Six Months in Sudan (16 page)

“Back home we have only one wife. We think that is enough.”

“Oh yes. Even one is too many sometimes.”

I laugh. “Why did you come back to Abyei?”

“Because it is my home.”

I look around. To my right the barbed wire of the military compound, soldiers sitting idly in a covered house. To my left, the potholed path to the market. We turn down it together.

“Is Abyei better than before?”

“When I left many years ago you could not walk at night. Sometimes you would wake up and your neighbor would be disappeared. Soldiers would stop you and take you away, beat you for no reason. Maybe kill you. These days it is safe at night. For now.”

We are drawing closer to one of two food stalls in town. This one is
at the very start of the market, on one of the two paths that lead to my compound. I rarely take this one. Some of our nurses and drivers are sitting down and eating pieces of fried goat with their fingers, breaking off pieces of bread.

“Will you join me for lunch?” Alfred asks.

“Oh, no, thank you. Mine is waiting for me at compound 1. I have to talk with Tim about getting a helper for Mansood.”

“Please, it would be nice for me.”

“There are some things I have to do. Next time. Thank you, Alfred.”

He frowns for a second, then shakes my hand. Some of the nurses look up. I wave. They smile.

“Well, I’ll leave you to it. See you back at the hospital. Take your time.”

I stop at a stand. I have been stealing Tim’s cigarettes mercilessly and decide I should buy him a couple of packages. I pocket my change and look back at my translator. He is smiling and laughing with the others.

I turn around and walk towards my compound.

01/04: new normal.

this morning, during breakfast, a loudspeaker blared thick arabic. today was a cleanup day in abyei. everyone was to clean the space outside their tukuls, or face consequences. tonight the air is full of the sharp smell of plastic. fires line the road. you can see the black shadows of people tending them flicker and dance on the grass walls behind.

people fix flowers to the handlebars of their bicycles in bunches. roses, carnations, impossible pink flowers in rows. even soldiers. daisies pour off the front, a machine gun hangs from the back.

when an organism enters a new environment, with time the new stimuli elicit diminishing responses. as it inhabits, it habituates. in a conflict setting, for expatriates, it is called “immersion.” at first, every soldier is registered, every weapon noticed. after weeks, in a new normal, one sees mostly daisies.

for years i was blind to flowers. it took a friend to show me how easy they are to love. in the hot morning, they hang for water. an hour after, they stand tall. when i leave the feeding center, i think about that.

T
HIS IS WHAT HAPPENS
if you are a Dinka child, say thirteen months old, and you have around your waist a circle of beads looped twice, like Aweil’s beads except some of yours are blue, and you are naked except for these beads and lying on the cracked plastic bed in the small emergency room of Abyei’s only hospital at ten at night surrounded by your mother, father, a nurse, and a midwife who is trying ineffectively to blow air into your small lungs with a face mask that is four sizes too big and lets all the air slip out of the sides, and the Canadian doctor arrives just in time to watch you take your last ten breaths, and then they stop and then you die. This is what happens.

Your mother screams, turns, and leaves the room. The metal emergency door clangs behind her. Your family outside the emergency room, an impressive number of aunts, uncles, grandparents, and friends, start to wail.

Your father sits down on the other cracked plastic bed, puts his face in his hands, and looks through his spread fingers.

A nurse puts one hand over your eyes and uses the other to close your mouth. She holds them like that until a clean cotton cloth can be placed over your face and she puts her hand over that.

The midwife takes long strings of gauze and slowly wraps them around your head, again and again, until your mouth and eyes are closed fast.

The nurse removes the intravenous and cleans your skin of blood.

Your father takes a small piece of string and binds your large toes together, to keep your legs closed, then wraps your feet. Your hands are placed grasping each other, and your thumbs are bound. Your fingers sit neatly folded together like piano keys. Your hands and wrists are then covered in gauze. Last, he lifts you onto a piece of colored cloth and wraps you a final time.

Someone opens the door (your grandmother?) and takes you from the room.

