the nose cone of this Antonov. The navigator holds his hands on my shoulder as we touch down—I guess you just need that little added bit of safety when you’re landing with no seat belt sitting on a glass window in an ancient Russian cargo plane. Abubaker has arranged for our charter pilot to meet us and take us to look at the plane I’ll use for aerials. The plane looks great and we try to leave the airport, but are ushered into a security office. Someone on the plane has accused me of taking photos out the window on the trip. Once we figure out what’s going on, we respond vehemently that we did not… this could end badly… aerials without permission can send you to jail. I have all my hard fought film from Juba in a case at my feet. There are about eight people in this sweaty little room talking fast and one of them is on the phone with the head of airport security. Kamal is arguing for us and showing them still photos on Cherri’s digital camera and explaining our trip is sponsored by the Minister of Information. I’m thinking I need to get my shot film the fuck out of this country. It turns out the accuser was in the room saying he saw me take photos out the window. When we threaten to call some powerful ministers he backs down—maybe he didn’t see me actually holding a camera-he says. After they let us go, I figure out that this whole problem is because I took my fanny pack with me when we went to the nosecone. I took it because it had a lot of money and I didn’t want anyone screwing around with it. My accuser just assumed I was taking photos even though I never had a camera out of the case the whole trip. This is how unprotected people end up in jail or worse—just on the suspicions of some security asshole who doesn’t even know what he’s talking about. We have a room at the Acropole for an hour—switch out film and clothes and shower. We drive into the night to be at a camp near the Meroitic Kingdom. We are driving on the best road in Sudan, built by Osama Bin Laden.$

Sudan Oil Fields | War Refugee Serves Tea | Southern Sudan
There are little encampments of refugees living around Rig 15 and moving with it as it moves. These refugees are mostly women living under scraps of plastic with a pot to boil water and 3 or 4 tea glasses. The try to make a little money by selling tea to the oil workers.
It’s a long story, but basically the Chinese kicked us out of here and this photograph is the result of convincing a really scary security guy (emotionless, unhelpful, uncaring goon who I am sure was part of the “ghost house” era) to get up at 3am, drive hours on pounding rough roads back to Rig 15 where I was able to photograph for about 15 minutes at dawn before we drove yet more pounding hours back so we could be kicked out on the morning flight.
From the journal:
Then we move to a portable drilling platform with Nuer and Dinka roughnecks who are really nice folks. There’s also a 26-year-old Canadian driller working the crew on the platform—he is very talkative and his little room is full of weights and Maxim magazines.
These workers have shifts of 28 days on and 28 days off. When the Dinkas go back to their villages, they have to take back routes so the soldiers don’t steal their supplies. Someone took this white kids boots—turned out to be a soldier. They stripped the soldier naked and marched him off into the woods at gunpoint. The kid never saw the soldier again, but he did hear shots in the woods. At night he sits around with the African roughnecks trying to make conversation, but they know so little English and he doesn’t know any of their tribal languages. This platform can be put up in 24 hours. It is 50 semi trailers of stuff—they’ve been drilling for five days and have four more to go in this spot. Then they pack the whole platform and move again. This rig is called “Rig 15” and there are little encampments of refugees living around it and moving with it as it moves. These refugees are mostly women living under scraps of plastic with a pot to boil water and 3 or 4 tea glasses – they try to make a little money by selling tea to the oil workers.

Mulahareen Tribesmen in Market | Darfur Region | Northern Sudan

This is where the Mulahareen and other Arab militias hang out in a Darfur area market.

Darfur is the center of the Dinka slave trade. Baggara herders from Sudan’s drought-prone west carry out the slave trade. Playing on Baggara-Dinka tensions over pastureland, the government arms Baggara horsemen to ride south with army resupply trains, raiding Dinka villages as they go and gathering human capital.

