Six Months in Sudan (3 page)

“Okay.”

“Things in that area are very tense. It is a very important area for both sides. Historically, but mostly because that is where most of the oil fields are, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I haven’t been there. Not yet. It’s still pretty new. So far there has been no real fighting. A few small skirmishes, some gunfire, nothing too hectic. The North and the South take this place very seriously, and are very much in control of the militia. Not like Darfur. You’ll be given more specific details in Khartoum.”

“Okay.”

I looked at what I had written. “War” and “oil.” That should be helpful.

In Germany during my pre-departure training, I had watched colleagues get phone calls or emails (“I’m going to Sri Lanka!” or “They offered me Myanmar!”), and silently crossed my fingers for a place at war. I took French lessons so that I might end up in Congo, or Chad. I read books about Sudan.

The country was at war, and had been for years. The conflict had not ended, it had shifted fronts. Currently it was Sudan’s western province of Darfur that was on fire. In Abyei, for now, the fighting had
stopped, and in its place was a shaky truce. I was going to where I wanted to be. Close to war and its consequences.

Pushed by the sharp thrill of being somewhere new and rare and exciting, pushed towards that free feeling where anything can happen. Pulled because I wanted to understand. I understood the blind actions of large companies because they were a multiplication, a millionfold, of a greed I knew, stripped of accountability. I appreciated the wisdom of the Red Cross’s silence because I have, at least briefly, known patience. I valued MSF’s vigor and indignation because I understood outrage at injustice. But war, I didn’t know it. Not yet. Not well. But it’s in me somewhere.

I think there is at least one other reason I wanted to be in its way. As a new medical student, I was in the hospital one afternoon, sitting in a small, windowless room with a man and a woman, my teacher behind me. We had discovered a tiny tumor in the woman’s brain. It had spread from a cancer in her lung she didn’t know she had. It was incurable. I was going to tell her. Minutes before, my teacher and I had sat at an Arborite desk in the nursing lounge as he explained how best to deliver bad news.

“I have some serious news. You have an aggressive form of cancer,” I said. “It is very advanced. It must have spread quickly. We’ll do everything we can, but at this point there seems little chance of cure. I’m so sorry.”

I watched the color wash from her face. Her husband sat beside her like a stone. And I, for the first time, understood that though I was living, I was also dying. I have never forgotten it.

Because of that, part of me wants to walk towards it.

AFTER TWO DAYS OF BRIEFINGS
, they were nearly done. My last meeting was with a woman in the communications department. I explained to her my intention to write a blog, and my hope that it would allow a different exposition of life in the field. It would be insistent, rough, and fresh. It would fit our mandate of
témoignage
, of bearing witness. MSF Canada was fully supportive, had set up space on their
web page that could be updated by text email, even by SMS. I was going to be the first to try it out.

The communications liaison was reluctant. She explained to me that an MSF worker, the year before, had kept a blog in Sudan. In it, she had come out heavily in favor of the Darfurians, and labeled the Khartoum government complicit in the tragedy playing out there. It was an unwise public declaration when our presence depended on the permission of the northern Sudanese government. All of our visas, all of our supplies, most of our national staff were passed under Khartoum’s watchful eye. It was an administration known for its attention to details.

Anything I posted would be read not only by my family and friends but by Khartoum. That was certain. And if they perceived we were interfering in their activities, they might begin to interfere with ours.

I said I would take great care. I had been briefed in Canada by the communications department, and was aware of the risks for my team as well as for MSF in a country known for its resistance to outsiders. My interest was not in telling the political story, not exactly. It was detailing the medicine of poverty. Readers could draw what conclusions they wanted. I passed to her the URL of the few posts I had written so far. She promised to read them.

“I haven’t been to Abyei yet,” she said. “Hope to get there. It’s difficult, though. Good luck.”

I stood up from her desk and walked upstairs to my last order of business. The administration desk for Sudan was on the wide second floor, in the middle of a cubicle maze. It was covered in papers and passports and its phone rang incessantly.

