Even The Dead Are Coming

In 1987 Mike Robbins, a 30-year-old London journalist, decided on a change of lifestyle and signed up for two years as an overseas volunteer. Some weeks later he found himself standing with his luggage in the middle of a featureless baked-earth plain in Eastern Sudan. It was over 100 deg F in the shade. And there was no shade. This is Robbins's account of the two years that followed, working with the Sudan Government in the last months of a failed democratic experiment, as the country coped with hundreds of thousands of refugees in the aftermath of the 1980s famine. But it is also a personal account of life as a development volunteer in a surprising, sometimes inspiring, country.

In 1987 Mike Robbins, a 30-year-old London journalist, decided on a change of lifestyle and signed up for two years as an overseas volunteer. Some weeks later he found himself standing with his luggage in the middle of a featureless baked-earth plain in Eastern Sudan. It was over 100 deg F in the shade. And there was no shade. This is Robbins's account of the two years that followed, working with the Sudan Government in the last months of a failed democratic experiment, as the country coped with hundreds of thousands of refugees in the aftermath of the 1980s famine. But it is also a personal account of life as a development volunteer in a surprising, sometimes inspiring, country.

Mike Robbins was born in London in 1957. As a young man he spent time in music publishing, financial journalism, traffic broadcasting and reporting on the fishing industry. In 1987 he began two years as a development aid volunteer with the Refugee Settlement Administration in the eastern region of Sudan. It was this period that is described in Even the Dead are Coming, which was written soon after he left Sudan. He served as a volunteer again in the 1990s, this time in Bhutan, and also spent long periods in Syria, Brussels and Rome. In 2002 he moved to Norwich in England, where he was later awarded a PhD by the University of East Anglia for work on the relationship between climate change and agriculture. He is currently in New York.