From my Journal:
We are flying three and a half hours over completely empty open desert to get to the Jebel Mara plateau. The flight to port Sudan is three hours of the same but to the Northeast—huge expanses of nothing but sand and scrub. As we get closer to the volcano, we can see the washes that must only exist in the rainy season. There is a higher density of scrub here, but it has no water until the rainy season.
This morning is a complete circus. I am the first one up at 5:30 and I have to get 10 other people out of bed and all headed in the same direction. I’ve never had so much help to get nowhere in my life—we have Hassin, our security guy, Yahia our interpreter, Adil our driver, Cherri, two pilots, ground engineer, local guide, local airline guy and a cook. I do this work in the states with one person—the pilot. Finally I get everyone into the car with all our bags. We’ve packed up because Cherri screwed up and we landed at the wrong town… we will take off from here, but land at Nyala where they have runway lights and base ourselves out of there.
But the circus isn’t over, the pilots are not staying with us and no one in my entire entourage really knows where they are. We drive down block after block knocking on gates—waking up the house security guys. Finally we come back to the first street we tried—I am incredibly frustrated and tell them to honk the horn and I walk up and down the street yelling “Ahmed”. I see a gate open two blocks away and we realize they are in that house. These guys don’t want to honk a horn, but it is ok for a mosque to blare its speakers in the middle of the night. When we walk into the house, the pilots are still asleep. The roll out of their beds groggily and put on their socks. We get them to the car after I chew them out and someone says we will go to Nyala… “Nyala?” the pilot says with a blank look and then goes back to pack… He finally brings his bag and the copilot, but he’s bought home furnishings here, so not only are we trying to squeeze 10 people into this clown car, but he is shoving in these huge woven disks used to cover large platters of food.
When we show up at the airport, they are late opening it up and the pilot tells me he hasn’t filed all the papers yet (he should have done this the night before) and he hasn’t refueled the plane or paid the overnight fees.
We are now at the Nyala airport waiting area—only one of the ten plugs works and I’ve made coffee for everyone. I sit away from the crowd. This is MY cup of coffee—a part of my routine—my world—I want to completely disassociate myself just for the time it takes to drink this. Everything else in my world can change, but this cup of coffee, these few minutes are always the same. It’s a way to hold on to just a little of my wonderful life in this nonfunctional country.
I only get about one minute though, before someone breaks it with blather. This ratty airport bathroom has a sink that is good enough to wash my hair—I’m ready to go, but our car won’t be here until 2pm at the earliest, because they are driving here from El Fashir. Hassin, our security guy, sits next to me saying in mutant English “I want to eat now.” I point to some hard-boiled eggs Adil sent with us and Hassin is happily making smacking sounds next to me.
We sit in the airport waiting area for six hours and finally take the worst taxi I have ever seen—even in Cuba—A 1964 Nissan station wagon and every piece of it has been replaced—metal handles of misc. metal parts—the back hatch no longer opens so all the luggage goes over the back seat. It is a long way to Nyala at 2mph and there is so much play in the steering wheel that the driver is always swaying back and forth—he has large sunglasses and is driving the taxi the way Ray Charles plays the piano. Big hunks of metal are welded on to hold up the back seat and the pilot has a big rip in the back of his shirt from catching on the metal sticking out of the seat. Then Ray Charles demands 7000 dinar for a ride that would be two minutes in Adil’s car. The earliest our cars (went over land when we flew) will be here is 2pm and we are in a ratty Sudanese hotel with squat toilets, humming neon and incredibly noisy bathroom fans—but this is better than I expected for this outpost.
We are sitting in a tea house outside Nyala airport… just a bunch of huts made of sticks—wind is wailing all around us. I will never get to see this volcano from the air. The tea house proprietress is lanky and beautiful… she is sitting to my right and picking her nose. All the men are flirting with her. Adil carries water for her and jokes “this is my 2nd wife.”
The winds and dust storms are so bad we can’t even take off in this small plane. It’s 30 knots up there and 16 on the ground and our plane is only rated for 12 knots. So I’ve been up at 5am three days running waiting for weather. We brought in three vehicles that will go six days each across open desert for this mission. I chartered a plane, housed and fed 6 to 10 people just to photograph this stinking volcano and now I am on a 727 commercial flight back to Khartoum because the dust storms have started and it is almost impossible to get this small plane off the ground, much less take aerials with it.
Hassin, my security guy has dragged my huge duffle onto the plane. He took it out of the checked bags on the tarmac because it has a $30 Polaroid camera he doesn’t want to see harmed. Hassin has a key fob on his pocket but no car or house key. The key is to his briefcase, which he fastidiously keeps locked. The case has 2 pairs of underwear, 3 shirts, 2 t-shirts, 2 pants, his cell phone and one blue pen. He is not locking any money in this case because he told me 2 days ago he ran out and he never uses his blue pen because he likes my red pen much better. He is constantly saying “Ah… Randy… your red pen…”
At one point Sudan faced wars on all of its borders. This fear perpetuates this awful permit process as well as the bureaucrats who get a fee every time they process a permit. So most of my bribes for getting things done are disguised in by bills from Abubaker as permits.
A woman has a tea stand at my back and I can feel the heat of the coals and that is fusing with the sweat, dust and sunscreen on my shirt that feels like one big hunk of cardboard. I’m staring at this deep fried piece of charcoal looking fish that Adil has brought me. The eyes just pop out when it is deep fried whole. I wonder if they even gut it? Breathing the waves of dust every time a bus passes on my left, I’m just staring at this fish and cannot move—what the fuck am I doing here? How has my existence been reduced to this? Eventually I try to pick away at this lump of charcoal/food with the torn bits of bread they’ve supplied instead of utensils.
They had taken me to stay at the local hotel—US prisoners in solitary confinement have it way better than that hotel. We went up four dark flights of stairs—and thru a black hallway with only one shaft appearing for a minute as some shadow enters their doorway. Water from a sump cooler is raining on our heads as we try to reach the room—only to find steel doors on all the windows. This room with the stench of sump coolers and feces is completely clamped down—no light, no air—the closest description is an old coalmine locker with a squat toilet area. If there is a power outage (assured) and the ceiling fan stopped you would cook in your own juices. I refused. So now after trying to eat fried fish by picking off pieces using bread as scoops we are now back trying to find the port director and they can’t remember where he lives—where we just came from. We go thru another hour stopping every 3 feet to ask directions. I decide to sleep in the back seat. Yahia wakes me to tell me the port director said no photographs and wants to know where I want to stay. A rope bed in someone’s courtyard is fine with me—this is what we’ve been doing for months. Miraculously he bumbles into a better hotel—just a ratty Sudanese one, but not Auschwitz.

Dinka Slave House | Freed Dinka Slave Girl |Northern Sudan
NGOS has improved stability in the country and cracked down on terrorists. In this process they have mounted an international charm offensive where they claim to be liberating slaves from the Murahaleen in the west. But the truth is their progress with human rights is just for show.
This is a halfway house for former slaves abducted from Dinka lands in the south by Arab nomad militia. As slaves, they were taken to Darfur and Cordofan. These militia operate autonomously from the government… they run resupply missions to southern garrison towns and take slaves on the way back as pay.
From my journal:
I meet Helen, a member of parliament who has adopted war orphans and photograph at her house… the straw of the outhouse wall is interlaced with all the toothbrushes. She tells me that some members of parliament are illiterate.
A NYT columnist flies in and I have several meals with him at the hotel. He finds some of the holding houses for slaves liberated by Khartoum as part of their international charm offensive… so I end up making photographs of them in their houses…
I find out the government propaganda machine is buying 10 pages in Newsweek and spending a million dollars for 10 pages so they can reach 5.8 million readers.
This place has been so difficult to work… but what I’ve gone thru is only significant in that people who are trying to bring food, clean water, education are going thru the same harangue—I still can’t believe people in parliament can’t read or write in any language and are deciding the fate of this country.
My picture editor calls and wonders “if I’m not too tired (I’ve only spent 2 months in the dust) and only if “I have enough energy to continue” If I would consider going to Nairobi and find the rebels and start dealing with the part of the trip I was planning to do in the fall. I tell him I’ll think about it. I’m out of film, malaria tabs, coffee, money, shampoo, toothpaste, cipro, batteries, Ambien etc.
I’ve already shipped some stuff back home including water filters, ponchos etc. Because I’ve finally allowed my mind to wander home
I call Paul, he’s just gotten out of the south and the night before he was evacuated from a rebel camp and it was heavily bombed 3 hours later. He’s the one pushing to hurry up on this story. Because he will disappear onto his phone less mountaintop and he doesn’t want to rewrite if there are major changes in this country.
I am physically and emotionally exhausted and now they expect me to go into an active war zone…

South Sudanese Hide from North Sudanese Military
Africans hide in acacia forests from northern forces. They know the acacia forest harbors a flesh-eating parasite that will kill them, but they prefer their chances here rather than on the savannah. It is easier to escape motorized ground troops-the trees slow them down.
Recently, the Government of Sudan (GOS) dropped bombs near here, wiping out an entire village and all of the livestock. They target livestock because they know it is the last resource in times of famine.
From the journal:
The people in these villages are malnourished and living in acacia forests—only because it is easier to escape motorized ground troops—the trees slow them down. At the same time they all know this same forest harbors a sand flea that carries kalazar—an opportunistic flesh-eating parasite (lechmaniasis) that attacks the immune systems of people and kills them. Everyone in the village has made a little tent out of bed sheet material but that will not stop the sand flea. It is better to have finally woven mosquito nets and we have brought hundreds of them in from Medicare on our plane, but even those can’t always stop this flea. This cargo plane charter is costing National Geographic about $8,000. I am paying for the food and I don’t want to show up empty handed.
The basic problem with the northern government of Sudan (G.O.S). is they won’t share basic resources with their own people—along geographic or ideological lines. George Athoor and other SPLA folks here are more adamant about Christianity vs. Islam than I expected. But if pressed, they say the primary issue is resources. GOS not only wants all the oil under their lands, but they want all their water. They want to drain the swamps and make something called the Jonglei canal—this would completely change these people’s lives. The machine to make this canal is one of the largest machines in the world and it now lies rusting under vines as this war rages around it.

