Six Months in Sudan

by Dr. James Maskalyk

  We stop at a covered stall, big enough to hold two low tables.

  “Sit, sit,” Anthony says, smiling proudly. The owner emerges from a back room, rubbing his eyes. Anthony grabs his hand and shakes it vigorously.

  “Dr. James, Coca-Cola or Fanta?”

  “Um … Coca-Cola.”

  Anthony takes orders from the others and walks into the back room. He emerges with five bottles, and hands them to each of us, waves away our money.

  The owner pushes a gray pile of coals together and fans them with a piece of cardboard. They glow red. He takes a jar of murky oil and dumps it into a large steel pan, then places it over the embers. It starts to smoke.

  A boy of seven or eight stands paused in the puddle next to our stall, staring at me. He is wearing a long dirty shirt, ripped at the shoulder. Around him, raindrops spatter into the water. Anthony sees him.

  “Pffft. Pffffft.”

  The boy leaves. He steps onto a plank barefoot.

  Everyone is talking to one another in Arabic. I can’t understand a word. Behind us, the owner throws a bowlful of chopped goat into the pan. It hisses as it hits.

  I lean towards Helen. “So, are you excited to go to Abyei?”

  Her eyes tell me she is not. She is nervous. Until this morning, she had never been on a plane. She came from Addis to Khartoum by land and has seen cities mostly. This is the only town we have passed in half a day, its existence made possible by the large gravel pits nearby. It will be one of the last before we get to Abyei.

  “Is Abyei like this?” she asks.

  “Smaller.”

  “Smaller?”

  I nod.

  “What can you get there?” she asks.

  “Malaria.” She doesn’t laugh. “For food? Well, not much. You’ll see, I guess. It’s probably better to talk to the cook when you get there.”

  “Is she a nice person?”

  “Oh yes. Very nice.”

  A tray full of gristly goat pieces is dropped between us. With it, five pieces of bread. A flurry of hungry hands reach for them. Mine stay in my lap.

  “Dr. James? You eat?” Anthony asks.

  “Not hungry. Thanks. Coca-Cola is okay.”

  “You don’t like? Not good?”

  “Oh no, it’s good. I like very much.”

  Anthony is not convinced. The rest of the table is waiting. I break off a piece of bread and scoop up a piece of goat. They start talking again.

  I tear off another piece of bread. I have been sick enough times in the past four months. A picture of this market is hanging on the walls of E. coli travel agents around the planet. I went to the bathroom before we entered the market, and the latrine was flooded.

  The food is soon finished. We need to get on our way. The drive is from dawn until dusk, and there is little time to pause. We thank our host, and pay. Anthony refuses to take my money.

  We balance our way back to the Land Cruiser on the planks. One tips, I spill off, and sink into the thick mud.

  The nurses jump into the back of the truck before I have a chance to protest. The ride in the rear is even more teeth rattling. Helen and I share the front seat. My right thigh digs into the handrest, my shoulder pushes uncomfortably against the metal chassis.

  Helen is squeezed between the middle armrest and me. She is tiny. She is wearing short sleeves and her bare arm is against mine.

  I have not touched a human being for a long time. Felt a few hundred, but it’s not the same. I forgot. It’s good. Soft. Simple.

  I answer more of Helen’s questions about Abyei, but it is difficult to hear over the din. The road is rippled, and no speed, fast or slow, lessens the tumult. We stop talking, and she soon falls asleep, her head resting on my shoulder.

  I put my earphones in, and watch the trees whiz by. My left arm is fast asleep, but I don’t move it.

