Quirks of Living in a Sanctioned Country

I've officially been in Sudan two months!!!

The US (and other partners, like the EU, Canada, etc.) have a web of sanctions and embargoes on Sudan that make doing business in Sudan the equivalent of threading a needle. I'm not going to go into the details of these sanctions (if you want to waste a few hours and have your eyes glaze over, feel free to peruse the US Department of the Treasury's website here), but because of all these sanctions, I need to conduct all financial transactions over a VPN which, to be fair, is a best practice living in any foreign country. As such, I have a VPN downloaded on my computer and to make sure I never forget, I ALWAYS activate it before going online. I'd hate to have my brain freeze lead to a frozen bank account or credit card.

A beautiful Sudanese sunset over the Nile.

Now that I have all my stuff, including my printer, I decided to plug in my electronics to make sure they all work. And my printer does work...mostly. It's a wireless printer and the plug-in cord doesn't actually fit on my computer, so I happily send things to it wirelessly. But remember the previous paragraph and VPNs and all? Yeah, my computer has a VPN, but my printer doesn't, so my printer has a Sudanese IP address and my computer has a US one. Therefore, sending a document to the printer wirelessly doesn't work, and it took me about 20 minutes of troubleshooting this morning before I realized that I will forever have to disconnect from my VPN in order to print. At least the printer works and I didn't have an ink disaster when unpacking?

In another quirk of a sanctioned country, I have an iPhone here but the Apple Store doesn't let Sudanese data plans/IP addresses download apps. And if you have an iPhone and have experienced the PAINFULNESS that is AppleMaps, you know downloading GoogleMaps is an absolute necessity. Thankfully some people here have VPN routers so I was able to connect to them to download apps I need/want. But now the apps won't update because, oh wait, I'm not on the VPN router all the time so it thinks a Sudanese data plan/IP address is trying to update. And I'm back to the big no-no part. So as a quirk of living in a sanctioned country, anytime I want a new app, or want to update an app to get rid of that super annoying number on my phone telling me that I have apps that need updating, I will need to go to a friend's house with a VPN router set up. The perfectionist in me--the same one that must have 0 unread emails in my inbox--is dying because of this.

I'm sure that in two years here I'll find other quirks. I'm already adjusting to the all-cash economy, although not being able to get cash at any time is a bit of frustration. At least things are relatively cheap, so I don't go through the cash all that quickly!

And while this song has nothing to do with this post, I really like it. So enjoy Lauren Aquilina's Sinners.