$War Torn Sudan | Boys Covered in Mud Only Have Leaves to Eat Living in the dust – In war-torn southern Sudan, boys who have only leaves to eat pack mud onto their hair to kill lice. From the journal: In the middle of the night (1am or so), Kamal walks into the room and says “Oh… Randy, I am sorry, but the men from security are here and they want to take all of your cameras and films.” I’ve been asleep for 3 to 4 hours and this just seems like a bad dream—I don’t even believe him at first so I don’t make any motions to crawl out of my bug net cocoon. Out of the cocoon, it’s cold, reality is setting in and both facts have me physically shaking. I am carrying one third of the total film I’ve shot so far and that includes $5,000 in aerials—not to mention expensive camera equipment in the hands of security goons. These goons are the kind of raw material they hire at the Hilton and they have to teach them what a fork is before they can even let them bus tables. We make multiple phone calls to our security guy in Khartoum and he knows nothing about this. The goons won’t even tell us their names or show any form of ID. They just say they are giving us this one chance to turn over all the materials and that this order comes from Khartoum. They say they are very sorry, but it is out of their control—they won’t even talk to our assigned security agent—Anwar–in Khartoum on the phone. They say their orders come from Imad-Head of Internal Security for Port Sudan. Anwar calls Imad and finds that Imad never gave any such order—but it’s too late, they’ve taken the stuff after a veiled threat about taking us to jail. The booming guy says “take it easy, this is life,” as he leaves with my pelican case in his right hand. Until 1998 security goons showed up like this in the middle of the night and people just disappeared. This even happened as late as 2001 with Turabi’s people. I try to go back to sleep, but it isn’t working, I am too angry, my heart is pounding too hard. I get out the sat phone to try to call somebody, but I don’t even know who to call. I’m thinking what press organization could use this abuse as a nut graph in a story about this police state. Cherri gives me half an Ambien and I get about an hour of sleep. We pack up in the morning—grab bread, boiled eggs and jam (they insist on buying jam because they think “Americans want jam.”). Ali, our local guide, who was also here in the middle of the night with the Gestapo, looks like a bus hit him. He is so sad for us. A cell phone call to Imad tells us to not even come by the local security office, that my equipment was put on a plane to Khartoum and if I want it that I should just follow it back. In other words telling us to get the hell out of town. Why are they taking my stuff to Khartoum if no one in Khartoum ordered it? We wonder if there is an imminent rebel attack and this is all a ruse to get us out of the area. Mahdi used a similar tactic to get Cherri’s group out of an area that could get hot. So we rearrange stuff in the car, not knowing if we’ll be searched at the airport or not. I had a 30 second window away from the goons and managed to separate all my shot film, notes, expense book, and malaria tabs out of the main case I gave them while Cherri kept the goons busy last night. I hid this in Cherri’s underwear in her suitcase; figuring Islamic goons would be embarrassed to look there. Now we are too afraid to carry the film through the airport. Sammy—the driver–pulls over and I sort out the film and cover it with sleeping bags. We line our bags of clothes up on top so we can just grab them and Sammy can speed off driving my film back to Khartoum. Kamal has been trying to call his cousin who is head of security for this airport. It’s probably appropriate to mention here that Osama Bin Laden built this airport. We meet the cousin at the front door of the airport and he tells Kamal that there are three security guys waiting to secretly accompany us on this plane. I have no idea what will be waiting for us in Khartoum. Maybe a more fundamentalist group in government is behind this and we will be stopped at the Khartoum airport. The weirdest part of this is just not knowing what is going on or why. We know security is tight in Port Sudan ever since the U.S. launched cruise missiles from the Red Sea to blow up the Shifa pharmaceutical company and security was reamed for not seeing it coming. So these folks are not particularly pro-American… And when they see me in a plane circling and circling and taking pictures… even though they are told I have all the clearances to do this, they just don’t believe it… no one has been allowed to do this in twenty years. Yahia Babiker is in charge of all external security in the country and we finally get through to him. He says my equipment was hand carried by an agent this morning but then when we land in Khartoum we are told my equipment and film will come with someone on an evening flight. We have a meeting with Yahia at 3pm, but he doesn’t want to meet until he can find my stuff. Who knows where it is or what is going on. We are told Mahdi and Yahia are mad about this and will fire people involved—I doubt it—They can’t control them from Khartoum, how will they fire them out of their little fiefdoms if they weren’t even aware of them in the first place? Yahia’s office is actually a compound with many cars and drivers and security guys everywhere within this little walled city. This is Sudan’s version of the KGB—there isn’t the confusion here that reigns in the other government camps. The guy at the gate looks at us and knows where we are going. Yahia’s office is new, clean and sparse—very bright cool white fluorescents overhead with modern diffraction grids in a drop ceiling—but it’s a new drop ceiling and the fixtures aren’t whining as they are in the rest of this country. There is a grey-blue leather seating area in an L-shaped office. The other side of the L is Yahia’s desk with the latest computer equipment (i.e. COMPUSA new, nothing fancy). The only other item in this large room is water cooler on the slate blue floor. We are sitting in the chairs of the leather rap pit and he is on the big sofa with only his cell phone. The ministers talking on their tiny cell phones run this entire government. We asked Yahia for his cell phone number, but he refused. The cell phone rings periodically—he squints at the number and then pushes a button to get rid of the call. These guys all sit around and wait for the number to show up as Bashir. I can’t tell if this is a scary man or not. I know Yahia’s predecessor had “ghost houses” all over Khartoum where people were tortured. So, in a stupid move, I invade his space, sit close to him on the couch and show him a copy of NG that has a story by Paul and a story by me. He responds fairly well so I stay there. He says that for our “inconvenience” he has tried to make up for it by spending the morning clearing our trip to the oil fields. As the meeting ends, Paul asks him about the University of Montana and Yahia says he went to the Univ. of Missouri. I tell him I taught there in the Journalism School and he brings up all sorts of names of professors—this conversation is surreal. All the ministers I’ve met have gone to Midwest party schools. Yahia majored in political science at MU which I know is not much of a program—and who knows if he was even in the top half of his class. Yahia and I missed being at MU at the same time by one year. We have former students sitting in fotohut booths in grocery store parking lots with similar academic records as the folks that are running this country. And what is really scary is that the next level of government below the ministers is like falling off a cliff into imbecile land. Yahia takes us into the next room where they have my case with most of the cameras, but no film or videotapes. One of the cameras is flashing numbers, indicating that film was ripped out of it. I explain a Leica and 35mm lens are missing (about $5000) and point to the space in the case where it used to be. Yahia just asks if it was insured.$

