I know, I say this a lot.
And I really can't say its the last time lol.
But!!!
I was so busy working on establishing a youtube channel that blogger kind of slipped my mind a little...
So Youtube is going quite well... although I do have a story to tell you about when it didn't go so well...
As a British Sudanese there is so much that I get wrong in Sudanese culture and I have a lot to learn, but being fluent in Arabic and of a Sudanese ethnicity makes my mistakes far less forgivable to Sudanese people.
Following strong requests from my youtube comments to produce videos in Arabic I decided to try it out... and two videos received a very negative response from the non-english speaking community. One addressed harassment and the other was a story about a vet I met briefly who told me she refused to treat a dog because well... it was a dog.
As you can imagine, a vet refusing to treat an animal puzzled me... I didn't really understand why someone would choose this particular career if they had a prejudice towards animals... It turned out that in Sudan, people use animals for their livelihood and not for any sort of emotional attachment - having a dog was a sign of wealth and the vet saw bringing a dog as a 'show off' gesture. She was accustomed to treating cows and sheep which people use for their livelihoods.
Harassment was also an issue that proved to be very sensitive in the Sudanese community, although many of the comments resorted to insults (very common in any youtube community) there was an underlying belief that addressing the issue was somehow worse than the issue itself. I was called 'galeelat adab' which translates to 'badly mannered' and I decided to investigate the issue further.
After carefully analysing the comments I realised that the issue wasn't so much me, or how I was addressing the issue, it was more the issue itself. In a country where people are starving, earning very little, pressured from every aspect to partake in corruption - harassment is something little see as a real issue. It is a 'rich people problem'. The public was outraged that an issue like this is even being addressed meanwhile other issues like the government and the state of the country were left unspoken about.
As it isn't really possible to speak about the social and economic climate in the country due to the lack of freedom of expression, I decided to stick to English videos for the time being... but these issues highlighted the struggle of growing up between cultures - my western friends wouldn't be able to fathom a vet who refuses to treat a dog, whereas my eastern ones wouldn't fathom a patient bringing in a dog in the first place...
