We woke to a quiet that I don’t think I’d ever known before, a holy stillness that held within it secrets of the new day. Rolling from the cab, I stood facing east, my breath clouding in the remnants of the night air, watching a fading vermillion of dawn behind the hazy hills and across a rolling morning mist.
If I’ve ever felt blessed, just wholly at the centre of everything, an alpha and omega, it was then, as the dawn both required my attention and honoured me with its presence. I was certain in those moments that what we were doing was sacramental, as I stood there in the moment, in the lee of the sleeping lorry, witness in a barren landscape to the cornucopia that it carried, God’s holy gifts for God’s holy people.
After a short while of this communion, perhaps less than ten minutes, the driver’s door opened and I heard Adrian pee against the great wheel. He emerged stiffly around the vertical wall of the engine cowling, blinking blindly into the light and zipping himself up.
“Good morning,” he said, without looking at me.
“Yes, it is,” I replied.
It’s difficult, but I want to explain that this was a moment, more intense and real with someone than anything I’d had before.
And I want to be honest. It was deeply affecting and I believe I was in the presence of a great, limitless love. I’m not foolish. I know how the sun’s rays of light refract through the moist and warming air. I’m not taken in by a bag of nature’s tricks. But I was held in the palm of that morning and I knew all manner of things could be well. It made me smile that this had happened only after my ordination. It felt like affirmation rather than vocation.
So it wasn’t all bad with Adrian. It was good, there in that moment. And I took his hand and smiled up at him.
There was an awkward pause.
“Better have a quick coffee and something to eat and get going. If we look broken down, it won’t be long before we attract attention.”
“Ade,” I said suddenly and he turned back. “Thank you for coming.”
He smiled and shook his head, looked at the ground and kicked a stone.
“I don’t think we were offered a choice,” he said, his voice dropping at the end to indicate conclusion.
“So let’s go now,” I said. “We’re on a mission. We’ll eat and drink later when we have some miles on the clock,” and I ran to the driver’s side.
“Are you insured?” he called.
It was one of the funniest things he ever said, because he was sending himself up, whether he meant to or not.
We’d done about eighty kilometres before I pulled over and then it wasn’t because we wanted to brew coffee and get some sort of carb and sugar hit from dry biscuits. A small skull-and-cross-bones sign nailed to a teak tree by the side of the way indicated that the road had been mined at some stage in the ebb and flow of battle between the Sudanese government and the southern rebels.
Young sappers of the SPLA were swinging their detectors like suburban lawn strimmers in the road ahead. I pulled on to the gentle banking on one side and hissed the air-brakes to a standstill. The SPLA boys in their desert fatigues would be no trouble, so Adrian and I made some coffee. They approached us and, in response to one mildly curious question, Adrian said we’d had engine trouble, fallen behind our convoy and were now catching up. I said we had a radio in the cab and were in constant contact every fifteen minutes, just in case any of the half-dozen soldiers had ideas for our transport.
The commander nodded distractedly and winced into the distance. Nobody here cared about paperwork. While we waited for the all-clear, we ambled about separately, sipping sparingly at water bottles from the small refrigerated box in the cab that we couldn’t get to work properly, so the water was mostly tepid.
Leaning against one of the great tyres, hot to the touch like a burning skin, I saw Adrian crouching about a hundred metres down the road, watching something low and a little in front of him, a lizard perhaps. But he stayed there and was staring. I walked in his direction and saw that he was kneeling now, his backside on his heels, his hands resting palm-upwards on his thighs. As I walked softly up behind him, I saw he was fixed on a pile of maybe a dozen or fifteen skulls, human, in the drainage ditch by the road.
They were sun-bleached white and scavenged clean. Most had no jawbone. They were probably all that was left of a government garrison in retreat, jumped by rebels along this remote road, and I expect the skulls had been kicked into the ditch by the sappers to keep the road tidy for purposes of their sweep.
