Greetings from Khartoum, Sudan, where those with the least offer their guests the most

Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly series in which NPR’s international team shares moments from their lives and work around the world.

In April, I visited the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, a few months after it was recaptured by the Sudanese army. After more than two years of civil war, the scale of obliteration was utterly tragic. One of Africa’s most vibrant cities — which I’d first visited in 2020 — had become a shell of itself.

Most of Khartoum was eerily empty. But a few people remained. Some had survived a brutal occupation by the paramilitary group at war with the army. Others — among more than 6 million people displaced from Khartoum — were just beginning to return.

For about five days, my Sudanese colleagues — journalist Ammar Awad and photographer Faiz Abubakr — and I met as many Khartoum residents as we could. Some had been tortured, or lost family members, or belongings. They welcomed us into their homes on the verge of collapse, in buildings hammered by artillery and gunfire.

We were constantly confronted with a kind of stubborn, irrepressible hospitality. Each of these interviews generally began with them offering Sudanese coffee or tea, the coffee often black and dense, the tea black or mahogany-red, sometimes with cinnamon leaves. 

Glass after glass, interview after interview. After two or three — my ideal maximum for a day — this deluge of tea and coffee became testing.

Sometimes my polite refusal was enough. Other times, it was swatted away with the arrival of yet another tray — another set of glasses and a bowl of sugar, sometimes served with dates and water.

After a few days, I started to take pictures of this gently relentless ritual of kindness — offered by people fortunate to survive the war with enough to sustain themselves, and by others left with virtually nothing.

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