  13/06: open stretches.

  after 10 hours on a chattering road, i arrived into abyei as planned, two days ago. the first thing i did after setting my bags down was to fall headfirst into a fever. i spent my first morning back shivering in bed.

  today, i am better. at first i was worried i had disco fever, which in abyei, because of a lack of discos, is incurable. i considered lotto fever, spring fever, saturday night fever, johnny fever … pretty much all the fevers, but couldn’t confirm any of them. we simply don’t have the necessary tests, ones that would be readily available in canada. there, let’s say someone has, i don’t know, johnny fever. we just get the johnny fever guy on call, he rolls in with that episode of wkrp where mr. carlson decides to rain down turkeys on the thanksgiving parade, and the patient is cured. in abyei, it is much more difficult. the best we could do, if we even made the diagnosis of johnny fever, is to try to explain the episode from memory. it is poor treatment, and very rarely works.

  on a hunch, i started taking antibiotics. today i feel better. i guess i’ll never truly know which of the fevers it was. i’m just grateful it wasn’t disco because there would have been little chance of staying alive.

  the long ride from kadugli was exhausting, though the chance to see a landscape i had only flown over made it worthwhile. in ten hours of rocky red roads, we passed only a handful of towns. it is in one of them, the one where i ate lunch in a mud market, that i likely picked up one of the fevers. another one we passed was home to a hundred people or so. they shared their village with birds, large ones, three feet tall at the shoulder. they landed, evolutionary, between a crane and a pelican, and walked stooped, their heads hanging between their bony shoulders. most of them lingered in the groundwater near the side of the road, trying to siphon frogs. a few of them, however, padded back and forth between houses like hunched old men, as if they were returning to the market to pick up something they missed the first time.

  the rest of the journey, except for these few small blinks of people, was through acres of uninterrupted wilderness. the landscape reminded me of northern alberta, in the jackpine and the tamaracks, wide spaces between narrow trees standing on sand or marsh. some of my favorite. occasionally we would pass someone walking with a hoe dangling over his back. from where? to where? we had passed no homes. he was walking for miles, endlessly.

  i thought, was this what the fighting was about? these spaces where no one wants to live, and those that do have to struggle and struggle just to get a stalk of corn to poke out of the ground? the blaze of the bombs at night, a second before the sound. the bullets splintering the tamarack trees, whining away, frustrated at not finding a human. people running ahead, just ahead of the fighting, to where, anywhere, just not here. these marshes? that’s what it was about? here?

  sure. and because of resources. history. politics. because humans are war-like. all of these, and for other reasons i will never know. but also over those empty stretches. because, at the end of each long day, as dusk fades to dark, somewhere in this flat land, a woman sits down and sighs, glad to be home. and when the bullets come and drive her from it, her thoughts are full of return, of the peace she once felt with her back to the wide sky on a quiet road that stretched towards forever.

  “YOU NEED A TRIPOD.”

  “What if you climb up here … like this. No … the tukul.”

  “Over here.”

  “Oh, I’ve got it … Come here. Right here. Up like this.”

  We are in compound 1, taking pictures of Saturn. Right now David is balanced between our kitchen table and the rough edge of the gazebo window, holding his camera steady on the rafters. Julie, the new administrator, Tim’s replacement, is tryng to join him. Tim and I have taken a different tack, setting our cameras up on Marco’s angled roof. Saturn, for its part, looks like it just spilled out of the cup of a waning moon.

  On our makeshift couch, Marco sits talking with Laurence, our new logistician, about the Congo. Both of them did a mission there, at separate times. Laurence is telling a story of how he was invited to spend a weekend in the jungle with a group of pygmies. As they were walking, he looked away, onl
y for a second, and was lost, their path indistinguishable between the trees.

  “What did you set your shutter speed to?”

  “One-tenth of a second.”

  Click.

  Both Julie and Laurence arrived while I was on my R&R. They became fast friends on the long ride, on the open stretches. Tim and I finish taking our crooked pictures and sit down near Marco and David.

  “So,” Tim says, leaning forward from the couch, reaching for the ashtray.

  “So,” I answer.

  He ashes out his cigarette. “Glad to be back?” he asks.

  “Gladder than when I left, I think.”

  “Yeah. You look a bit better.”

  “I got some sleep. And it was good to see that there is more to the world than compound 1.”

  “There is? What’s it like?”

