Sudan in the 1980s was relatively quiet. In 1987 I was based there, working for aid agency Care in the final years before Omar al-Bashir seized power.
One day I was returning from the city of El Obeid to the capital, Khartoum. After two weeks of dust and extreme heat we were thankful to be travelling overland across the desert at night, when it would be cooler. There were no tarmac roads, just dusty tracks. Two colleagues, our driver and I left at sundown for what should have been a six or seven-hour drive.