Behind it sat Catherine; beside her, a map of eastern Africa. Thick black strokes carried out from its different countries, each ending in a flower of passport-size photographs. From Darfur, three lines arrived at a field of pictures and names. From the center of Sudan, a lonely mark arced out past the edge of the paper and stopped at a label that read “Abyei.” Surrounding it were five small faces. The team. A field coordinator, a logistician, an administrator, a nurse, and the doctor I was due to replace. I leaned closer.

Catherine hung up the phone. I smiled and handed her my photo. She took a piece of tape, doubled it over, fixed it to the back, and pushed me into Abyei’s orbit.

“Your visa’s still not ready. We can never tell with the Sudan embassy. Especially Abyei. People have waited for weeks. Keep checking back.”

I left her to a ringing phone and went downstairs to the library. I grabbed a book on meningitis from the shelf and sat down on one of the rough couches in the middle of the room. A woman sat down beside me and folded her arms unhappily. She was short, her blond hair pulled back in a loose ponytail.

By this point, after even my few days in and out of the MSF office, it was obvious who was on their way to the field and who was coming from it. Those who were leaving were well dressed and curious, their eyes full of questions. Those coming home wore their months on drawn faces, curiosity stamped out.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Sorry?”

“What country are you going to?”

“Sudan. I’m a midwife.”

“Yeah, I’m going to Sudan too. Doctor. Darfur?”

“No, I was supposed to go to a place called Abyei. But they just refused my visa. Khartoum said they don’t need any more midwives. I’m going back to Italy.”

“Oh. Shit. I’m supposed to go to Abyei too.”

“Do you deliver babies?” she asked.

“Not if I can help it.”

“Well, you’ll have to. It’s a mess there. They have no midwives at all, not at all. But what can I do?”

“Sorry.”

“Yes.”

She stood up.

“Hey, my name’s James.”

“Antonia.”

“Well, I hope I see you down there soon,” I said.

“Maybe. Who knows. And I hope you’re not wasting your time. Ciao.”

One day passed, then two, then three. I would walk to the office and stand meekly in front of Catherine’s desk until she acknowledged me with a shake of her head that meant “not yet.” I would give her my email address again, or remind her of the phone number of the guest house. The rest of the time I wandered Geneva’s streets or sat in my small room, reading about tuberculosis and staring at the blank brick wall.

It became Friday. No word. The embassy closed at noon, and if my passport wasn’t returned by then, I would be in Geneva at least another weekend.

I looked at my watch. Ten to twelve. I steeled myself for Catherine’s frustration at my insistence, and picked up the phone.

16/02: visa.

my visa has come through. i am going to pick it up at 5 o’clock, the end of the day. i leave tomorrow at 5 a.m. for khartoum. the midwife had her visa refused. apparently sudan is happy with the quality of deliveries in abyei and feels that there is no need for further expertise. wait until they get a load of me. the red carpet will stretch all the way to europe.

i do have a few tricks up my sleeve. one of them is that one with the fake hand, where you greet the woman and say “hi, i’m dr. maskalyk” then turn away leaving her holding the hand. i use it to scare them out of labor.

this morning, half asleep, i stumbled into the hallway of my tiny hotel and ran headlong into a man my age holding a toothbrush. “dentifrice?” he asked. i returned to my room and found him some toothpaste. we chatted. he was with msf too. most of us in this place are. it’s like a halfway house. we are either halfway gone, or halfway home.

he is a logistician. he was on his first mission in guinea-conakry, but was evacuated a few days ago, after only two months in the country. guinea is at war with itself. the government has recently imposed a 20-hour curfew to deal with increasingly violent protests. msf treated 275 wounded in the capital over the weekend. neither of us knows what has happened since.

“what now for you?” i asked.

“no plans. no idea. good luck,” he said and turned away.

F
IVE O’CLOCK. CATHERINE
was gone but on her desk was an envelope with my name on it. In it were my passport and ticket. I walked down the stairs and out the sliding doors of the MSF office.

On my way back to my hostel, I stopped at a pharmacy to pick up tablets for malaria, and next door purchased a package of Gauloises. I had decided to start smoking. Restart. I knew I would have company in Sudan. Cigarettes were tools. They marked minutes. The downside is that they’re not easy to like. I needed practice.

