“And what did you find hard about the mission?”
Yesterday I took a shovel and pick from the bones of the new office and broke the ground beside my tukul. It was hard work, all clay. I have blisters on the first knuckle of both of my thumbs. This morning, after last night’s rain, the ground is firm and smooth again, no sign of my work.
“I never felt like I could get away. I think we could have used some more support, too.”
Marco told me that we are getting another midwife, one more nurse, and a nutritionist. A pharmacy assistant will be coming to straighten things out. No more bits of paper under a calculator.
“But the mission is better and better.”
Once the fence beside the tukul goes, and the tent is moved, the compound will be wide open space. A volleyball net can be set up. Underneath the tamarind tree, we can stake a hammock. No more meetings in the gazebo. It can be a place to read, to play cards.
We have started to get occasional food from Khartoum now. With the last shipment of drugs, I received two kilograms of muesli. A nurse returning from R&R brought two containers of yogurt. I used these, and some skim milk powder, to make more. Though Helen’s trip did not cause a food revolution, Ruth has proudly added potatoes au gratin to her repertoire and makes it at least three times a week.
“And what do you think you could have done better?”
The other day, Marco reluctantly gave us permission to visit the UN bar. He said that he would not attend, that he thought it wise to keep our distance, but that we were grown men and women who could make our own choices.
“I … I think I was too serious. I didn’t relax. If I was done working, I would go to my tukul and write. I didn’t take enough walks. I didn’t visit compound 2 enough. I should have traveled more, spent less time in the hospital.”
The ground where I slept, under the tree, is now mud. I tried to walk there the other day in my rubber boots to look for another foam bed. Mine in my tukul was too thin. As I walked past the tree that was once my leafless roof, I looked up into its deep green, and stepped out of my boot and into the thick black muck. I found a bed, one used during the measles mission. It was stained, but better. When Laurence saw me carrying it back, he said he was going to order some proper beds from Khartoum.
“Will you do another mission?” Marco asks.
There is no shadow left to slide into. The sun is straight above us, beating hot on our heads. Sweat beads on my forehead. Marco stifles a yawn with his hand. I need to go back to the hospital and help Mohamed.
“Yes.”
Marco folds his computer shut.
“Halas.”
Finished.
02/07: day.
now is the point in the story when the character begins to be pulled towards a future he thought would never come. the character, however, cannot appreciate any signs of movement. he still measures days in the same way: from dawn to dusk.
JULIE STICKS HER HEAD into the log tukul. I am typing on its computer.
“Coming, James?”
“Um … yep. Right now.” I press “send,” close the computer’s plastic lid.
The team is standing just outside the gate. Save Marco. He is in his yellow housecoat, arms folded in silent disapproval. The rest of us are going to the UN bar tonight.
“Sure you don’t want to come, Marco?” I ask.
“No. I stay here.”
“All right.”
Laurence sticks his head inside the gate.
“James, let’s go. The driver’s here.”
“Hey, Laurence, since you will be acting field co when Marco is on R&R, can we have our morning meetings at the bar?”
“Well, we’ll probably be there from the night before, so I guess it makes sense. We might as well take our lunch there too.”
“What about dinner?”
“Only every second day.”
“Okay.”
“And are we still going to use Marco’s tukul for our girlfriends?”
“Of course.”
Marco shakes his head and turns around. I hop into the back of the Land Cruiser and slam the door. Laurence climbs into the front. Angela, Julie, and David are already inside, hunched on bench seats.
We turn onto Abyei’s road. The UN compound is on the outskirts. We crawl through town, the driver honking at bicycles in his way. They swerve out of our cone of light, and we slowly pass.
“The gas is the skinny one on the right,” Laurence says to the driver, who ignores him, his nose against the glass.
We approach Abyei’s speed bump, formed by an attempt to bury the power cord of a generator that crossed the road. Tim and I called it Mount Abyei, the highest point for miles. I look around the cabin of the truck for someone to whom to tell my usual joke, that if I don’t survive the ascent, to tell my family I loved them. Everyone’s different. We bump across it.
