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By Root 501 0

sometimes with goat cheese and sometimes with camel’s liver fried in strips and placed on top. Tomatoes and pungent onions in a little salad were a rare pleasure. During the Eid al-Fitr, the feast that marks the end of Ramadan, which was around Thanksgiving that year, we happened on a little camp across the mountain from Nyala and found a group of young men killing and frying whole chickens in a wok of boiling oil over an open wood fire. We sat under a spreading baobab tree for hours savoring the food and telling stories, my Arabic being pretty good by then. I did not know the word for snake, however, so I was a little slow to react when a small, deadly black mamba crawled under me and the men were yelling for me to move.

For months in Darfur, Kamal and I sat in the souk, befriending the young men who were the targets of the project, questioning them about what they knew about the employment training opportunities and what would make a difference in their decision to take advantage of them. Most of the time, Kamal asked the questions and I completed the surveys. After a little while, the pitfalls emerged, some so obvious as to make the original design of the project seem ridiculous. Using expensive power lathes in the classroom made little sense when power was unavailable for much of the day and when no such equipment would ever be seen at a Sudanese construction site. Offering classes during market hours was pointless when those same “unemployed” young men were out hustling, selling cigarettes or newspapers in the souk to earn enough to eat that day. Class sites too distant to get to from the souk … Well, you get the picture. For the project to work, we concluded, classes would have to be offered in or near the souk, after it closed, in skills needed and with tools used on a typical Sudanese construction site. The most effective incentive to bring the young men in was food.

After several months in Darfur, with a mixture of excitement and sadness Kamal and I boarded a retrofitted bus from China for the trip back to Khartoum. Many of the young boys and men I had met in the El Fasher souk came to see us off. We bounced along toward Khartoum, the bus packed, hot, and squalid, with my knees banging against the screws in the back of the metal seat in front of me until they bled. But I sensed I had been in the presence of something—in Darfur and across Africa—more meaningful than I could get from any book or class.

After my work in Sudan was finished, I traveled to Cameroon in West Africa, and then hitchhiked from there across Nigeria to Lagos, its capital, befriending strangers and spending the night in the homes of people I met along the way. Before the end of my fellowship year, I had trekked extensively around West Africa, through large cities and tiny villages, verdant bush and dusty desert. Benin, Togo, Ghana, Mali, Niger were each so different—each with points of great pride, each with its own personality, its own aspirations and grudges.

I had never seen such poverty. It made my own experience growing up in Chicago seem small and insignificant. Most people lived in rudimentary shelters. Even in urban and highly developed Cairo, the poor crowded together as squatters on the roofs of the elegant apartment buildings along the Nile. Everything was put to use, every part of every animal, every part of every crop. And everything was shared. The generosity of material and spirit humbled me and changed me. I surrendered to it. Though I was sometimes painfully lonely as weeks turned into months without contact with home, I was repeatedly touched by the simple kindness of strangers. I met people on jitneys traveling between villages or on a plane, and through them I found a place to eat or lodging for the night. I felt as though I was being handed from one stranger to the next, hardly without interruption.

Even before my year was over, I knew I had stood in places that I could have never conjured on my own, and I had received what I had come for: a deeper understanding of how broken, impoverished, or otherwise challenging