My passport felt heavy in my pocket as I climbed the steps to my room and let myself in. My suitcase was laid wide on the floor. In it were many of the things I had been carrying around with me for the last two months, from place to place, from Germany to Brazil to Toronto to here. I had been through it, packing and unpacking, then again, trying to pare down what I needed even further. The flight to the field, from Khartoum to Abyei, I would be allowed only 15 kilograms of luggage. I grabbed my stack of books, hefted them up and down. About 5 kilograms. My computer was 2. Halfway.

I took a cigarette from my pocket, lit it, and sat down in the middle of my scattered belongings.

There was no way to tell what would start tomorrow. I could not see Khartoum, could not make that place real. Tomorrow it would fall up at me from the ground, and once I landed, I would be met at the airport and the work would begin. I stood and picked from the wastebasket a map of Geneva given to me on my arrival, and smoothed it flat. I put my jacket on, slipped the Gauloises in my pocket, and went down to the street.

Hours later, back beside my bags, I started to put things back in, layer on layer. I stacked my books at the bottom of my backpack, and on them my camera, a set of small speakers, and the balance of my clothes. I set my running shoes on top.

It was nearly 2 a.m. I was to be picked up in three hours. I undressed and lay in bed. My mind swam in circles. I looked at the clock: 3 a.m. I imagined blackness.

My alarm went off. I dressed, put my backpack on, and clunked my suitcase down the stairs. A car was waiting for me, and in the back seat was a tall black man. He stepped from it and offered me his hand.

“Ajak. Just ended my mission as field coordinator in Congo. Going home to Nairobi,” he said.

“James. From Canada,” I said as I loaded my luggage into the trunk. “I’ll be in Sudan tomorrow. I’m on my way to Abyei.”

“Oh?” he said, brightening. “My family is from there. Ajak Deng. Mention my name. People will know me.”

I took a pen from my pocket and wrote it down.

“Are they all as tall as you?”

“Yes,” he said, and opened the car door for me.

“Just a minute. I’ll be right back.”

I ran upstairs, took my coat off, and left it hanging on the back of a kitchen chair for someone halfway home. I vaulted back down the stairs, stepped into the open car door, and the vehicle rolled away.

THE OVERHEAD
announcement woke me.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have begun our descent into Khartoum. In preparation for arrival please ensure that your cabin luggage is stowed in the overhead bins or under the seat in front of you and your chairs and table trays are returned to their upright and locked position. The local time is 9 p.m. The temperature in Khartoum tonight is 95 degrees Fahrenheit.”

I looked around me. The plane was full. It would continue on to Ethiopia after a stop in Sudan, and I tried, with a glance, to guess who would be stepping off the gangplank with me.

Some were obvious. Men dressed in long tunics and white kufi hats glanced at their watches and set the time. Others were less clear. Two Europeans sat in the row in front of me. I tried to catch their eyes a few times, but could not.

The plane slowed to a halt and I stood up. Few others did. In total, eleven of us, in a plane of a hundred, pushed past the other passengers towards the door. Whatever business was being done in this country, it was largely closed to the world.

The door opened, and with it, desert air blew in as from a bellows. For a cold-loving Canadian who, when he was a child, would clear a pond and fire pucks at his little brother in below-zero temperatures and return red and exhilarated only when they had lost all the pucks in the snow, it was an unavoidable embrace.

We stepped down the stairs and onto the tarmac. Row on row of white planes, bare except for the black UN stencil, sat silent: a plane graveyard. It would not be the last time I marveled at the immense resources the United Nations poured into Sudan, nor at its rows of idle machines.

On a bus to the airport terminal, the Europeans chatted with one another, or on their phones, old hands.

We stood silently by the luggage carousel and waited for it to turn. I pulled my MSF shirt from my satchel and put it on. Bags rolled onto the rubber conveyor belt, and one by one, people grabbed theirs and walked towards the exit, mobile phones to their ear. Mine came and I followed. I took my sheaf of documents from my bag and presented them to the uniformed man behind the customs counter. He barely acknowledged me. Midway through his bored inspection of my papers, a man walked past, stood in front of me, and clapped the customs guard on the shoulder. The guard broke into a smile and rose to give him an embrace. They spoke brightly in Arabic for a few minutes, laughing and gesturing. I was forgotten. Any importance to my arrival was in my own mind.