Word: gaili
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Asked if he considers himself a present-day Sudanese ambassador, el-Gaili laughs...
...father, a former supreme court justice in Khartoum, where el-Gaili was born, became disillusioned by increasing governmental encroachment onto the judiciary and left the country with his wife and four children for self-imposed exile in 1978. El-Gaili was two years old at the time. With the encouragement of his father, el-Gaili mostly learned about events in his homeland--its civil wars, famines, floods and increasing implementation of fundamentalist Islamic law--from newspapers he started to read when he was eight, at his home in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, on the other side...
...family returned to Sudan every summer to visit relatives. For el-Gaili, growing up the only Sudanese expatriate at his Saudi school, memories of the town el-Gaili, named after an ancestor and 25 miles north of Khartoum, became a major influence over his identification with his country. Still, from ninth grade onwards, el-Gaili harbored dreams of going to America and broadening his horizons...
Originally, however, el-Gaili's father, a conservative Muslim, was very opposed to el-Gaili leaving the Middle East and tried to persuade him to take the traditional elite Sudanese education--university in Egypt and graduate school in England...
...headmaster at my Saudi school, who was an avid supporter of my [American] education, had to meet with my father for three hours before he gave his consent," el-Gaili recalls...