Six Months in Sudan (24 page)

We wind on the path for an hour, scraping between trees, scattering occasional troops of monkeys. After an hour or so, I see a hut. A few more. Roofs of grass held up by walls of grass, and inside them, beds of grass. No clay. Families stand to watch us pass.

“Bayom,” Anthony says.

It is my first real glimpse of the larger world that surrounds Abyei, one where many of my patients live. The other mobile I did was just off the main road.

All this space.

When I said I was interested in being somewhere remote, this is what I imagined. Not Abyei, its generators, its military rallies, its roving UN vehicles.

We climb a ridge and see huts scattered on gently sloping hills. At the top of one is a large tree. Underneath it sit several men.

As we get out of the Land Cruiser, they rise and step towards us. They shake our hands eagerly. One of the men, my age, is introduced to me as a doctor. We smile at each other, then sit down. There aren’t enough chairs for everyone. Two of the men remain standing.

The chief begins to speak in Dinka and the doctor translates.

“First, to our guests, thank you for coming such a long distance to meet with us.”

Marco nods.

“You have brought medicines to these people who have suffered so much because of the war, and without them we would have none at all. We are glad you are here, to sit with us, because we are worried about the rains.”

Their worries for the rainy season are the same as ours. Not only will it choke their access to the larger world, it means disease. Malaria, cholera. When the rain starts and before things grow, the chief explains, his people have no food. They eat grass and it gives them diarrhea, and some of them die.

Please, could we bring them food? A box of medicines? Could we build a proper school? Dig a water pump?

Marco listens carefully, nodding throughout. When the doctor is done translating, he answers with the only thing we can do: we will drive on an increasingly muddy road until the truck will go no farther, and once that happens, we will turn around.

The chief nods solemnly. Our limitations must seem like refusals. Marco speaks again.

“Someone told us of another road, one that goes to Bayom but from the other way, from Twich. Do you know that road?”

The doctor translates and the men begin to talk excitedly.

“Oh yes. Another road. A very good road. Someone was on it with a car like yours the other day. It is this way, down the hill. Past those tukuls. I will show you. It is very very good,” the doctor says.

The meeting is nearly over. I ask them if there are any particular illnesses they are seeing right now. Diarrhea, hepatitis, measles. The doctor answers that there are only a few cases of malaria, nothing else. We stand to shake hands again, and Marco talks to the chief. This time Anthony translates. The doctor and I step towards each other.

“Michael, I’m glad to meet you,” I say. “It must be difficult to work here. I find it difficult to work in Abyei, and I have a hospital.”

“Yes. It’s difficult,” he says. “I have no medicines. Sometimes I can go to Abyei and get them, but mostly I have to tell people what they need and let them find it.”

“Where did you go to school? Are you a medical doctor?”

“I am a nurse.”

He did two years of training in Ethiopia, and once his certificate was done, he came to help during the war. That was four years ago, and he’s been here since. He’s not from the area. He is from near Juba, the capital of South Sudan. He wanted to help his people.

“I have a small clinic. It’s on the way to the road, just down there.” He points down the hill. “You will pass it, just before you get to the road.” He glances over my shoulder. The chief needs him to translate something to Marco. He excuses himself.

I move back under the tree. Most of the men have left, carrying their chairs back to their homes. A few are still sitting and smoking. We look at one another and with no way to say it, have nothing to say. They start talking to each other.

The edge of the hill is rimmed with patches of scrappy acacia trees. Underneath a large one, I notice three families standing, looking in our direction. I watch another woman walk towards them, a baby balanced on her hip. They must have heard the car and think we are here to do a mobile.

Marco and the chief are finished. Michael and I go back to the Land Cruiser. We discuss Bayom’s people, about how poor they are. I don’t ask how much he charges them for his consultation. We shake hands a final time, and I climb in.

Michael speaks with Anthony, and then the engine roars on. We circle around the tree, away from the way we came, and past the waiting women. Anthony shouts something to them in Dinka, and when I turn around, they are walking back through the brush.

