Sudan is one of those places that exist solely to test mankind’s faith in the Creator. It’s hot, dusty and packed to the rim with millions of people who hate each other. Wherever you look you are guaranteed a view much different than anything you’d see anywhere else. People black as tar and people with green eyes and blond hair sharing the same passport colour. Large suburban villas with garages big enough for six cars towering over neighbouring huts with mud bricks for walls and steel plates for roofs. Elementary schools with 90 children to a class, no electricity or canteen, where 7 year olds are expected to learn 13 books by heart and discipline is handed down through multicoloured donkey whips. People abandoning their ‘7-rooms, free water and generated electricity, 300m2 front yards complete with sea front view’ homes to labour under the sun selling tissue boxes and expired pre-paid cards and sleep in cramped rooms with no running water and the sewage lining the front steps, dreading the morrow with it’s inevitable empty stomachs and tax collectors. The longest river in the world, an empty promise of welfare and prosperity, a sliver of muddy blue raging north, carrying fish, alligators and drowned boys on its way, feeding the land on either side and then claiming it all back in one powerful flood whenever it feels like it. Hatred lurking behind each tree, under each rock, in each black-hearted soul, cooking and simmering for years on end, only to boil over and scorch every plant and person in its way; all in the name of freedom. Hopeless youth, oppressed by democracy that doesn’t exist, merciless poverty sparing no one, and a long, long night with no morning in sight. The Great Sudanese Dream; a declaration of equality and prosperity for the broken land; of peace and freedom from border to border; of love and brotherhood overcoming all barriers of colour, language and origin. The Great Sudanese Dream that until this moment is nothing more than a mirage over the dusty horizon, a child’s hope for the uncertain future, a maybe that just won’t seem to become an is.