Word: nile
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Jonglei project, named after the nearly inaccessible province it crosses, is being built to carry needed water to Sudan's arid north and to Egypt. The channel could irrigate some 600,000 acres of land by diverting 30% of the flow of the White Nile River, as much as 5.2 billion gal. of water a day, around the Sudd, a vast swampland in southern Sudan...
...Sudd, Arabic for barrier, is aptly named. Its central 7,000 sq. mi. are permanently clogged with reeds and papyrus and infested with 63 species of mosquito. From May to October, the White Nile floods and temporarily extends the swamp another 4,300 sq. mi. Says Daniel Yong, a member of the area's nomadic Dinka tribe and a Jonglei Canal project official: "In the rainy season there is water everywhere, but in the dry season you can die of thirst." The Sudd proved an obstacle to 19th century explorers, but today it is more of a hindrance...
...Sudan, the story is much the same: 518 fighters arrived in August, and only 370 remain today. The Palestinians who live in tents at Mashtal el Bassatin, a Nile village 120 miles north of Khartoum, occasionally call themselves Polisario, after the desert guerrillas of northwestern Africa. Says one: "We did not choose to come here." Discipline at Mashtal el Bassatin has broken down only once: on the day the fighters heard over the radio of the Beirut massacre. Outraged, some of the men set their tents on fire. About 100 of them had relatives in the two Beirut camps...
...images revealed stream channels, broad flood plains and what millenniums ago had been great river valleys, some as wide as those of the Nile. Though a few experts speculate that the ancient and modern water systems were once connected, there is no supporting evidence. In fact, says McCauley, "the trending of the [ancient] rivers is to the south and west, the opposite of the present-day movement. It is possible they all joined up to one large basin of interior drainage as large as the Caspian...
...volunteer effort was in the planning for seven years after Fiennes' wife Virginia first proposed it to her husband, whose previous ventures had included a Hovercraft expedition on the White Nile. Fiennes met Burton, a former army corporal, at a party, and he agreed to go along on a training mission to the Arctic in 1977. An advertisement for a deck hand turned up Anthony Bowring, a seaman, who tracked down a 27-year-old polar ship. Bowring then persuaded his father's insurance firm, C.T. Bowring, and a New York insurance company to buy the ship...