14 - 15 March

Karima, Wednesday, 14 March
Went for tour of Kendall’s work at Gebel Barkal yesterday. Very intriguing. Hashem, our cook the past few weeks, had us to his house in Karima for tea. Wonderful. Off to Kerma today. Still need to finish packing a few odds and ends and inventory the dig supplies, house stuff, etc., that we’re leaving behind. G and T kindly inventoried most of the dig supplies for me yesterday while I was lying down trying to kill a migraine.

Redwan’s House, Tombos, Thursday, 15 March
Brief note: After calls from multiple mosques this morning I am immensely grateful that Christians don’t do the call to prayer. “Morning, y’all, it’s time to offer up your prayer to the Lord.” I can just picture it. Women fighting over who got the honor (or whose husband go the honor). Mega churches competing to see who had the best sound system. I bet that huge cross thing in Effingham would be audible in Chicago if they did that.
Long, bumpy ride across the Nubian Desert to get here yesterday, through a sandstorm, no less. Not a bad one, but enough for Mubarak, the guy who replaced Bomba as our primary driver, to tell me I needed to wash my face when we stopped for lunch. ☺ I apparently attract filth. (And if that’s not an open-ended opportunity to make cracks about T, I don’t know what is…)
Scrambled around the Western Defuffa today. Lots of mudbrick pictures for a certain friend.

Kerma, 10:50 AM, Thursday, 15 March
Sitting on one of the reconstruction outlines of an ancient building near the Defuffa. Lovely morning scrambling around the rocks at Tombos to see various inscriptions. Beautiful Nile views. Awesome quarrying areas. And I got to play with a puppy. (I miss ours.)
As we drive through the towns around here, people stop and yell “Khawaja” (“foreigner!”) not in a hostile way, but it gets a little old. Anyway, on occasion we yell back “Sudani!” which usually gets a good laugh. Recently, though, G, sitting in the front of the Land Cruiser, leans out the window and yells back at a woman “Hey, baby!” I reached forward and smacked him. He turned around and said “hey, I thought you were listening to music.” I told him that didn’t prevent me from knowing when he was acting like a jackass. ☺