I lived for two weeks in an Arab village at the edge of the Nubian Desert in northern Sudan, a five-hour drive from the capital Khartoum. Seeing the way people lived in this village – without electricity or clean water and with only shoddy health and educational services – really helped me appreciate what I had. But it also taught me quite a bit about Sudanese politics and surprisingly, about the conflict in the western Darfur region.

Sara washes dishes the old-fashioned way in her home in Sudan. Photo by Heba Aly.

What is the Darfur conflict all about? That's a complicated question with a whole lot of answers, but one of them is marginalization. Most of the inhabitants of Darfur – which literally means the home of the Fur tribe – are African; while most of Sudan's senior members of government are Arab. There is an underlying assumption that those two realities are linked – that the government marginalizes Darfurians because they are African and not Arab. But spending time in the villages of northern Sudan made me realize that Darfurians aren't the only ones who are neglected by their government. There are many other groups in Sudan who feel they are just as marginalized.

Southern Sudan was at war with the northern government for more than two decades until a 2005 peace deal gave them the share of wealth and power they were seeking. There's been a rebellion in the eastern part of the country as well. And now northerners – despite being Arab – say they too get nothing from their government.

When you look at Sudan holistically, one UN worker once told me, it becomes clear that the problem is one of governance. But more often than not, the country's problems are examined through such a thin lens that this bigger picture is often lost. Seeing the conditions of the Arabs in the north brought it back into sharp focus for me.

We're not only talking about people who live without electricity -- meaning no light at night, no refrigerator to keep food in, no fan to escape the acute heat. We're also talking about people who get their water with jugs from the Nile River or by manual pulling water out of a well. We're talking about people whose single health clinic consists of an emaciated building with two virtually empty rooms and one ill-equipped health worker. We're talking about people whose grade 8 children cannot answer "How are you?" in English.

These people -- like many of their country men on the peripheries of Sudan -- have virtually nothing. And their race seems to have little to do with it.

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