But someone had stacked them respectfully, so that they were piled upright, a sightless audience to the passing. Adrian had been looking into the little caves of their eyes. I realised he was praying.
We drove. We stopped. We drove again. The journey continued like this for a couple of days. No more sappers and skulls, just great tracts of driving, Adrian and I taking turns at the wheel and otherwise dozing in the back, the odd navigation conference and calculations of the rations left aboard the lorry. And our odyssey punctuated by little vignettes of the horror that the civil war had visited on inhabitants luckless enough to live in this ruined Eden: a burnt-out farm, its fenced and empty animal pens still standing; a pile of cattle carcasses; abandoned machinery, its bright yellow paint echoing a hopeful time, now evaporated in the heat haze.
We drove for hours through forests of teak, which along with the stratum of oil somewhere way below, in some benign fantasy of another economic world, could not only have fed the people now fled, but sent their children to brand-new schools to become doctors and engineers and teachers and aid workers to other desperate regions. They could have gathered in the sun on their school runs, like parents from the Home Counties to the Emirates, to complain that they’d had to wait half an hour to see a doctor in the flagship new hospital or to sneer at how hideous was the new superstore.
No, in truth the tribes of southern Sudan are too noble for that Western model of existence. Maybe that’s what made them so vulnerable to the ravages of civil war. The population of a country spoilt by prosperity is harder to oppress.
The Dinka herd oxen and watch the sun rise. They were always going to get walked over by those with American guns who would fight Western wars, even if they didn’t care about the rich seams of black gold under their plains.
We stopped at a tight little settlement beyond Amadi. It was still standing but was strangely vacated. “Ghost town” didn’t do it justice, for that implies abandonment. The ghosts were very present here and some were still walking about, in a semblance of remaining alive. There had been a hospital. That’s why government forces targeted it in a deliberate act of apparently wild vengeance. There were children in the wall-less building now, some sitting on metal-slatted beds, others lying, with dirty-bandaged stumps and the blank expressions of those who invite no sympathy, because there is none to be had that could mean anything.
We were told that the settlement’s rudimentary shelter, a trench with wooden beams and corrugated iron bearing a load of replaced earth, had taken a direct hit. The forty or so inside, women crad-ling their already gaunt children, some men pathetically shielding them, had been eviscerated, like the first turns of a kitchen liquidiser through soft fruit.
Back on the road, we encountered some Baggara militia, Arab tribesmen armed by the government. They stood in the road, like children pretending to stage a checkpoint, but what they really wanted was a lift on the truck. They had probably tired of raiding villages, killing the men, enslaving the women, the everyday work of mercenaries.
I kept telling myself what we’d learned, in the rudimentary training of listening to more experienced operatives; that the overwhelming likelihood was that we’d be OK if we stayed in a locked cab, talking to them through open windows. The convention was that aid lorries were proscribed from providing transport for the armed of either side and, other than those crazed by blood-lust and drugs, the fighters on both sides had some deeply buried code of honour that aid workers were to be allowed free passage.
Still, this was no place for a woman to carry a bag of gold and a child and expect to survive. My bag of gold was the truck – and my child was Adrian, if you like – and we were, by our own account, a lone and wounded straggler from our pack. Adrian, somewhat unnecessarily, kept repeating to me to keep my voice calm and to maintain that we were assured of free passage by the UN. I rather wished he’d have spent more time doing so from his own window, but most of the talking fell to me, and I could feel them start the mocking routine from the foot of my door, a worrying prelude to objectifying me and turning violent.
As it turned out, it was only the height and relative precariousness of our load, I think, strapped down with tarpaulins that offered no purchase for ascent, that discouraged our hitch-hikers and after avaricious glances to size up the lorry and its attractions as loot, they retreated down the road we’d travelled without looking back at us. We were the discarded and already forgotten husk of an opportunity.