The driver speeds up as we leave town. The gravel shakes us. We pass an SPLA checkpoint, the same one as on my morning run. From inside, a disembodied hand waves us through.
The road is empty. Coming up on our left is the storage compound for the World Food Programme. Its lights, lit by a generator, are strangely dim. As we draw closer, I can see why. A blur of bugs, thousands of thousands thick, whirl and loop around them. Tiny electron orbits of mosquitoes, an occasional parchment of moth wings. I imagine swiping my hand through their fast field, feeling them whap against my skin like sand.
Why the attraction to light? A remnant of their pupal stage, where they crawled towards an opened end? Or the right way to struggle from a bird’s mouth or a sticky plant’s. Maybe it’s just something that is beyond their control. Maybe before humans brought light to the dark, moths used to fly all night towards the hollow moon.
We are soon at the UN compound. Four helmeted UN peacekeepers sit in a guardhouse, yawning. One gets to his feet and gestures our car forward. He takes a comically large dentist’s mirror and reflects the underside of our car, looking for bombs. He waves us out, goes through our IDs one by one, and then lets us pass. Our driver backs the Land Cruiser away.
“Do you think he was drunk?” Laurence asks.
“Who? The driver?” I ask.
“Oui.”
“Could explain why he was going so effing slow. I was too far away. I’ll look on the way back.”
“When you’re drunk.”
“Exactly.”
We pass through the UN parking lot. Dozens of new Land Cruisers, their long CB antennas bent like mousetraps ready to spring. Containers full of soldiers, from Bangladesh, Zambia, Germany, and Canada, sit humming and air-conditioned. Several hundred peacekeepers are stationed here in Abyei. Recently, both military groups, North and South, curtailed their movements. The UN soldiers are now forced to drive in smaller and smaller circles.
The bar lies just on the other side of a field flanking the parking lot.
“Watch for snakes,” David says. We look at our feet as we walk through the thick grass.
In a courtyard between containers sits the bar. Its roof is a tukul’s roof, its floor cement. Underneath harsh fluorescent lights are tables made from large, empty spools, and around these, a few plastic chairs. To one end is a counter. On it, a soldier sits, his shaved head resting in the crook of his elbow. Above him a fan slowly spins. It is quiet except for the calls of crickets and the hum of the large generators, different from the racket of our small one. The soldier sees us and sits up straight. Women have that effect in Abyei.
We each take a seat at one of the spools. There is no one else in the bar. Laurence starts to stand. I leap up.
“Let me. Pilsner, David?”
“Pilsner.”
“Laurence?”
“Pilsner.”
“Angela?”
“Yup.”
“Julie?”
“Same.”
I lean against the bar.
“Five pilsner, please.”
The soldier reaches into the glass cooler behind him, pul
ls them out one at a time, and pops their tops off. There is no satisfying hiss.
“Sorry. They all got frozen yesterday. Cooler was too cold.”
I shrug and hand him twenty-five dollars. He puts it in a tin box. I pass the bottles around.
“To beer,” I say.
“To Abyei,” Laurence says.
“To the UN,” David says. “Just kidding.”
We all take a sip. Flat. Cold. I reach for one of Laurence’s cigarettes. He nods.
“So, James … you leave soon.”
“Looks that way.”
“Have you heard about your replacement?”
“A little bit. First mission. Tropical disease experience, which is good. Speaks French. That’s the only bad thing, I guess.”
“Careful. Marco’s gone soon.”
“She’s not going to arrive before I leave, though.”
“Oh?”
“Visa problems or something. And I can’t stay. I start work in August.” I told Brian, when I first went through Khartoum, that I had agreed with the hospital to return and help out in the summer. People are on vacations, want to get rid of shifts. It was a foot in the door to the hospital, the university. Now it is a good reason to leave. I’m exhausted.
Angela and Julie are chatting with the soldier behind the bar. He is thrilled. Laurence and David start talking in French. I finish my pilsner and order another. Also flat. Cold.