Sugar Cane Migrant Worker War Refugee | Northern Sudan
This sugar cane migrant worker is a war refugee from the south of Sudan. Osama Bin Laden built the most modern infrastructure in Sudan. Sudan is the largest country in Africa, but it is impoverished, so it couldn’t pay him in cash. Osama took sharecropping income from this sugar cane area to pay the bills for roads and airports.
From my journal:
We get up early to go to the Kenanan Sugar Factory.   The Blue Nile and the White Nile join just below Khartoum and form the Nile that flows into Egypt. They exploited these two Niles in colonial times and ran irrigation between them creating the largest irrigated scheme in the world. Half of Sudan’s GNP still comes from agriculture—mostly from this area. When Osama Bin Laden was building infrastructure here, they paid him by letting him sharecrop large plots of this scheme. The sugar factory is on the southern end of the scheme along the White Nile. We bumble into the PR trailer… there is an air conditioner with no front and a big exposed fan… they’ve tried to cram a computer in here and all of the peripherals are covered with large sheets of plastic. There is a wall of videotapes topped with 11X14 dime store framed faded photographs of mill machinery. In the corner there are two cheap tripods covered with dust. There is an overly paternal Idi Amin kind of guy in charge of PR for the plant—one of those guys who are always saying “enough?” “Finished?” When I am just starting to work. The truth is he probably doesn’t like the part of his job where he has to chaperone people like me. I try to photograph folks irrigating but they aren’t doing much and he is way too constraining and he thinks he is way more knowledgeable of what I need to do than me. At his office I asked to use a bathroom and was escorted next door to a club that must be for the managers—bleeding red windows with red wallpaper and multi-colored bricks and huge framed photos of Hallmark-style dewy-eyed lily-white children.
I have not seen anything in Sudan like this guesthouse. This compound has beautiful green tile roofs and white walls like it belongs on a Greek island somewhere… Scandinavian teak furniture, sconces everywhere, 100 count Egyptian cotton sheets, quiet air conditioning and a restaurant with leopard curtains and art deco chairs with oak leaves carved into them. There are TWO tablecloths on each table with European place settings, mango or baobab juice, crystal chandeliers and guys who have been pulled out of the cane fields and trained as European waiters. In all of this opulence it seems strange that there is no sugar on these tables with every condiment imaginable-I mean-we ARE on a sugar plantation. The meals here are a panoply of fried foods that arrive mostly cold, but the plate is arranged in a way that you feel you are in a world of plenty. Desert is raspberry jello with pineapple pieces topped with a yellow meringue—this brings back memories of family reunions in Wisconsin. It turns out this is where the board of directors stay—KSF is owned by a consortium of Sudanese, Saudi and Kuwaiti governments. So this is how the privileged of the kleptocracy live.
They give me a factory tour and some of the machines are down and guys wearing flip-flops are walking inside these boxes of huge mashing gears and cleaning them. They let me go in places without a hardhat that I shouldn’t be allowed into—deep dank humid bottoms of these huge gear contraptions that are dropping sugary, sticky rain while we are walking on boards suspended over pools of fermenting goo.
Tonight the winds are right to set some of the cane fields on fire. The first field is set around 5:30. The make torches out of dead cane leaves and leave them at intervals along the edge of the field. It takes the first run for me to understand I need to be in front of the runners… they are already a third of the way across this huge field when I start running after them… It’s silly to think my out-of-shap- carcass strapped down with cameras can keep up with African runners. I’m not the only one to realize this and a manager pulls up in a pickup truck to take Yahia and me along the fire line to get in front of the runners. I made the mistake of asking if they can get ahead of the fire and the driver guns it down this narrow fire lane—the heat is intense. They are all in the cab and Yahia and I are standing in the back of the pickup. I am shielding Yahia so I get the worst of it. Its hard to hang on to a flying pickup and try to shield your face from being scorched. Working in front of the runners is definitely best. The next fire is set at dusk and I am trying to run again, but the only time I can photograph is when they slow down to pick up another handmade torch and do the relay runner thing. I end up in the back of another pickup but the fear of petrol explosion only gives me a few opportunities close to the runners.
The next morning we leave at 5am to photograph cane workers—many are still asleep along the side of the road like a row of corpses wrapped up in their thin white sheets. It gets cold at night in the desert 14degrees c or so. They are all lying on their handmade machetes to keep them safe I guess… they start work in the dark around 4am. They strap cheap silver flashlights to their heads. It gets too hot to work after noon or so… They are expected to cut an entire field before they stop for the day. Once they burn a field they only have 24hrs to get it chopped down and to the factory.   There are 14,000 workers here (8,000 are seasonal). The company could do everything mechanically but that would put a lot of people out of work. The NASA night photo of the earth only shows a couple of blinks of light in Sudan—one is Khartoum and the other is here-the Kenana Sugar Plant.
Yahia’s friend is in charge here and he assigns us a ranger named “Smile.” In contradiction to his name, Smile has a warrior’s demeanor, looks to be about 18, carries a Kalashnikov and doesn’t know how to operate a seat belt.
Everywhere we go, people stare at me… Adil tries to run them off the road with his crazy driving and I wave at them as this is going on so they forget how mad they are at my crazy driver.
Yahia has a scroll also… it is his special map… a long tube very carefully wrapped in newspaper… both tubes are in the back seat… I can barely keep cameras from being destroyed by keeping them in hard, dustproof, and waterproof cases. These precious items of theirs will be destroyed in 5 minutes of this trip. We have so much stuff on top of the car that we’ve busted the car top rack twice… three huge spare tires, cots, boxes of bread, bags of fruit, cans of baked beans and Tuna, Raman noodles, (I finally started doing the shopping after I nearly starved the last trip) spare parts, tool kits, sleeping bags, tents, bug nets, 5 people… and they all keep buying stuff and piling it into the truck.
We are headed to the Ethiopian border where there are tribes from west Africa (near Genina-Darfur) I know we were thrown out of a town further north because of troop movement on this border. They point out a small mountain and say it’s the border and then we drive right up to it… are Yahia and these park rangers bumbling us into a bad area?
I am already on a steady diet of cipro and Gatorade… it’s hard to believe you can actually keep working in 130-degree heat with raging diarrhea. They all sense that I have a level of frustration and they all really do want to help… their solution is to try to get a whole village to dance for me. I try to talk them out of it… I don’t want to be in the middle of some stage spectacle entitled “dance for the kowaja” but I’ve virtually given up trying to control stuff like this. I know the dancing spectacle won’t work, but I will just photograph the periphery
Tonight at dinner, I walk by our thatch hut and smile (who also doesn’t know how to operate a propane burner) is holding a match way below the burner with the tank on full and the smell of propane everywhere. I yell at Yahia to stop him and just keep going out of the hut… the last thing I need right now is to be in a thatch hut fireball.
That night I roll over and see Yahia in the corner on all fours throwing up like a dog, then I hear Adil and him talking. There is so much noise in all these courtyards I’ve been sleeping in that I wear earplugs every night just by habit.
So in the morning the muffled sounds and Yahia on all fours in the moonlight just seem like some dream, but Adil points to him and says “malaria.” Yahia is very ill he shows us a water bottle with his urine that looks pink with blood. I think he is having some kind of organ failure and we are 12 hours from any decent medical care.   I decide to cut the trip short and head back to Khartoum.