I stand there useless, and once the emergency room empties, I am alone. I pick up the gloves off the ground, square the edge of the
cracked plastic bed with its metal frame. I loop the padlock through the drug cupboard and click it shut.

I take my time. I secretly hope that you and your family are gone when I step out into the night air. I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry? That after the tenth time, it is not getting any easier at all? I just want to walk home alone, eat my dinner leaning over the stove, and go to my tukul and not see anyone.

They’re gone. So are you. To where? I don’t know. Here, for me, your story ends. Mine goes on, rushes away from me in all directions, so many things in it I don’t know where to begin.

I finish with the last of the outpatients and walk towards the gate of the hospital.

“Call driver?” the guard asks.

“No. I walk. Cigarette?”

He gives me one. The package has a picture of a soccer player on it. He lights the cigarette for me.

I start walking home. The night is moonless and black. The cigarette tastes terrible. I throw it on the ground. I strain forward against the dark and a soldier almost barrels into me.

08/04: easter.

the abyei night is black like thick ink. as you walk down the road pushing your face into it, trying to gain a centimeter or two of perspective, it almost meets a soldier’s leaning over his handlebars doing the same. you both recoil like surprised fishes at the black bottom of the ocean. he swerves, and the flowers on his handlebars brush your arm.

this morning, a sleep headache behind my eyes, i laced up my running shoes and ran out of town. i wanted some open space; no people, no cars, no zigzagging chickens, only the wide horizon. a few kilometers north of abyei, the sun and the moon shared the sky with dawn birds.

here in abyei, outside the hospital and in it, i am witness to the most beautiful things. today i was standing in the measles recubra holding a child from the feeding center in my arms. measles had once again swept through our hospital and infected his mother. she was too feverish to move. paola was giving her a sponge bath, and i was hoping to find a mother to help feed her son until she was well. i watched a woman take the most gentle care to offer her child water from a plastic cup, holding her hand under the rim so that not a drop was spilled. the child refused, and the mother offered softly again. it was such a beautiful, intimate act of love.

i asked the women in turn if they could feed the child i was carrying along with theirs, even if just for a day, even if they did it in turns. they roundly refused. i pressed, they resisted.

the fittest survive. here beauty and the hard truth of nature share the same recubra. like when you watch a butterfly fold her wings once, twice, then take off on her jittery way, and a swallow swoops in, eats her, then wheels out of the frame.

i spent the morning on a mobile clinic about an hour from abyei. we arrived early, and there were no patients. we hadn’t been there for weeks because of the measles epidemic. while i was waiting, i walked out into a field and a million birds flew by. the flock pulsed and changed like smoke. when i turned back, i could see bright flashes of clothing moving through the woods as people approached.

it is now midday. most of msf has the day off for easter. the temperature is 120F, by my thermometer. i don’t see the falcon on my tukul any more, but up above, some drift on hot drafts of air. a few move so high that they become dust, disappear like untethered helium balloons. the other night, bev and i were talking about how we would like our ashes to be reanimated. “falcon,” i said.

annie dillard once offered her opinion on whether birds fly for pleasure. she found her answer when she watched, from her window, a barnswallow fall like a stone from his nest in a barn’s loft. just as he was about to hit the dirt, he spread his wings, skimmed the ground, and flew out of sight. of course they do.

it is easter. in lac la biche, alberta, my family will be sitting together and watching cold ducks test the ice of the lake. they will have an afternoon meal and talk about the things they are thankful for. being grateful is a lesson i was taught well. it is one that the world keeps repeating. each of us is lucky to be alive and to be surrounded by people we care about. there are a thousand million ways it could be otherwise. but somewhere an opaque reason met an impossible chance, and we are all here at the same time. it’s such a lucky thing, it’s hard to believe.

“A
NTONIA? FUL?”

She looks into the red plastic bowl of beans Paola is holding and frowns. “No. Absolutely not.”

Antonia arrived earlier this week. The last time I saw her, she was sitting beside me in Geneva, grumpy from having her visa refused. Brian must have convinced Geneva that a midwife was important. I am glad. The “maternity hallway” that lines the entrance to the operating theater is the event horizon of an obstetric black hole.