On the third day, we hit the vicinity of Rumbek, nothing that could be described as outskirts, far less suburbs, more a simple increase in shacks, tribesmen by the road with skeletal oxen and more vehicles swerving to avoid our truck, like fishing boats around a great dreadnought. At a long-disused garage, with absurd piles of tractor tyres and rusting jeeps on bricks, we asked for a route to the airstrip, alongside which we knew there would be a distribution station. We finished the last few miles by late afternoon, the heat beginning its reluctant collapse into night.
The figures by the wayside grew in number, the stronger of the Dinka gathered in small groups around their animals, some singing the laments that went with the dusk.
Finally, the word “airstrip” next to a red cross on a sign, with a crude emblem of wings. Adrian swung the truck in next to a huddle of cabins and faded green tents. In front of us the ground fell away towards a plain and there, silently, was a crowd, stretching away into the middle distance, and makeshift shelters and carts like floating debris on a sea of humanity. The predominant colour was dusty black from a mass of exposed skin, yet the colours of women’s shawls, the stripes of yellow and orange on brown lent the scene a grim gaiety, like football shirts at a massacre.
No one looks at you, I’d learned, and no one moves towards a supply truck at this stage of a famine. The alienating ennui of starvation has set in.
We left the cab to look for distribution staff. In the first cabin were some men lying on mats, one holding his abdomen and retching, dysentery perhaps. Then a cabin, still bearing the name of a civil engineering contractor and possibly shipped here from some wound-down oil development, bore a large, red-painted cross, its horizontal axis running rivulets, like blood or tears.
Next to it was painted the single word Lancelot, a medical relief outlet. Inside, an improbably well-fed Sudanese woman beamed at us and indicated for us to sit on a bench beside a desk with some paperwork. She bustled out, presumably to find someone. We waited, sitting, then wandering about the room, our feet echoing too loudly, looking out of windows that showed nothing, other than the back of another shed.
A while later, a tall, young white woman swung through the door. She didn’t smile but said “Hi” in a neutral, unhostile manner and shook our hands. She wore a linen shirt, baggy against her slim frame, and fatigue trousers under a sleeveless porter’s coat – plenty of pockets – and I saw from her wristband she was a doctor. Her dry fair hair was tied tightly back, showing coffee freckles running up from her neck to her temples. We told her we had a lorryload and what we carried.
“Great,” she said, with neither contempt nor joy. “I’m Miriam.”
We moved the truck across to a distribution yard, where strong, young, local men and a couple of English public schoolboys on a gap year broke up and assigned our load, bagging up smaller packages to be carried long-distance on foot. Adrian and I slept beside each other that night, on the floor of a tool shed, under opened sleeping bags, feeling some body warmth, cherishing nourished flesh.
Early the following morning, we went down to see if we could help with distribution. A mixture of aiders and local hands were farming out the smaller sacking bags of maize to those strong enough to make the treks back to frail families. It was as well ordered as ever – that’s what always surprises journalists and celebrity visitors – and apart from sorting out some obvious “mallies” for redirection to the medical tents, there was little to do.
So I wandered in the direction of the camp, where the listless throng sat with their emaciated offspring. This is no place for tourists, even semi-pros like me, and I wasn’t about to wander aimlessly among the protracted dying, but Miriam, pinned down with diagnostics and prescription in a medical tent, did need some help with prioritisation of new arrivals at the margins of the camp who wouldn’t have the strength to move through the grounded crowd. I could rank-order the critical stages of starvation and come back for a couple of the local med staff as necessary.
It’s not difficult work. They barely see you when they’re semi-detached from their surroundings, their bodies turned in on themselves. They have eaten their insides and are entirely internalised. There is no crying out for help here. Nor is there self-pity. The world is just as it is; it contains life and death and the margin between the two has been so eroded that the wait for death is just negotiable territory between existence and absence, more part of belonging with the dead than the living.
