just happened to be:

Just happened to be in the head office of the Bank of Sudan in Khartoum, waiting to cash a Ministry of Education cheque for an end of contract lump sum and salary payments the Ministry had not paid over the previous two years.

I reached the front of the queue and the cashier exchanged the cheque for several stacks of new, crisp Sudanese one- and five-pound notes. He also gave me two poor quality see-through carrier bags into which we stuffed most of the money until the bags reached breaking point. He wrapped the remaining bundles of cash in newspaper, which smelled of peanut sauce.

I walked out of the sweaty heat of the bank into the lung-scorching heat of Khartoum carrying two flimsy plastic bags from which money was poking conspicuously. There were no taxis or buses in the sandy potholed streets because of petrol rationing so I walked back to my cheap hotel. Funny to think that I had chosen it the previous day because I only had the money to pay for one night’s stay.

I was carrying enough cash to buy a house and was due to fly to the UK in two days. Only $100 Sudanese pounds could be legally changed into hard currency and I had already reached the statutory limit. There was a thriving black market I could use but that was both morally dodgy and potentially life-threatening. Although Sudanese hospitality would normally put the “developed” world to shame and I had never experienced any violence against me, changing two bagfulls of new banknotes would be asking for trouble.

I eventually decided to give the money away. After ruling out NGOs and charitable organisations, I decided to give it to Abdullah Bashir, a friend from Kadulgi whom I had been told would be in Khartoum during Ramadan. Although there was no phone network and even if there had been he wouldn’t have been connected to it, I knew a place where people from Kadugli met in the evening. They would be able to where he was.