  “Ha. I guess you’ll find out tomorrow.”

  “Insh’allah,” Tim says.

  “Insh’allah or not, bro. You’re done.”

  “Yeah. I guess I am.”

  “That’s gotta feel pretty good.”

  “Yeah. I guess. Julie caught on really fast so today I had nothing to do. I packed, had a nap, read for the first time in … I don’t know, forever? Then I just wandered around. No destination in mind. Went to compound 2, through the market. Can’t remember when I did that last.”

  “So, you excited to get on the plane?”

  “I can’t really imagine it.”

  Laurence sets a beer down in front of each of us, winks, and sits back beside Marco.

  “Cool.”

  Tim lights a cigarette, gives one to me, throws me the lighter.

  “So what’s next?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. I don’t have any plans. I guess I’ll have to look for a job.”

  “What about another mission?”

  “I don’t think so. We’ll see.”

  “Well, Tim, after you leave, I’m the veteran.”

  “Yeah. Like Jean said.”

  “It’s crazy, eh? That it has only been six months? So much has happened, the measles epidemic, Bev was here, the emergency team stealing all our water. It’s like, forever.”

  “For those who think life is too short, come to Abyei!”

  I laugh. “Yeah. We could put it on a poster with a picture of a fan, but with one of those ‘no smoking’ things drawn through it.”

  “And a picture of the Abyei jazz band,” he says.

  “Talk about lasting forever.”

  We smile at each other.

  “What’s the first thing you’re going to do?”

  “Don’t know. Sleep. Eat.”

  “Your mom’s going to freak with how skinny you are.”

  “For sure.”

  “I was going to get you a djellaba and a walking stick for a going-away present, but couldn’t find one.”

  “I appreciate the thought.”

  David and Julie have finished with Saturn and are talking in the kitchen with Marco. I can hear the splash of the shower.

  “Where’s Angela?” Tim asks.

  “I think she’s still at the hospital.”

  “No way. She was there early this morning too. She’s going pretty hard.”

  “I’ll talk to her.”

  We’re both quiet. In the background the generator clacks.

  “Looks like they moved those bags finally,” Tim says.

  “Our security area? Yeah. It only took four months. I’m going to plant a garden. David has some seeds.”

  “It’s different than when we came here, hey?”

  “I was thinking about that. Laurence and Julie will only have seen it like this. The team is tighter, we’ve sorted out some of the problems with the compound, there’s not a hundred people in compound 2.”

  “Yup. And soon there’ll be a garden, an office, borehole,” Tim says.

  “Disco,” I reply.

  “Drive-in theater.”

  “Waterslide.”

  “Proper doctor.”

  “Your girlfriend.”

  He laughs. I take a sip from my beer.

  “Well, bro, I gotta say. It’s not going to be the same without you. You were a good, steady influence.”

  “Yeah, you too.”

  “No, I mean, you were calm. And I could laugh with you.”

  “Mmm.” He draws on a cigarette.

  “I wasn’t having a very good time for a while, you know,” I say. “I mean, a bad time. Like I wasn’t myself. Not with anyone, you know? I just spent all my time inside.”

  “I know. I could tell.”

  “But it was easier with you. The past few months, the mission, was easier because of you. It’s kinda been one of the best parts of it.”

  “You too.”

  “I don’t know who I’m going to talk to when you’re gone.”

  Laurence comes out of his tukul and sits down beside us.

  “How was the shower?” I ask.

  “Like heaven,” he says.

  The rest of the team comes from the kitchen. David says something to Julie in French, and she laughs. They sit down around our low table.

  “Well,” Marco says, “tomorrow the team changes. The person who has been here longest is going home.”

  We all turn to Tim and smile.

  “So, Tim, you have been a very good person for us here in Abyei … mmm … and we are glad that you did a very good job … and we hope your journey is safe. And that you eat a lot of food.” He raises his glass.

  We do the same.

  “To safe journeys.”

  Clink.

