50 years of VSO: Sudan in the 80s
In 1985, BBC World Service presenter Fred Dove was a newly qualified language teacher wondering if he really wanted to teach in Britain. Then he saw an ad for VSO that changed his life forever. Here he describes life in a sleepy town in northern Sudan, the early years of HIV and AIDS and how volunteering led directly to a successful career in broadcast journalism.
At 24, while training to be a Modern Language teacher, Fred Dove was becoming more and more doubtful about teaching in Britain. Then he came across an ad in the paper for VSO. Having lived in Nigeria as a child, the idea of working abroad appealed to him. ‘So I wrote to VSO, got the applications forms, and the rest, as they say, is history,’ says Fred.
Tea and teaching in Sudan
Fred was offered a volunteer job in Sudan, where VSO had been working since 1963. As a Technical English teacher in a mechanical engineering college, Fred’s job was to improve the English skills of the students so that they properly could properly access the curriculum. ‘All text books were in English, lectures were in English and the students had to write in English,’ Fred explains. ‘So it was a fairly straightforward post. I didn’t have a counterpart to train up like VSO volunteers often do today. I was there to teach English.’
Life was good in the northern town of Atbara. ‘It was a fairly sleepy, provincial town on the banks of the Nile,’ remembers Fred. ‘People were generally friendly and hospitable. You’d end up having conversations in the market about where you were from, and you’d be invited round to people’s homes for meals or cups of tea – very small cups with lots of sugar. Because we were by the Nile there was always food, always water. It was a lovely place – sunsets over the Nile were particularly spectacular.’
The emergence of HIV and AIDS
This was the eighties, and HIV and AIDS were starting to hit the headlines. ‘Back then, not much was known about where it came from,’ says Fred. ‘I remember fellow volunteers and I talking about HIV over a cup of tea in the evenings in the yard under the open sky, thinking ‘here we are in a country where there are mosquitoes, there is malaria, HIV is a blood disease, hang on…mosquitoes?’’ The realities of the infection would emerge throughout the decade. In 1999 VSO volunteers began working on HIV and AIDS related placements; within three years it had become one of VSO’s two priority goals.
Sudanese leaders close up
Civil war was raging in southern Sudan but it didn’t impinge on life in peaceful Atbara in the north. Fred was aware of the conflict because he read the papers, but he felt far removed from it thanks to the country’s massive scale. That would change dramatically just a few years later.
‘When I returned to the UK I became a trainee producer at the BBC World Service,’ says Fred. ‘And within four or five years of leaving Sudan I found myself interviewing two leading Sudanese figures: John Garang, the leader of the southern rebels and the northern Islamist leader Hassan al-Turabi.’
Both names Fred knew well from his time in Sudan, and both men he would never have imagined crossing paths with. ‘There I was, a young producer, interviewing these men for a world audience, but of course bringing to the interviews all my memories and experiences of my years in Sudan,’ Fred recalls. ‘Whether it made for a better interview – well, I hope it did, because I was able to bring something to the interview that many others couldn’t. My knowledge of Sudan helped tremendously.’
The professional and personal benefits of volunteering
VSO was key to getting that crucial first traineeship at the BBC World Service. ‘When I applied, one of the criteria for the job was having lived and worked overseas – which of course I had because I’d done VSO. So I got the job and have spent most of my working life at the World Service…now whether I’d have ended up doing that without VSO – I don’t think so.’
Volunteering had a major impact on Fred’s personal life too: he met his future wife, a fellow teacher from the UK, in Khartoum. Nearly twenty years and two children later, Fred says he’d recommend VSO to his family in a flash. ‘If my kids come along in ten years’ time and say ‘Dad I’d like to do VSO’, I’d say ‘Absolutely, go do it. It can widen your horizons if you’ve never worked abroad before, it can give you a chance to visit places you wouldn’t normally get to see, it can leave you with friendships that will last a lifetime, and when you come back you could be a different person. You will have challenging times, but you’ll never regret it.’