Following Hanley up the steps, the priest watched as the American retrieved his duffle, his keys and an old brown leather satchel. He also took the large padlock from a metal chest behind the bulkhead.
“I’ve had this briefcase forever,” Hanley explained. “It’s been handy for carrying all my papers, including my flight log.” The back part of the plane’s interior was empty, save for two seats attached to the bulkhead, the partition separating the cargo area from the cockpit. The cargo area flooring was a highly polished wood, the interior walls painted a light grey. The cockpit seats, the instruments and the various levers and knobs all shined, with two small screens in the center of the instrument panel.
The priest followed Hanley out of the plane. After locking the plane’s rear door, he threaded the chain from the large rock through a section of the right wheel strut and padlocked it. “This will do, but even if it doesn’t, it’s all that I have,” he told the priest. He smiled and again the priest thought the smile odd, the American’s face sad, but smiling nonetheless.
Picking up the duffle and the old satchel, Hanley Martin said to Father Robineau, “I’m ready if you are.” As they walked to the truck, Hanley asked, “Do you think the plane will be safe, I mean, will it be vandalized?”
“I would doubt it. There are few if any rebel factions operating in this area. Most of them are in the Darfur region, west of where we are. The people here are still respectful of the mission. We have told those visiting the mission of your coming and they know the plane will help them. So, I believe they will honor its presence here and not disturb it. They will come to see it, starting tonight, perhaps, certainly tomorrow. Now they certainly know you are here. How could they not? My hearing is bad and I could not have missed your arrival.” The priest smiled and put a hand on Hanley’s shoulder. He said, “Let us return to the mission, we will find something for you to eat and drink and you can tell me about my niece, Sophie.”
Stopping, the priest allowed a small, low cloud of dust to catch up to him, adding another fine layer of dirt to his dull boots. Squinting from some minor discomfort brought on by age and the thought in his head, he said to Hanley, “Tomorrow or the next day, you will meet Sister Marie Claire. She is a person of some force, or forcefulness. She is determined regarding some things, determined to makes changes. Sudan does not change easily. She knows this. It does not stop her; nothing stops her, not even the bishop. She will talk to you about these changes. Be careful with her. She means well, but be careful.”
4
A thrill slid up Hanley’s spine, chilling the back of his neck. Since leaving Crete, he had been too busy with the travel, customs, the fear and the anticipation, to think about her. The old priest snapped her back into Hanley’s consciousness, holding his attention tight, freezing his stomach, forcing a rigid smile to his face. “I’m looking forward to meeting Sister Marie Claire,” he said.
“She’s not at the mission now. She is in Rumbek gathering supplies, drinking water and food, paper products, that sort of thing. She will be back later tonight or tomorrow,” the old priest said.
Hanley’s first glimpse of the Catholic mission station at Mapuordit was a yellow lightbulb glowing in the distance, a stationary point he watched as he bounced around on the passenger seat of the old vehicle. Even anchored as he was by a seatbelt, his upper and lower body parts were constantly flung about. He tried to hang on to anything that would hold them in place but his attempts were mostly useless.
The single yellow bulb was screwed into a standard white porcelain fixture, hung from the eaves of the station’s main building. It was a deep yellow glow, the kind he remembered glowing at night, marking the back doors of countless farmhouses all over Indiana. It was the color that bathed the side of his uncle’s farm house night after night, year after year. The memory brought a twinge of nostalgia, the kind he felt when it was something he had not thought of for years.
“I’m sorry for this horrible road. You may become accustomed to it, but I will tell you, I have been here for years and I have not,” Father Robineau yelled to Hanley. The noise of the ride was more irritating than the jostling. After weeks spent flying an old twin-prop cargo plane, he was surprised he could think that possible.
Hanley leaned into the voice of the priest to hear what he was saying. Before he could answer, the old Land Rover rolled to a stop beside the main building and the priest turned the key. Hanley said, “I’ve always been capable of adjusting to most things. It’s a gift of sorts, or else it’s that I expect less from my surroundings than most people. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine. As long as there are no snakes, I’ll have few problems.”
