البجا
On a visit to Khartoum, after his last journey with the nomads, Asher was asked by UNICEF Sudan to organise a camel caravan in the Red Sea Hills to take aid to Beja people cut off by drought and famine. On this expedition Asher met UNICEF PR officer Mariantonietta Peru, an Italian from Sardinia; they married in 1986. A graduate of the University of Rome, Peru was a fluent Arabic speaker who had studied at the White Fathers Institute at the Vatican, and at Ain Shams University in Cairo; she was also a UNICEF-trained photographer. Together, Asher and Peru planned to realise a vision Asher had conceived years earlier; the first ever crossing of the Sahara breadth-wise, by camel and on foot. Influenced by the work of British author Geoffrey Moorhouse—who had unsuccessfully attempted this crossing in 1972— Asher and Peru decided, contrary to the original idea, to make the crossing from the Atlantic in Mauritania to the Nile in Egypt.