Of a half-dozen midwives, a number that seems to shift with the week, there is only one that has any specific training. The others are traditional birth attendants. They are all larger than me and make an intimidating bunch. Antonia, though a third their size, is a force of her own. She is Italian, in her late thirties, and has worked everywhere. Within twenty-four hours of arriving she had distributed to all of us our own laundry buckets. She called our habit of throwing the clothes we needed washed on the tops of our tukuls “filthy.” Two nights after she arrived I heard the whir of a fan coming from her room. I was amazed. When I asked her how she persuaded Jean to let her have one, she looked at me like I was from another universe.

“Let me?
It’s 120 degrees.”

I liked her immediately.

“Salad?” Tim passes her a bowl with onions and cucumbers in it. She looks at it and wrinkles her nose. He sets it down.

Antonia has brought her own tray of food to the table. On it, an orange, a tomato, and a tin of tuna. Beside these, a small bottle of white vinegar. She picks up a plate, inspects it, then looks at me and frowns.

“Terrible.”

I agree. In general. Tim has lost 15 kilograms in his three months so far. I treated him for parasites shortly after I arrived, but he has continued to lose weight. I have been sick several times. Both of us, on our first missions, shrug and accept it like we did the fan.

“The cook hates you,” Antonia says, giving voice to a suspicion we
each silently share. She stirs the ful disdainfully. “Tonight I make a big pasta.”

“I like ful,” Tim says, lying, trying to stick up for our cook, or our failure to do something about it.

“We’ll put some aside for you. What’s in this bowl?” she asks, taking the lid off. Inside is a fried egg.

“Oh, wonderful! Perfect! I couldn’t be happier!” Her thick Italian accent makes us laugh.

Our cook, Ruth, comes out from the kitchen carrying five plates of pudding. We fall silent. She glares at Antonia, correctly identifying her as an adversary. Antonia smiles shiningly back. Ruth sets the plates down with a rattle and turns on her heel.

“Hates us,” Antonia says, opening her tin of tuna. She faces Bev, who has been silent through all of this. “I would like permission to take one or two days from the hospital to do a training with Ruth. And the cleaner. Basic cleanliness and hygiene. It’s simple.” She looks around. “Maybe better we take two days.”

When I arrived here and dropped my backpack in the dusty center of the gazebo, my eyes were fresh. I saw some burned candles slumped against the corner of the cement wall, some paperbacks swollen from last year’s rains, a torn roll of yellowing plastic. That evening, after I had met everyone, I stacked all these discarded pieces into a box, put them in the corner. Jean said how much better it was, that after so many months, he didn’t even see those things any more. The box still sits there, yellow plastic roll flapping in the wind. I don’t really see it any more.

Antonia’s eyes are fresh. I’m excited for some change.

“Just principles of disinfection and food preparation. The mothers can wait for two days, no?”

We glance at each other. To this point, none of us has dared to take on Ruth or our cleaner. They both wear dark glares most of the time. We have tried the complimentary approach, lauding the cook for things we like, silently sending back full bowls of ful. It has had no effect.

Antonia is waiting for an answer.

“We’ll see,” Bev says, lighting another cigarette. She leaves in a few days, and has returned from Khartoum for the handover with her replacement. She is scrambling to get her final report together and has little interest in big changes. Jean is leaving at the same time. He is trying to sort out problems with the borehole contract. He hoped it would be finished before he left on the plane. It won’t be started.

“We’ll see,” Antonia echoes, cuts up pieces of her tomato and mixes it with the tuna and some vinegar.

Tim and I talk about the compound often. How it would be better with this, or without that. We talk about the food that Ruth buys, how much money we pay for the little we get. Tim collects daily receipts from Ruth, but they are in Arabic and he has never been through them. I suggested to Tim once that we ask around for another cook. He laughed.

“You can’t fire anyone here. Essentially, it’s against the law. They will go to the SPLA humanitarian office, make big trouble. We’re better to cook for ourselves.”

“Pass the ful,” Paola says.