يوم الويكاب دا يوم عيدنا

Quote: Heglig In Heglig, where Mahmud spent the rainy season, people lived in even closer proximity. After the men had worked their fields they collected a plate of stew from their wives and took it to eat with the other men together with any guests in the village. The guest stayed in the khalwa. Originally, a khalwa was the place where a Sufi, a Muslim mystic, would retreat to pray and fast, but the word began to be used to describe the religious and cultural centre of a small community . It was a place for congregational prayer, a guest house, a kindergarten, and a place to eat a meal and to idle away an evening in male company. People were not rich enough to withstand a crop failure without going hungry. The first study of diet in the area took place in the 1940s, and it showed that people depended heavily on one crop, sorghum, most commonly eaten as a sour bread pancake called kisra. The roasted grains were used to treat nausea and charred stalks made a flavour enhancing potash called weikab. Heglig folk memories recall the poor diet of their village - the monotonous diet affected people's night vision so badly that they needed guide-ropes to get home from the khalwa after their evening meal. It was only when mustard-cress was introduced that the problem cleared up . Sorghum stalks made toy flutes for boys and girls turned the leaves into trumpets . Rufa'a was a town where girls and boys mixed together into late childhood, and Mahmud's sister-in-law remembers that he played with the boys and girls of his part of the town, Daym Graydab (Qaridab). They played games like shilayl and ayt al-noba which have children hiding and finding scraps of bone or cloth, shrieking nonsense chants in enthusiastic accompaniment . He also played football - a game that had only recently arrived in Sudan, and that had been taken up by one of Rufa'a's most famous inhabitants, Babikr Bedri, a farsighted educationalist. In 1904 he ordered footballs for his boys' school . The boys played barefoot and with great gusto . When the Rufa'a boys went to Wad Medani, the provincial capital for the annual competition, there were so many of them that they were sometimes put up in the jail .