The quick and the dead are judged by omniscient aidies, the former redeemed so far as is possible, the latter disposed of hygienically. But those in limbo have given themselves to being taken either by us or by the stillness of the ground. We call ourselves relief workers sometimes, but part of that is about the quiet acceptance of our mutual exhaustion, knowing absolutely that relief is coming in one form or another. We’re telling them: you will be fed or you will die.
Life isn’t cheap in a famine zone. It’s understood. It’s death that comes cheap, not life.
At the edge of the muster, the groups thinned and I stopped by a small gathering still sitting in the sun, no shelter yet rigged, or no will to rig one. There’s a very particular aura to the locus where someone will soon starve to death, and you come to feel a kind of beat in the air which marks the fading rhythm of living organs.
A young girl, maybe twelve, maybe more, was standing, alongside the matriarch, shawled and proud, her skin like hide, hardened by the sun. A younger mother squatted, her high cheekbones marking the contours of her skull, holding what was left of her child, a boy I think, in her lap. He no longer had the strength to be cradled, lying across the creases of her skirt like he’d fallen from the sky. The oversized head had fallen back, the flies around his eyes not flitting, but taking their fill from the ruins of his eyes, like cows at an oasis, watched from the air. A twitch of those eyes, which barely degenerate in starving children, was the only movement on him.
Reporters always say the skin is like paper, but it’s not. It’s like the last inedible membranes on cooked joints of meat that have been fully carved. All subcutaneous tissue had dried up and withered below his ribcage, which looked set to split from his chest. He had no bottom or hips and would never move his legs again. His mother’s arms, the last of wiry tendons pushing their veins to the surface, fell either side of him, as though he was an offering. She stared without focus and I knew she was no longer absorbing images. But she could be saved.
I knelt beside her. We learn to remain expressionless if we want to communicate. It’s a kind of sign language, needing none of the extraneous baggage of human contact, which requires wasteful energy to handle. But in this instance no contact was strictly necessary. The man had in all likelihood gone looking for shelter, or was dead, hatcheted maybe by government security, and these women would have walked for days with their dying infant cargo. The girl and her grandmother would survive, along with the mother, I could see that, but the boy child would soon be dead.
A plastic bowl of maize and water mush lay beside the mother, and the girl p
icked at a square of flatbread that lay in it.
These survivors would need medical attention, vitamins, supplements and the dying child would be in inaudible pain as his vital organs started their final collapse, so whoever had brought the holding sustenance should have attracted the attention of one of the medical corps who were moving through the crowd. I knew they should really get to one of Miriam’s tents – this woman’s strength could be supported once she had lost the burden of her child, its body despatched for incineration. I called past her to the sky-blue clad figure of a med scout and he glanced up briefly from another patient to acknowledge that he would work in my direction.
I reached for the little bowl of nutrients, tore a corner of the bread and dipped it in the mix, held it to the mother’s lips to suck. She didn’t move her head, but her insect-hand rose to take the morsel. Then the other arm rose like a crane jib. She was looking at me now.
“Take this,” I said in one of the few Dinka phrases I’d learned.
It was a pointless command. But I needed her to suck on something rehydrating, get some moisture in her mouth.
“Do this,” I repeated, holding the bread in front of her face.
Her hands took it and she separated it, the damp piece went in her mouth and, fixing me now with a blank stare, held out the remainder to me. I straightened slightly as I realised what was happening. She was sharing it with me. I took it quickly without smiling and looked up, not without petulance I think, at the standing girl and grandmother, who listlessly and without emotion looked down on our tableau of the living and the dead. I put the scrap of bread on my tongue.
A light transporter plane came moaning through the haze that afternoon, putting up what little dust was yielded from the rock-ground as it landed away from us. As it idled back towards the cabins, I saw sacks held in netting through its open side-doors, their blue roundels confirming that they were from the same source as ours. We had long unloaded, but I glanced over in the direction of the vehicle compound, where our truck would have been. I knew that this could be the start of a narrative of consequences for stealing a supply truck.
A Dark Nativity Page 9