Travel to Sudan

We have our travel permissions, and the El-Kurru group is planning to travel to Sudan in January 2022 to continue our work with our community collaborators and Sudanese professional colleagues in person! We will be working with a partner project at a nearby site, the Jebel Barkal Archaeological Project (website and blog here)—some team members will work on both projects.

At El-Kurru, we will work on renovating a house in the village that will be a first home for the Community Heritage Center. This is not just any home, but the home of Mahjoub Ali, who was the father of our friend and colleague in El-Kurru, Anwar Mahjoub.

Anwar wrote a beautiful tribute to the house and to his father that we plan to put on a panel at the entrance to the newly renovated house:

You are in the house of Mahjoub Ali.

Mahjoub Ali was a loving father, a boat maker, and had a kind heart.

He worked as a boat maker and a carpenter in a time when most of us did not have iron beds and chairs, so he used to fix most of the village’s artistic woodwork.

You saw him from distance, so you recognized him by the small bit of wood he had in his mouth, which was the remains of what he had been working on.

On days when he was building boats, he kept a pot by the river filled with coffee and tea.

This was not the first house of Mahjoub Ali, but this was the first house in which the writer saw the light and knew the meaning of the warmth of the family, the light of the lantern, and the quiet nights between his loving brothers and sisters.

Many memories! They have not and will not leave this place.

–Anwar Mahjoub

Our brilliant project architects, José Ignacío Forcadell Utrilla (“Nacho”) and Nadezhda Reshetnikova (“Nadia”), have made a few sketches of ways to renovate and update the house for its new uses:

Renovation of the old house is being funded by the J.M. Kaplan Fund and by the University of Michigan Humanities Collaboratory, and we are grateful to both for their support!