Migrant Workers Return for Wedding | North Sudan
Villagers in the far north of Sudan greet each other before a family wedding. These men rarely see each other. There is no work for them in their villages and most of them work in neighboring countries. Sudan is a difficult place to live if you a not a member of the elite few in Khartoum.
From my journal:
We pound our way back to Nyala—conditions are still bad for aerials. We’ve generally just camped in people’s courtyards, but this is the first time in a small town local hotel. There’s a TV at the front desk that radios whatever channel they are watching into the rooms. It is almost always tuned to the Aljazeera network. Right now they are doing a biography piece on Arafat. The early photos of his life they are showing look like they’ve been trampled after coming out of a copy machine that is low on toner. There is early footage of him marching in youth Palestinian group and they try to highlight him with a lighter circle, but most of the footage he is outside the frame. There is a lot of footage of burning Israeli flags and a rock video that alternates between four black guys with headphones in front of a mixing board and atrocities in Palestine. Footage of the dead and wounded kicking and screaming—crying and getting gassed. Clinton and Bush and Sharon are on the screen quite a bit as well, but not as much as Arafat and Quadafi. Al Jazeera is way hipper than all the Arab TV I’ve seen. They have mostly women reporters.
Now they are changing channels at the front desk, which changes all the TV’s in the rooms, so my TV changes to a more typical Arab TV—hours and hours of some ugly guy in a turban blathering on in Arabic. There’s a commercial for Dettol—some kind of germicide cleaner… the footage shows a kid urinating and missing the bowl… meanwhile a woman outside my door is sweeping dust an inch high that accumulated in only one day. She is using a fistful of tall grass as a broom. I don’t expect a towel or anything here, but the shower doesn’t work and the squat toilet doesn’t flush. So the toilet is full of the feces of the last occupant. I’m used to taking showers with handfuls of water from sinks. I get almost all of my hair cut off before trips like this.
The power is off more than it is on here. The floor is a coating of chipped and torn vinyl over tile that has cracked and shifted over the years. the bathroom door is meant to be locked in the closed position and there is a clanging exhaust fan but that doesn’t keep the cockroaches from coming under the door. When the fan is off in power outages the bathroom smell wafts back into the room. There are two completely worn out toothbrushes and a huge bar of soap on the sink. There’s an un-emptied wastebasket by the one piece of furniture in the room. This piece of furniture has a small cabinet at the bottom and a huge backboard with four misshapen hooks and a folded prayer rug tossed across the top. The hooks must be for a towel and an extra jalabia—pretty bleak.
This is a place you can stay only after adapting to the third world for a while. I can just now eat at the “best” restaurants—places where bread is slapped down on wet tables by grimy hands. If you don’t eat all the bread, it’s picked back up for the next customer. Bread is dipped in fool—basically pasty beans or beans and meat that is served in these aluminum pans with more dings than you would think possible. The pans are washed in grey water. Everyone slops their bread in the same pan and makes contented smacking noises. Fingers and hands get covered in the goo and when you are done eating you leave immediately and abruptly to wash your hands. It took me a while to learn to do this… I would sit at a table after eating and they would keep forcing food on me… the only way to get out of this is to leave.
Since we still can’t fly, I’m stuck back in this hotel… Now there’s a cartoon about a gap toothed American commando and his evil plans are overheard by a big-eyed Islamic boy hiding under his jeep. They discover the boy and shoot at him as he rides away on a bike into a very pleasant world of very attractive Arab cartoon characters in turbans. The boy does some clever maneuver that crashes their jeep and they lie in the road with tongues hanging out and dazed faces. Black children in turbans and Arabic skullcaps discuss what to do with the problem. Then an email is sent and the boy and girl hold hands and dance into the sunset down flower-lined lane.
There are men praying in the courtyard of the hotel, which has a washing station in the center like a mosque. There are more photos on TV now of soldiers pulling up their shirts to show their scars… blunt photos of head wounds… more pictures of Arafat. I find out from Melissa that Sharon is surrounding Arafat with tanks and Cairo is having anti-American protests.
My personal internal security guy (FBI) gave his boots to one of the locals at the volcano who broke one of his plastic shoes. It looks like his big toe was shot off. He tells me “my money is finished… I need money for food.” I give it to him wondering where that big toe went. I ask Yahia about it later and he says it’s a war injury from the south… a land mine.

