Gash – The Traveler
Blogpost by Ahmed A. Bagi Alamin
She starts her journey in Asmara City, and she always gets up after the heavy rains. Then she moves towards Sudan. It is somewhere in June. She crosses all the wonder valleys and passes the green hills, until the prospected guest reaches to Al Geerah village, where the Sudanese show her their respect to visit them. Despite their happiness, she will not stay there. Others are desperately waiting for her arrival, and she has a mission to accomplish. She left them after drawing a nice smile on their faces, though.
It is July 15th: she almost arrives to Kassala where she is greeting the Taka mountains and those gardens which are glad to have their thirst quenched after an along dry season. She has already crossed the Kassala bridge but she still need to keep going; because the challenging part of her journey has just begun.
Suddenly, she faces big soil strips constraining her and trying to force her on a certain track. Left or right. But the thing that you did not know about our traveler is that she is a bullheaded, particularly when she finds something trying to govern her wild manners. She tries destroy everything in front of her, pushing madly at the soil blocks, but in the end she is exhausted and she is forced in in the certain track to the left.
Hence, settled down she decides to discover more places, she has just gone through all open gates. At this moment, she is crossing Salaamalykom canal, going proudly among high banks in Kassala Block. She has just arrived to Misga 1 in front of the Darawandies, which is hanging in the Misga offtake to avoid that huge amount of silt that is accompanying her, meant to distribute the water to Tugarar Canal.
The traveler jumps the Darawandies and she is soothing the parched field with her pleasant water and covers the soil that has been dry since two years. She is disappointed as she finds a lot of intensive grasses and a big forest of trees scattering in the whole block of land though. She is shocked as to why did they not prepare for her coming! For she has come a long way to be with them. She saw the fields not even leveled as they were in the past and her effort to travel all this distance may be in vain when the water follows the lower spots and is drained away without infiltrating into the thirsty soil. Then she sees an old man on the other side of the field she saw standing on the other side well prepared.
The man treats his farm as one of his sons or daughters, who he misses so much as they now stay in town, leaving him alone to look for the field. He waits for a long time to be sure his farm gets enough water from the traveler.
At this moment, Gash decides to come to me, and end her long journey. Perhaps, next time, she will find all fields prepared, and the sons come back to do their duties to their earth. She bids farewell to me and did not tell me when she will be visiting us again. I will be waiting for her, all of us will be waiting with big expectations, hard works and hopes.