“There are snakes,” the priest said.
“Great.”
“Oh, please don’t worry. We do not see many. Only a few in this area are really dangerous. You just have to be careful where you step or reach. Unfortunately, they don’t have rattles that warn you like American snakes. I think your snakes are much more considerate of others. In Sudan, our snakes are rude. Of course, in France, we have no poisonous snakes,” the priest said.
“I thought France had a couple of types of poisonous snakes,” Hanley said, “I believe I read that somewhere.”
The old priest’s face assumed an offended look and said, “There is nothing poisonous in France, Monsieur. Let me show you your room and then we can have dinner with the staff which will be in one half hour or so. We eat late as we have much to do while there is daylight to assist us,” the priest explained.
With his duffle and satchel gathered from the truck, Hanley followed the priest across the compound to a rectangular building made of plywood and metal, the roof a corrugated tin, faded a flat gray with streaks of red and orange where the rare rains caused rust.
A cheap wooden screen door, grayed with age presented a browned metal handle to open it, a single spring to close it and two hinges to hold it to the frame, the only decorations Hanley saw on the building. The priest entered first, leading Hanley down a hallway made entirely of unpainted plywood. Their boots thudded on the thin floor, creating a shallow echo between it and the earth below. They walked the length of the building, a dormitory of sorts, to the last room on the left, the room where Hanley would be living for the year or more he might stay in Sudan. Another thin wooden door opened to a small room, no more than eight feet square, with a cot, a small table and a shiny black metal trunk, the kind freshman haul to college.
Hanley’s room was, he would learn, the same as that of the doctors and nurses at the mission, a small cell with room enough for the few comforts he saw before him. The walls were thin and the door was old, perhaps taken from another older building. Hanley found a thin foam pad covered his cot with a very thin white sheet and thin woolen blanket on top. A large net suspended from the rafters hung over the bed. On the small table, Hanley found a large candle and holder.
“This is your room, one of our best rooms, you should know,” the old priest said. “It is a corner room next to a door leading outside. It has a window and gets sun in the morning. Quite nice for our small mission. I think you’ll be comfortable here.”
Hanley laid his satchel by the table and his duffle on the bed. “It reminds me of my room my freshman year in college,” he said.
“Where was that?” Father Robineau asked.
“Ball State in Indiana.”
“Like baseball? Did they teach sports at your school?”
Hanley hoped the priest was being sarcastic. “If they did, they weren’t successful,” Hanley said, recalling the school’s record in any athletic endeavor he could recall.
Sitting on the end of the bed, the priest asked, “What do you know of our mission and of this area?”
“I know a bit of what you do here, of the nature of your operation. I’m sure Sophie and Michael have told you about my meeting Father Bertrand at their home. It’s been almost two years now,” Hanley said. This, Hanley learned through his talks with Father Bertrand, the head of the Fathers of Notre
Dame, the Catholic organization sponsoring the mission at Mapuordit, as well as several other missions around the world. A chance meeting with the priest at the home of Michael Campbell and his wife Sophie Robineau started the conversations that eventually led to Hanley’s decision to work for the mission in Sudan. Michael, as Hanley called him, were friends, having met when Michael worked for Beech and then Raytheon in America. Airbus eventually hired Michael who moved to France where he met Sophie, the niece of Father Robineau. They lived in France.
Hanley knew from his research the mission had several doctors practicing at any time, rotating in and out after a month or two, most coming from eastern Europe. On the ride back from the airstrip, Father Robineau told Hanley there was a doctor from Ireland at the mission, but Hanley already knew this. The nurses and staff were mostly French, a few were Italian. Over the past eighteen months, Hanley read as much as he could about the Mapuordit mission station.
Hanley said, “I know this mission is part of the Catholic Diocese of Rumbek, which is northwest of here. The mission operates a primary and secondary school as well as a medical clinic. I know you treat leprosy in a separate clinic across the road.”