Suakin Port | Ancient, Roman and Unused | Port Sudan | Northern Sudan
The greatest asset the North has is access to the sea. This is the old port—Suakin. Oil goes out of a newer port. Pilgrims from all of West Africa gathered at Suakin to cross Red Sea to Mecca. The trip to this port determined settlement patterns all across the Sudan.
Suakin was ottoman built but has Roman remnants and was possibly chipped into this perfectly round circle by the Romans. Suakin was the main port from the 14th century until World War I and has never been excavated. I was jerked out of the air right after shooting this photograph and never got up to shoot aerials again…
From my journal:
The next day our charter plane lands around noon and we fly over dust for 3 hours. I make sure there is a case of water and the sat phone has charged batteries in case we have a forced landing. This plane is an amalgam of parts—French body, Cessna controls and American engines.
My original plan was to just continue this flight and do aerials because we have the permissions, but a three-man crew shows up with the plane and we have three people with a lot of luggage—the plane just gets off the ground at the end of this dusty airstrip with all this weight. I decide to land, unload and then do aerials.
We land in Port Sudan and unload and pull out some of the seats just so I can work and then wait on the tarmac. I’m afraid if we do anything else something will get screwed up. We take off at 5:30pm and fly south—not much to this landscape, but the light is good. We end up circling the ancient coral port city of Suakin—it looks pretty good and the light will be perfect in half an hour. The pilot gets a call from the control tower and is told to return immediately. There are a lot of guns here and we don’t want to be shot down so I watch the perfect light I just paid for from the tarmac.
There is a great deal of confusion at the control tower… first they say there were no permissions circulated by Khartoum, then they say they found something but it doesn’t matter. Cherri convenes every politician imaginable on the terrace of the Hilton—a beautiful new hotel next to the decaying government provincial building. Most of the local ministers probably hang out here getting free drinks and food from people like us. Cherri also calls Mahdi and miraculously his mobile phone rings in Abu Dhabi where he is attending a wedding. He calls the top general in this area from his mobile and has his office fax letters. But it isn’t until 1am that we get the ok to fly in early morning. Kamal forgot all his ID papers and ends up in my room because I feel sorry for him. His snoring destroys the four hours sleep I had hoped for and when I go into the bathroom there is an incredibly gross oil slick in the tub and somehow he has managed to hose down the only toilet paper. I guess he didn’t know how to use the fancy Arabic water wand next to the toilet.
There is major confusion here about what time it is. The pilot says there is an hour difference between the here and Khartoum and the hotel people 10 feet away from each other give me two different times an hour apart and say there is no time difference between Port Sudan and Khartoum.
So through more confusion I get up for about an hour to photograph the red sea hills. Later that day the dust storms start and I dismiss the plane and on no sleep, we head toward Suakin by ground route.
When we get to Suakin, there are more problems. I have my green photographer card, passport and travel permits—but after waiting over an hour, it seems this isn’t enough. We go to a higher-level security office and wait another hour. It is now around 3pm and I have no photographs. It turns out they left some of the papers in the car at Meroe when we got on the plane. It’s now 4pm and they’ve finally worked it out but they need to go back to the other security office for “just 5 minutes.” I say ok, but I need to work. So they leave me and I’m photographing these old guy in various states of undress going into the ocean, their Jellabia’s blowing in the wind. They think the waters here have healing properties. I work for ten minutes and a pickup truck pulls up and a hulking Idi Amin type jerks my cameras out of my hands and just stands there with this stupid expression on his face. There is nothing I can do—I ask him “are you stealing my cameras?” “Do you just want to hold it? What?” After 20 minutes of grilling in Arabic by some other goon asshole, Kamal shows up and somehow smoothes things over. I’ve spent a lot of money in the last few days and don’t have a lot to show for it.
Now Kamal and the group want to eat…. Is it possible to work in this country or not… I let them eat and wander off in disgust to try to photograph a little at dusk in the town—later they scramble everywhere to try to find me.
As we enter the old coral city, the security goons are sitting in the dust gorging themselves on fried fish sandwiches. They wave as we enter the narrow isthmus to the city. A guy who lives in the rubble latches onto us and becomes an impromptu guide. At the end of the tour, he scrambles over a big pile of coral rubble that was once a building and comes back a sack of coral to sell. It looks like he just knocked it off the reef, but maybe it is just pieces of these fallen down buildings.
As we leave we pass the security guys again—now they are lying in the dust recovering from their huge meal—they all wave.
There’s a businessman from Jordan I keep bumping into at the hotel—he is investing in the port. He says the Arab world is coming here in droves to invest, now that things are stabilizing a bit—the Arab world is incredibly conservative with their investments and wouldn’t be doing this if peace weren’t in the offing. Sudan has great resources. Saudi banned the import of meat from Europe and just had 600,000 sheep shipped in for Eid. Sudan has 140 million head of free-range stock. Only ten percent of the animals here are used domestically and only another ten percent is used for export. They have water and large schemes for agriculture and now with oil coming on line, he thinks this is a dirt-cheap place to invest. The people here are so poor though—the government taxes a guy with a few pots, a charcoal burner, a hut and a couple of sheep. 75 percent of Sudan is technically nomadic.
All morning is spent obtaining the permissions to go to Sinkat and Erkaweit. Both of these areas have been designated as tourist spots by the government.
We drive two hours, drop the cook at the house we are renting and pick up Ali, who is the big man of Sinkat. Ali takes us to yet another security office where we wait for yet another hour and then are finally ushered into the main security guy’s office. He asks me in booming perfect English how I like America. I tell him it is a very EASY place to live. He says “Just like here?” with a booming laugh.
So I have a one-hour window left tonight and then tomorrow to photograph the largest nomad group in Sudan—Beja people.
When we arrive at the market the people don’t smile or pay any attention to the camera. This is completely different from the rest of my experience in Sudan where I am usually completely surrounded if I stand still too long. This Beja tribe is Ethiopian and they spend most of their day making and consuming coffee in elaborate ritual just like Ethiopians.
Somehow someone in the group has talked to them about doing a very elaborate mock swordfight—probably Ali—part of their fun is to make mock assaults on me and the camera. On the drive back to Sinkat, we stop and photograph some Hadenbowa nomads. We are staying at Halim’s home and the cook has a meal when we arrive. They say there are no mosquitoes here, but I see them buzzing everywhere so we put up bug nets and eat our meal.
In the middle of the night (1am or so), Kamal walks into the room and says “Oh… Randy, I am sorry, but the men from security are here and they want to take all of your cameras and films.”

Giant Statue | Tombos Quarry | Northern Sudan
In the ancient Tombos quarry, villagers skirt a statue from the seventh century B.C., when their Nubian ancestors ruled all of Egypt. Today, Sudan’s government doesn’t even control the whole country. Since independence from Britain in 1956, the nation’s northern leaders have fought to extend their power throughout the south in a search for resources.
From my journal:
This is our first day of travel across the desert. We are getting on a ferry that saves 5 hours of time on the roads—the owner is greedy, so they tell him they met a foreigner by chance and are giving me a lift, so they only have to pay double–$16—instead of $50 if they had known it was my expedition.
We have 5 people in the two vehicles—me, Kamal, Ahmed (driver), Adil (driver), and a cook. The white Toyota is piled high with camping equipment, multiple propane tanks, stove, table, chairs, food, tents and sleeping bags. You need two cars out in the desert like this… we won’t see another vehicle in three days. They brought the table and chairs because they think since I am an American I need to sit in a chair when I eat. There is virtually no tourism here—so they are just doing the best they can in the dark ages of this business. The name of this company is indicative: Blue Sky Tourism Development Corp.
My car is the faster one and just has my equipment, our clothing bags and most of the massive amount of water.
Last night when we couldn’t find camel caravans, Adil was driving like a banshee across the open desert. He tried to slow down for the massive bumps but he was so hell-bent on finding caravans before dark that we spent a good part of the evening drive in the air.
We are almost at the other side of the river now—they had to hire a boat to get over to the ferry that didn’t respond to us honking and yelling—when they got there the owner said he was out of diesel—so they sent a donkey cart for the diesel—I don’t know if we paid for that or not.
I’ve never seen such hot, ugly light in my entire life. It is impossible to shoot outdoors except one hour in the evening and a couple of hours in the morning. And with almost all household activity closed to me because of Sharia (Islamic law) this is a very difficult assignment.
After three days of driving across open desert with two cars, we finally find waves of camel caravans on the 40-day-road from Geneina (Chad border) headed up to markets in Egypt. The only indications that this is a major trade route are the bleached bones of camels that didn’t make it along the side.
Camel shepherds keep coming up asking for cigarettes, so I have Kamal start shooting Polaroid’s for them—I believe in this—take a picture—give a picture—especially with indigenous groups. But at some point if you don’t draw a line across your neck and say you’re out of film there’s a chance of starting a riot.
We meet a pair of archaeologists who are working at Tumbus—an old quarry where at least one large unfinished statue is lying on the ground from Nubian culture. Stuart Tyson Smith and Bruce Williams—Williams is on the frontlines of a theory that the Nubians came first and Egyptian culture developed from there.

