motorcycle…diaries?

An entry I wrote but never posted from my time in Khartoum.

Little is more humorous, I think, to my Sudanese neighbors than the sight of a white person (me) learning to ride a motorcycle. “Learning” may be too generous a description: it involved stalling every hundred yards, going round and round the block. Understandably, I was the center of attention. Almost every other white person in the city (including myself, much of the time) is riding around in an SUV with a UN or NGO license plate. But my organization happened to have a motorcycle sitting around…

In what I thought was a clever move, I decided to begin my foray into motorcycle riding on a Friday afternoon on the dirt roads around our house. I thought Friday afternoon was particularly strategic since all of our neighbors, I imagined, would be at the mosque on this the Muslim holy day. And, indeed, they were. For about five minutes. Then I start to notice groups of men walking home. Apparently the services got out earlier than I thought! So here I am, obviously struggling, severely underdressed for Sudanese culture (jeans and a t-shirt), going down the dirt roads at minimal speed, the motorcycle making all sorts of weird noises because its painfully obvious I am doing something wrong.

It seems I’m practically the only person in Sudan who doesn’t know how to ride a motorcycle. Everyone wanted to kindly come to my rescue, telling me how I should be doing it. No matter what the age, 10 or 40, the pedestrians seemed to know more than I did.

And everyone is smiling at the sight of a khawaja struggling to ride a motorcycle. At least I made someone’s day a bit more interesting… Actually, I seem to do that quite a lot around here!