  19/06: mirror.

  each morning i wake to the sound of a bird pecking against the mirror that hangs on our shower wall. he cocks his head at his reflection for a second, then tactactac. i wonder if he is trying to set his image free, or if he wants to break through to the other world and its greener grass. it is dusk, but he is there now, tactactac.

  just a few minutes ago, as i was leaving the hospital, i imagined myself back home. in the emergency room. leaning up against the nurse’s desk to scribble down an order. the bright fluorescent light. the hum of electricity. an overhead announcement. a patient’s call bell ringing. the intern behind me waiting to review a case. a porter saying, excuse me, pushing a patient past. just one live moment.

  i understand why they call it shock. that’s what it felt like. two left brains. or two right ones. a mirror image on top of a mirror image, turned upside down. it didn’t match. if i changed places right now, in an instant, i wouldn’t know where to begin. wouldn’t know whether to sit down or stand up, where i finished and where everyone else started.

  THE MAN EYES ME FROM the side, wary. I am talking to a friend of his, the one who brought him in. His friend is worried because the man has been acting bizarrely. Shouting, laughing, crying, starting fights with people.

  “Has he ever been like this before?”

  He has not.

  “Did he do any drugs?”

  Only alcohol, but none recently.

  “How many days like this?”

  Three.

  “Is he sleeping?”

  No.

  “Eating?”

  No.

  “Is he talking about God a lot?”

  Yes. Very much.

  I look at the man. He is edging away, sliding down the veranda bench little by little, his wide eyes on me. I ask his friend to sit on the other side of him, and I turn to Alfred.

  “Don’t let him leave,” I say quietly.

  He nods.

  The look in the man’s eye is familiar. He is deeply paranoid, psychotic. Likely mania, given his age, but possibly schizophrenia. It could be something organic, medical, like an infection, but I doubt it. Something in the eyes. Too awake.

  I go to the nursing room. A child lies on the blue bed, breathing quickly. I have not heard about her yet. A nurse in a white coat is bent over a patient’s chart, squinting at an order. I unlock the metal drug cupboard and look for a v
ial of chlorpromazine, an injectable antipsychotic. Beside it sits the oral version, and I shake a tablet out and put it in my pocket, grab two oily ampoules of Valium. I fill two syringes with the chlorpromazine and put them in my pocket. I walk towards the guard.

  I’ll offer the patient the oral version of the chlorpromazine, but if he refuses, he will need to be restrained and sedated. It is not going to be easy. He looks strong. We’ll need his friend, the nurses, the guard, maybe others. The cleaners. We’ll put him in the front room. We’ll get a bed ready, with restraints, in the front room, that room where the premature baby from the tubercular woman lay dead for three days, we’ll take him in there, tie him down, sedate him, and then …

  What? Keep sedating him? Start him on long-term antipsychotic therapy? Rally his social supports?

  I’ll sedate him, and keep on doing it until he stops being violent. Then I’ll offer him oral therapy and ask that he come back to see me— Wait, I’ll be gone … to see Mohamed every week. And then we’ll let him go. And hope he doesn’t start shooting police in the market.

  I tap the guard on the shoulder. Follow me.

  We’ll get a bed, place it in the room, tie pieces of cloth or rope to it. I’ll get some soft cotton padding from the pharmacy for his wrists and ankles. We’ll ask him to follow us to the room. If he refuses, we’ll tackle him, carry him, tie him, inject him, screen him for malaria, reassess him in two hours, and again the next morning.

  We turn towards the veranda and can see the bright smiles of a growing crowd. The man is gesturing and yelling. People think him hilarious. I can’t understand what he is saying.

  Bed, rope, cotton, more people.

  I scan the crowd for Alfred and gesture him forward. He is laughing.

  “What is he saying?” I ask.

  “Only nonsense.”

  “The man is sick and if he leaves he will get sicker. I’m going to try and give him medicines, but if he says no, I will have to tie him down. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “You need to tell this to his friends too, so they understand, all right?”

  “All right.”