El Kurru Cemetery | Northern Sudan
Egyptian empire began to decay in 1000BC and in 660BC Kingdom of Kush ruled an empire stretching from central Sudan to the borders of Palestine. This is the Tomb of a ruler, in northern Sudan who controlled Egypt in the 25th dynasty. Rome and Greece were little bitty players at this time. El-Kurru was one of the royal cemeteries used by the Nubian royal family. The area is divided in to three parts by two wadis. The central section seems to be the oldest and contains several tumulus type tombs that predate the Kingdom of Napata.
From my journal:
We spend the night in Kerma—the first city of Nubian culture from 2050BC. There is this strange old mud brick HUGE fortress that was used to control trade in the middle Nile. They take my bags into a room full of dust… just the act of walking into this room creates clouds… I decide to sleep outside… I can tell this will be two months of taking bucket baths on mud floors in mud outhouses and sleeping in my bug net on rope beds in courtyards.
I call my sister on the sat phone—my family is all worried about me working in a “terrorist country”—I tell her about camel carcasses—bleached bones all along the 40 day road with waves of camels and shepherds.
We are at a wayside with only the workers here—when we came through here before it was full of people and Kamal said it was not good to photograph because these folks were traveling and didn’t feel settled. Kamal and I have had quite a few discussions on this trip and I will try to compact them in a non-ethnocentric way. Kamal hates the IMF. He says that for Sudan to get IMF loans, they have to meet all sorts of criteria—one of which is to let their currency float—so before floating, 3 dinar equaled 1 dollar, now 263 dinar equals 1 dollar. Since the average man buys imported goods—tires, cars, books, whatever—everything is more expensive just so the country can qualify for the loans—but then the loans are sucked up by a corrupt government.
Sudanese also have the same feelings toward America as so much of the rest of the world—we are the bully of the planet. We have the biggest fists, the biggest guns—and they believe we own all the raw materials in their country and we are sucking them dry, leaving all the poor people to just live in the dust.
You can see how this happens… the media here is really slap dash and has an anti American/west bias… then this news gets passed thru the countryside as if they were using tin cans with string. But we have the same slant to our news—Saddam Hussein always looks like Hitler in our papers. But in Sudan and Pakistan there he is in the papers beaming as he opens new schools and hospitals.
We spend the night with our driver Adile’s family. This is a very sweet, animated family. His brother has two wives under one roof and they all live in an extended family compound. This is the first time in Sudan that I’ve been allowed to photograph women.
I feel silly at times for having two cars and five people to ferry just me around, but when I tell one of the drivers to take the cook and head on back so I don’t have to pay for another day he refuses saying it is too dangerous. This driver has been doing this for a long time so I feel better about being safe and don’t worry about the money. These drivers don’t drive at night because they like to use the sun to navigate.
So Adile’s brother invites me to his daughter’s wedding. This is a long drive for a wedding, but he tells me this is one of the last places where they still practice the old traditions—the most interesting is at the groom’s party, they work themselves into a frenzy and then start whipping each other until only one man is standing—that man is the only real man of the group. I decide to make the trip back.
So we head back to Khartoum—7 hours in two cars, leaving plumes of dust behind as we fly across open desert.
I talk to the fixer and Mahdi about getting into “the camps” – the refugee ring around Khartoum that is the largest in the world.
There is a story in this months foreign affairs called “The Perfect War” and the author talks about how southerners are moved out of the oil fields, forced into garrison towns and eventually end up in this refugee ring. The government then abducts kids to train as soldiers and they are sent to fight their own brothers in the south. Northerners are oblivious to this war because southerners (mostly civilians) are the only ones affected.
The next night at Mahdi’s house, he has gathered all the players we need to see—the head of antiquities and museums, head of security, an assembly woman in charge of “peace,” a guy they’ve hired to generate propaganda and a few other journalists. I get stuck with the propaganda guy for a while—if I give him a sound byte from the western world (“bombing aid workers” etc.) he immediately launches into exactly the opposite of the worldview—he does this time after time and finally I say, “no matter what I say, you will say the opposite.”
“No I won’t,” he says.
Mahdi’s house has elaborate furnishings and huge swashes of red velvet curtains—the main rooms are so big that there is plenty of seating for a bank of women on one side and men on the other.
Mahdi is a real mystery–a hardliner—my fixer says when the names of the hijackers came out for the 911 attack that Mahdi knew two of them and called their families and said the FBI had the names wrong… turns out the FBI did screw up the initial id’s… but just the fact that Mahdi has those kind of connections is interesting… everything in this government is done personally… one on one… so for Osama Bin Laden to build the best road in the country and the Port Sudan airport means that he had strong connections with the government. The government paid for him to build the road in two ways: allowing him to collect tolls after it was finished and by allocating a large plot in the Gazera (irrigated scheme between the two Niles) for sharecropping.
Mahdi is very gracious and it seems we will at least get to start this project.