Hanley knew the mission at Mapuordit was founded early in the 1990s, the location selected for the understandable reason of being isolated, sparing it from attack by the Khartoum forces or the local militia such as the Janajweed, a group supported and protected by Khartoum. Through his research, Hanley knew even the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army and the SPLM, the rebel movement in western and southern Sudan, were a threat to the Christian missions operating in the region.
Another chance meeting, this one with Sister Mary Kathleen O’Brien, started Hanley thinking of working for the Catholic mission in Sudan. They met on a flight from Washington D.C. to Indianapolis. It was then Hanley believed he saw a pattern developing to the events that would change his life. Eventually, Sister Mary Kathleen said she saw them too. Hanley became wary of Sister Mary Kathleen and her assertions.
Sister O’Brien taught International Studies at Notre Dame. She was born in Baltimore. When they met, she was on sabbatical from Wheeling Jesuit College in Wheeling, West Virginia. He also learned they shared a love for the Pittsburgh Steelers, a team she adopted after the Colts moved to Indianapolis. She claimed to carry her Terrible Towel with her everywhere, even sometimes to mass. He knew the Terrible Towel was a cloth talisman waved by loyal Steeler fans at the games on Sunday, where Sister Mary Kathleen said all good Catholics go after mass. “I believe God is a Steeler fan, I really do,” she said with a look of genuine belief tinged with a small amount of shame.
“The mission at Mapuordit is on the trail refugees use to reach Ethiopia and Kenya,” the priest explained. Hanley already knew this. Many late-night telephone conversations with Sister O’Brien and packages she sent to him containing background information gave Hanley much of the history and conditions he would come across in southern Sudan. From his research, Hanley learned the number of refugees passing through the area near the clinic recently ballooned as the mission offered the only medical care in the region. The Fur and Zaghawa tribes made up the majority of the non-Arab tribes in Darfur, and the majority of the refugees escaping across the mid-southern counties of Lakes and Yirol. The mission also served the local tribes, Dinkas and Nuer with some Atuot mixed in. “There is a serviceable road between Mapuordit and Rumbek. Yirol, the main town in the Yirol County region, was just northeast,” the priest said.
“Sudan is a nation of numerous tribes, both Arabic and African. The tribal differences are the root cause of much of the conflict found in Sudan. In many parts of the Mideast, the dynamics of tribal conflict have been misunderstood by westerners, I’m afraid,” the priest told Hanley.
“A friend of mine, Sister O’Brien, told me the American government discounts the role tribal conflict plays in all of this and blames religion and economics as the leading causes of the strife that has lasted hundreds of years,” Hanley said. He knew from his discussions with Sister O’Brien that tribal ethnicity and the related issue of control caused much of the conflict in this region of the world, from Sudan to Iraq. The Muslim-controlled government in Khartoum faced strong opposition from the rebels in southern Sudan. She told Hanley the South was a source for wealth for the arid and unproductive north. Minerals, food and now, possibly oil caused the Arab controlled government to want the native African population to disappear, in whatever manner necessary. Genocide was as good a method as any to the Sudanese government, she believed.
“Come, let me take you to the dining room. You must be hungry,” Father Robineau said.
“Yes, in fact I am. I could use some food and a drink if you have one.”
“Unfortunately, the doctors smuggle in alcohol and not always what we need to tend to patients,” the priest said.
A sudden wave of exhaustion overcame him, his knees bent slightly as he rocked back a bit, small waves of nausea pushed a small amount of acid up into his throat. His head ached. What a day this had been. He experienced some of what this part of the world could offer. He knew it might be much worse. Americans are so naive, he thought; unless they’re from the inner cities or maybe Native American reservations, most escape poverty and persecution.
“Let me show you where you will be taking most of your meals. I’m not sure what you are used to, but I doubt it is this,” Father Jean-Robert said. “After which, I am certain you will want to sleep.”