We pass Michael’s clinic. It is made of grass. I ask Anthony to stop, and jump out. Its entrance is made of thin sticks, designed to form a series of hallways, like a cattle gate. Inside it is cool and dark. The ground is covered in grass. There are two chairs, nothing else.

I get back into the Land Cruiser, and Anthony finds a road that stretches north. On it, we can see a pair of tire tracks. Huts flank it at first, but as they disappear, so does the road. It changes from a road to a bicycle path. Several times we are blocked by trees and must reverse, retrace our route to the previous fork. We push through the brush for an hour. The sky starts to darken.

“Do you think we should turn around?” I ask Marco.

He looks at Anthony, who shakes his head.

“Are there any landmines around here?” I ask.

Marco looks straight ahead. I shut up. Anthony picks up the radio to call compound 1 to give them the hourly update on our location, then sets the handset down. We don’t know where we are. The prospect of getting lost becomes more real. I start to get excited.

We enter a wide clearing, and in the center of it is a large grass
tukul. A man, having heard our approach, stands outside. A pair of children’s eyes peek through the gaps in the wall.

“Twich?” Marco asks.

The man points north. We drive on until we find another hut, another man.

Twich? That way. Twich? That way.

The path finally widens. Underneath a tree, four men are talking. One of them has a bicycle.

“Twich?” Marco asks.

The man with the bicycle answers in English.

“You’re not far. Just that way.” He points north.

“The road. This road. In the rainy season. What is it like?” Marco asks.

“Water. All water.”

“Oh.”

“You should build a proper one.”

Anthony puts the car into gear and we drive on. One can interpret these requests in two ways. The first, that these people expect others to do everything. The second, that they believe that we can do anything. If we can drop food from the sky, why not knock down a bunch of trees, push some dirt into a road.

We enter more clearings, pass more tukuls. The walls are no longer grass; they are clay. We must be getting close to the main road. Like the dry riverbeds I saw from the plane, green trees on their banks, roads spill energy from their sides. The man on the bicycle is right. Of all the ways we could help Bayom, a road would be the best.

We drive from yard to yard, and finally bump onto a red road. I look at the odometer. Twelve kilometers. Two hours. And with the rains, no chance.

We drive back to Abyei deep in the afternoon, and watch the clouds stack. As we turn into town, raindrops start to spatter the windshield.

13/05: mother’s day.

one of the members of our team is approaching the end of her mission. she has been here for five months. i have watched her go through some of the same stages i have, some i have yet to approach. right now, she is stifling the excitement she has for going home, trying to save it for when she steps onto the plane, for when she will be able to believe it. marco was talking about what it is like when one’s mission ends. you leave from khartoum and step off the plane in geneva, and the world you left … collapses.

i am not surprised. we completely inhabit it, focus our entire energies on it, but as soon as you queue up in the airport to get a starbucks latte, it will seem as far away as the moon. but that is why i am writing this. to convince us all that it is not.

of course, i can’t bring you here, as much as i would like to. as such, much of the perspective gained is mine, and i might only realize it for a split second as abyei disappears into the horizon of my memory.

part of the secret to being here is to think not of the future, nor the past, but to imagine the day only as it folds into the next. every thought that starts about my vacation, or how much i miss careening around toronto streets on my bicycle, i let out what little air my happiness holds, like a balloon.

but, if i could be anywhere else today, i would be in alberta. i would be driving down the country road to my home, the one i left more than a decade ago, the only one i have ever really had. i would pull into our driveway, and drive slowly up it, stones popping from beneath the tires. i would stop, shut the car off, and hear only smooth silence. i would open the door, then the trunk, grab my bags, unlatch the gate, and go inside.

almost tough to type that, i can imagine it so clearly. and as clearly, the delight on my mother’s face. mine would be just as strong, but i have learned to hide it. it burns brightly, but under the surface. hers burns like a star. she is the most famous person in the world. trust me. if you met her, you would see it too.

“W
HY DO YOU PUNISH YOURSELF?”
Marco asks me, a piece of bread in his hand.

“What?”