Nice light in the Interior of Restaurant in Northern Sudan
Northern Sudanese friends converse in a restaurant where life is comfortable. In their civilized world, they are removed from the war in the south.
From my journal:
I buy a sheep and the locals slaughter it for dinner—they speak their own language. We have three local guides that strapped our stuff on their donkeys and we have one other local guide from Nyala who speaks their language, Arabic and a little English. Also in this group is the fixer from Khartoum and Adil our driver.
I realize when I have to pay for the sheep that Yahia has no money—that is why I have been living on peanuts and bread the last two days. Everyone else is really hungry by now because Yahia hasn’t been feeding them at all. The dinner of mutton is to placate this entourage who are a long way from home. I am flying back, I wonder how they will drive back for 3 days with no money.
I ride one of the donkeys most of the way back because of tender knees and blisters. We are out later this time and the heat of the day is killing everyone. We’ve gone thru all our water and still have an hour or so to go to get to the village. When we finally get back I find out even Adil wasn’t left any food. All he’s had in the time we’ve been gone is tea. I give him the last of my peanuts.
I paid the local guides and gave one guide with a huge neck goiter my pota aqua tablets—if the iodine doesn’t help him, at least he will have clean water to drink.

Government of Sudan Bombs Ruweng County | Southern Sudan
In February, Government of Sudan (GOS) dropped bombs from an Antonov (a Russian plane and one of the largest aircraft ever built), wiping out an entire village and all of the livestock. They target livestock because they know it is the last resource in times of famine. The goal of the GOS is to force southerners from their villages into garrison towns where the people can be controlled. They also kidnap the children.
From the journal:
Gabrielle shows up at 4 AM and says “ is it to ok if we go to the burned village now? “ It is a three-hour walk, mostly in moonlight. Shadows of soldiers with AK’s or spears pass as we walk and shake all of our hands. I finally realized I could greet these men in Arabic. I had forced all these Arabic words out of my head because I thought it was the language of the enemy. But in the 11 years of peace—since 1956—I guess Dinka and Nuer and other tribes found Arabic the only way to talk to each other. So I am greeting them “Salom Alokum” which means may the peace of Allah be with you. And “Inshallah” which means if Allah wills. This is all very strange. We arrived at dawn at a scorched piece of earth with thousands of cattle bones. Five people were killed here and buried so their bones aren’t spread across this savanna. The government of Sudan bombs livestock because they know people live among the animals and if they kill the animals they kill people as well and the animals are the one last resource for the people. So more people are forced into government towns and into their refugee ring. Government of Sudan has no problem bombing civilians to move them out of their oil expansion areas. Its aid flights don’t come back people will be forced into government towns—now they only have leaves and water lily to eat—But the problem for someone like Benjamin is if he is forced out and tries to get into a government town he will be killed just for being associated with the S R R A relief wing of the rebels. All of the non-aligned Africans will be welcomed into garrison towns but Benjamin will not and with no flights there is no way out for him.
Gabrielle shows up and says, “Is it ok if we go to where people are eating leaves?” Ruweng County is an island surrounded by enemies—now that SPLA and SPDF are joining (SPLA is Dinka and SPDF is Nuer) there is one less threat. But these are people that have nowhere to go.
I call Melissa on the sat phone—she’s been in tears over all of this. I have about 200 flies on my body as I am talking to her—periodically I breathe in and swallow one or two. I tell her “this is the sound byte for what I’m doing. I’ve moved 3 tons of food and medical aid into an area the UN is afraid to fly into, where people are starving and only have leaves to eat. My satellite phone hit her cell phone in Lexington KY where she is in an air-conditioned, cupolaed, chandeliered barn photographing a 72 million dollar racehorse—we couldn’t be in two different worlds.

Rebel Soldiers | Ruweng County | Southern Sudan
Ruweng County is an island surrounded by enemies. It is the last stand for the rebels in the existing oil field area. They hike in plastic shoes that are taped and tied together and slog thru swamps with the goal of putting put a mortar shell or two into an existing oil operation. Armed with Kalishnikovs, they prepare to fight.
From the journal:
When the plane lands in Ruweng County, hundreds of people have been waiting by and are coming at us through the Savannah. These people are hoping to be reunited with their families; to leave to get to school, to take care of medical problems one boy had a brain tumor, so many people so many needs. The last flights in here were the World Health Organization with a polio campaign in mid April. And they only brought the vaccine; we were the first aid flight since February 1st. When I say aid flight I mean that I was trying to get here but since I had an entire airplane for myself I am also carrying 3 tons of corn that I bought for a hundred dollars a ton and medical supplies from MedAir—the only NGO operating in this area. Since Februarythe 3-4,000 people here have only had 25 50 kg bags of maize and 75% of that went to the army.
Either you remain in Ruweng County and die or you are forced into a government garrison town. It is a six-hour walk to Panrieng, a government town. This is a full day’s walk for someone like me; it is a 14-hour walk to the front-line from this airstrip. There are all these people surrounding the plane with so many needs and the pilots did not want to be on the ground for very long because they are afraid of helicopter gun ships. The co-pilot speaks English but is never been here before and is being overrun by people who want to get out. We spend way too much time sorting this entire thing out with this plane on the ground in a no-fly. . Finally the village all puts the various packages on their heads that we have brought. A total of 1.5 ton of high protein biscuits, medical supplies, mosquito nets, my camera equipment and food. We head out on the two-hour walk to the village in blazing sun. The humidity here is much higher than northern Sudan. We walk over cracked earth in the 120-degree sunlight.
Benjamin, recently saw people digging in the cracks for durra, sorghum—little bits of it that fell in from the last food drop in February. This is the only NGO brave enough to operate in this area—and Benjamin doesn’t know how much longer he wants to stick around. I am staying at the MedAir compound—four huts with a straw fence—a dirt floor and no amenities. I am staring at an open can of tuna—starving—and can’t believe I forgot a spoon. MedAir is no help—a spoon is way too exotic here. So I dish the tuna out of the can with my fingers and go off to meet commander George Athoor. It is another half hour’s walk to his compound—There are no roads in the S P L A controlled Sudan. Distances are always given in hours for walking and you double the time for Americans. It is hard for a military commander to have presence when the only raw materials at your disposal are sticks and straw but George achieves it any way. Multiple armed guards have been alerted and I am ushered into a huge straw walled area with one chair in the middle. George is sitting in the chair—regal in his thatch Castle. He is like everyone I’ve met here in southern Sudan—honest and dignified. I tell him I want to show how his people are suffering—He wants to know some general information about my dealings in the north and it is just that simple—I start to work.
I don’t know exactly how to explain this but in the Arab world north of here–everyone shifted responsibility elsewhere—here people that are starving don’t even ask me for food. The man who loaded the airplane forgot water and had to run for it at the last minute. It meant we were 15 minutes late taking off and he apologized forever. I was shocked because he was taking responsibility for his actions–he knew that I wanted good light and he had screwed up. Just like every other Western visitor here, I am assigned a guide—Gabrielle—a good Christian African name–it takes him two days to work up the courage to ask for an a water bottle.

Shattered Sudan | Drilling for Oil, Hoping for Peace, National Geographic

Shattered Sudan | Drilling for Oil, Hoping for Peace, National Geographic

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