SUDAN: Women from the south have little choice. Displaced by war, alcohol sales offer them a thread of survival. reports Declan Walsh in Port Sudan.
Sunlight streamed through the barred windows of Port Sudan prison.
Conditions were grim - a cramped communal cell, no beds, foul-smelling latrines and a pair of stern-faced female warders. In the shadows sat a young woman, cradling a baby at her breast and weeping bitterly.
A month earlier police caught 22-year-old Mary Panasio brewing alcohol, a serious offence under Sudan's strict Sharia laws.
The judge threw her into the women's prison. Wiping away the tears, she said she was both guilty and innocent.
Yes, she had brewed beer. But she was a Christian, not a Muslim.
At home in Bentiu, 900 miles to the south, alcohol production was a time-honoured tradition. And here in the north, on the edge of the Red Sea, it offered a rare form of income.
"I had no choice," she said, rubbing oil on to six-month-old Emmanuel and shooing away a cloud of flies. "I have no money. How else can I survive?"
Across northern Sudan, women's jails are packed with southern women convicted of brewing alcohol. Of the 20 prisoners crammed into Port Sudan prison, over half are on alcohol charges.
Fellow inmates included a prostitute caught with a sailor, marijuana dealers and a woman who had an abortion.
"Alcohol is a profitable but risky business," said Amal Alkashif, a local aid worker with the charity Ockenden International, which trains prisoners to find alternative means of income.
Ranging from fresh-faced teenagers to wrinkled grannies, the southerners' sentences range from one to seven months, usually including a hefty fine.
All cover their heads in Muslim style, as do the warders.
The women say they are treated fairly, but confinement is difficult. Lunch was being prepared as we arrived, a stack of dirt-coloured bread husks. To chance getting flung in here for the sake of selling a few containers of beer seems a disproportionate risk.
But the southern women have little choice. Displaced by war, isolated by society and desperately poor, beer offers at least a thread of survival.
"This is an old custom at home. There are no problems and no prisons. But here in the north, we are not fitting in," said Rosa Philip, a 56-year-old from Raja in Bahr el Ghazal.
Twisting a plastic flower ring on her finger, Mary continued her story. A decade ago she fled Bentiu for the north, following a fierce battle in which her father and two stepmothers were killed. She ran north on foot to Kosti, then later to Khartoum, a dusty city ringed with squalid camps filled with homeless southerners.
Then one day she went to Port Sudan to visit a relative, and never went back. The move held a small irony - Port Sudan is linked to Bentiu by a long oil pipeline, whose lucrative contents were behind much of the war's fighting in recent years.
So far she has been arrested three times. The last time police raided during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. "They asked me 'Why are you doing this now?'" she said. But most of her customers were Muslims, she added.
The problem is rooted in the poverty of the southern Sudanese living in the north.
Shadr shantytown on the edge of Port Sudan is a hot, harsh place. Caught between town and desert, squatters reclaimed the land from a former rubbish dump. Clusters of ramshackle huts are fashioned from wood, tin and sacks; a camel was tethered amidst a sea of fluttering plastic bags.
The morning we visited a whiff of raw alcohol hung on the breeze. The police had raided the night before, reported a trader. When the brewers heard them coming, they dumped their produce and scrammed.
Margaret Peter (23) stood over an empty pit under the bed in her fly-filled shack. She had dodged the police but lost her equipment - two plastic barrels and some pots - and raw materials.
"They confiscated everything. But if caught I would have paid 50,000 dinars (€162) to get out. There's no way I can afford that," she said. The beer brought profits of €5 for every jerry can, she said.
It would be better to sell tea, but she had to look after her baby. And anyway, tea stalls required a government permit, which at €55 was an unaffordable sum.
However, other brewers have shown that the leap to legitimacy is possible. Jersa Nyoka, a big smiling woman from the southern city of Yei, runs a tea stall in a nearby market. In 1989 she fled to the north carrying nothing but the baby on her back.
For years she survived through the cat-and-mouse alcohol-brewing game. Then she got a grant from the charity Ockenden to start a new business.
Now she sits under a modest shack and serves sweet tea from a gold-coloured kettle. Alcohol was lucrative but ultimately a mug's game, she said. The massive fines were forever sapping her profits.
"It was income-generating all right - for the people who run the prison," she laughed.
Back in the gloomy prison, the inmates were thinking of home. After two decades of war, peace is close at hand. Rebels and government are negotiating hard; a peace deal is expected to be finalised early in the new year.