The priest led Hanley to a large circular hut, perhaps thirty feet across. It was at least fifty yards from the sleeping quarters. The noises of the African night were not dissimilar from those of rural Indiana, only more intense. Bug sounds, tree frog songs and a steady wind through the trees covered the southern Sudanese savanna with a layer of life more striking than Hanley had expected. A slight breeze cooled Hanley’s face as they crossed the compound. Suddenly, he was hit by an object just above his right ear, toward his temple. Whatever it was, it felt to be about the size and consistency of a wad of bubble gum. Hanley stopped and said, “Shit, what was that?” He looked about him, but could see nothing in the darkness. The priest turned and asked what was wrong. Hanley explained that he had been struck by something, something large and then asked the priest how large the bugs were in Mapuordit. “Very large,” Father Jean-Robert said and they continued on. Hanley could hear voices coming from the hut.
A dark wooden screen door set in a frame surrounded by small rough timbers allowed light and voices to reach Hanley as he approached the building. The light was a dull white, making the faces and hands below it glow while obscuring everything else in the room from view. As they entered, Hanley was surprised to see the hut had a wooden floor. In the center of the hut was a large, rectangular table. Several men and women were sitting, talking. They were eating, or had just finished. Two bottles sat near the center of the table; one was a bottle of what appeared to be red wine, the other a large bottle of water. As Hanley and Father Robineau entered, the talking stopped and everyone’s eyes turned toward the door. This feels like the first day at a new school, Hanley thought.
“My friends, let me introduce our newest staff member. This is Hanley Martin,” the priest said. Turning back to Hanley, he said, “There is really no need to introduce you. Everyone knows your name and where you are from. Father Bertrand provided us with some information about you. Yours is an interesting story.”
One of the men stood and walked around the table toward Hanley with his hand extended. He appeared to be in his late thirties, dark with black hair and the heaviest five o’clock shadow Hanley could remember having seen. You must shave three times a day, Hanley thought.
“I’m Stasio Dzyak. I am a doctor from Slovakia. Three of us are from there. We came together to do the surgeries for the people here in Sudan. The war has brought more of a need for our work, I am afraid. You have brought a plane, no? Very dangerous, no?”
The priest interrupted. “Why don’t we allow our new friend to sit and have
something to eat and drink? He is very tired and hungry, are you not?”
Hanley took the initiative and walked around the table to introduce himself. There were three other doctors, two nurses and a social worker. Two of the doctors were those from Slovakia, the nurses from France and the social worker from Kenya. Another doctor was from Ireland. Hanley had been told there would be three nurses; the missing nurse was Sister Marie Claire.
Dr Thomas O’Connell’s resemblance to his brother Tim was remarkable. Looking at the young doctor from Ireland was like looking at the bartender in Galway. A planned overnight in Ireland led Hanley to dinner at the hotel in Galway. There, he met Timothy O’Connell. The restaurant was crowded, forcing Hanley to eat at the bar. When Hanley explained his trip to the young Irish bartender, the name of his final destination caused the bartender’s jaw to drop. “This isn’t possible,” was all Tim O’Connell could manage to say. While Hanley ate, the bartender called his mother to tell her of the chance meeting.
“Dr O’Connell, your brother Tim said that you need to write a letter to your mother. It seems she is unhappy with your poor communication skills.” The look on the young doctor’s face was what Hanley expected it would be. Dr O’Connell was dumbstruck.
“What the hell. How do you know that?” the Irish doctor asked. Hanley explained his layover in Galway and the chance meeting with his brother. “By God, that’s amazing,” was all Dr O’Connell could say.
Hanley sat in the only vacant chair and looked at the food. He was even hungrier than he expected. The meal looked to be some sort of roasted meat, with vegetables, including ears of corn. There was a plate of flat bread and small cakes. One of the other doctors, about the same age as the first, but taller and not as dark, retrieved a glass from a smaller table off to one side and placed it in front of Hanley. The glass was mostly clean. Since no one apologized for its condition, Hanley assumed this was an accepted level of sanitation.
Sometimes the Darkness Page 4