“The book. Why do you punish yourself?” He points at the thick copy of
Ulysses
that sits beside my morning coffee. Each morning when I don’t run, I pull it from the wall of my tukul and sit down to read five pages. After three months, I am a few hundred pages into the annotated edition. I left the SparkNotes in my tukul. I use it to read about what I just read.

“No, it’s good. Well, okay, I can’t say I like it, but it’s worth it. It changes the way I think about thinking.”

Marco shakes his head and disappears into his tukul, returns with a book. He sets it down on the plastic table.

“This is better for you. If you are a writer.”

I look at it. Paul Auster,
The Invention of Solitude
. Seems to fit.

“I’ll take it, but I can’t start it. If I do, I won’t read this. I’m looking for an excuse to stop.”

Marco shrugs and walks away towards the shower. It is Friday and our day off. Our cook’s too. Our day to starve. I tried to ration the almonds Sarah sent me from home by only taking a small handful in the morning. A small handful in the midmorning. One after lunch. Another just before dinner, and then one just after. They lasted three days.

I push my chair back from the table, and it scratches in the sand. My coffee cup wobbles on the brown plastic table etched with scattered grooves. I grab it and look in its bottom. Coffee grounds. Cardamom.

Why do they do that here? Cardamom. That’s an Indian spice. It comes in pods. I saw some in Zanzibar. I have that picture, the one with my guide with a red bindi dot on his head from the ink of a flower. I wonder if the spices began in Africa and were brought on the spice route, or vice versa. Probably vice versa. Why does food suck
here so much? I don’t get it. Instead of just boiling a chicken, why doesn’t someone just chop it up and fry it with some onions and some cardamom? Must be a poverty thing. Either you don’t get the chance to sit around and come up with creative ways to cook, maybe risking a meal because the next one might be tough to come by, or it doesn’t matter that much, you just want food and it all tastes good. Could be a taste bud thing too. But Zanzibar had a wealth of spices. Wonder why they didn’t make it this far.

I wonder what happened to that girl I met there, the one working for the UN. She was in Sudan, I think. Or Chad. She was cool. Oh shit. I sent her a poem. That’s right. Jesus. Why would I do that? So embarrassing. I didn’t even know her.

I put the coffee cup down and turn my book over.

The gazebo is completely different after we sawed those legs off that table. Now it looks like a coffee table. It’s funny how something so small can change the whole vibe. More comfortable. Those metal chairs are shit. I don’t understand why we don’t just throw them all away.

I fish for my sandal with my right foot.

What am I going to write about today? I should write something. What did I write about last? Mother’s Day. Sunday. Do they have Mother’s Day in Europe? I should have reminded Tim. I don’t remember him mentioning his mom. I think he has a family. I hate when you do that.

I fish with my left.

What the hell am I going to eat today? I hope someone else makes something. I haven’t cooked once since I have been here. I wonder why. I don’t even care about it. Oh, I made some eggs. A while ago? Bev was here. We made them together. I cracked one, and its yolk fell out pink. The next one too. Then the third. I cooked the shit out of it anyway. How are you supposed to tell if an egg is bad? The yolk falls apart, I think. These ones smelled like metal.

I’ll work out after breakfast.

I’ll work out, then I’ll write and then … I’ll clean my tukul. Maybe I’ll go to GOAL and check my email.

I walk to the kitchen.

I can’t believe those bags of dirt are still there. They should just be a garden, then I can tell Grandpa I planted a garden. I should write about him. Like when I told him I was going to work in Cambodia, he didn’t say, “Don’t go, it’s too dangerous,” he said, “Don’t go. It’s too far.” That’s funny. Or how when he was a kid he would put on those skates, those double skates, and just after the lake froze and the ice was thin, skate around with an axe handle and try to stun muskrats through the ice as they swam underneath, bubbles in their whiskers, streamlined smoothing under the clear black ice, and then whack, a star of cracks. He would sell them for pocket money, for candy.

Grandma’s brother is deaf from measles. I think she had a sister die of it. Maybe I can come to it that way.