Laurence leaves to use the latrine. I turn to David.
“You are leaving too,” I say to him.
“Yes. As soon as I can get a flight.”
“Through the South?” I ask.
“Yes, to Juba. Juba-Loki, Loki-Nairobi, Nairobi-Geneva.”
“Then what?”
“Not sure. Another mission, I guess. Whatever they tell me. Maybe back here. Still no borehole.”
“I see …”
David starts flipping the lighter, tapping it on the table. Neither of us wants to talk about work. Tap. Tap.
“Well, David, I’ll make you a deal.” He stops tapping. “You know how I told you one of the things that would frighten me most would be being at sea, on a sailboat hundreds of kilometers from shore, in the middle of a storm?”
“Yes, I remember. Me too.”
“And I don’t know if I will ever do it, but because I’m afraid, I kinda want to. Know what I mean?”
“Yes. I’m the same.”
“Okay. So, if in your life, in the next ten years or twenty years, whatever, if you decide you want to sail across the ocean and want someone to do it with, I’ll do it.”
He shakes his head. He doesn’t follow. I try again.
“If I had to sail across the ocean, and I could choose someone I thought would make good company and who I could work to solve problems with, it would be you.”
He doesn’t understand my meaning.
“You know. We sorted out the recubra. And the gazebo. Remember? When it was raining.”
“All right,” he says, hesitantly. “I’ll let you know.”
“I mean … we don’t have to … just …” He looks towards Julie and Angela. “Forget it.”
He stands, goes to join them. I drain my second pilsner, pick up the red lighter. Tap. Tap. Tap.
I AM LOOKING FOR my clothes in the clothes cupboard in the corner of the gazebo. It is well after dinner. The generator kicks noisily in the corner. Ah. There they are, an unfolded bunch of them.
I close the wooden door and tie it shut from storms. I place my clothes on our dinner table and start to fold.
David is gone. He left yesterday. He drove for two hours to a flooded landstrip and waited as the plane buzzed it once, twice, then banked away. Desperate, he and the driver followed in the Land Cruiser and watched it land on a drier piece of earth a few kilometers away. They tried to reach it, but a river blocked their path. They drove back and forth, but could find no place for the truck to cross. Finally, the driver stopped, David hiked up his trousers, grabbed his bag from the back, and forded the river. He arrived just in time. The driver put the car in reverse to begin the drive back to Abyei, but he was hopelessly stuck. It took him hours to get out.
Where everyone else is, I don’t know. Sleeping, listening to music, sending email. Oh, there’s Marco, walking back from the log tukul. He is going on his R&R soon. To Jordan.
He stepped into the kitchen to pour himself a glass of water, and is now walking towards the gazebo. He takes a chair at the end of my folding table. Smiles.
“So.”
I smile back.
“So.”
“The great doctor goes home soon.”
“Insh’allah.”
He lights a cigarette, and exhales slowly.
“Soon, Abyei will be very small to you.”
“Really?”
“Like … poof. All these problems become not yours.”
“I would be surprised if it was that easy,” I say.
He shrugs.
“I am going to be worried about you guys until the next doctor gets here. I can’t stop thinking about that.”
“Even that will disappear. Poof.”
I shake my head and sit down.
“You glad to be going on your R&R? To another Muslim country in the desert?”
He nods. “Very much.”
“Aren’t you going to be worried about us?”
He laughs, thinks for a second. “No.” He laughs again.
“Could I have a cigarette?”
“Of course.” He offers me the package.
It is rare for Marco and me to be sitting like this, just the two of us, talking. We both like each other, but we are both quiet, busy watching. I prefer writing to talking; he prefers listening. I am always moving, full of plans. He told me, during my end-of-mission evaluation, that after he arrived, he watched me for a couple of days and thought, “It seems Abyei has two coordinators.”
I remember those days. I learned from them.
“Did you read the book I gave to you?” he asks.
“Um. Some of it. It was good. I have to give it back to you before you leave.”
“Just put it down in my tukul.”
“Hey, let’s sit outside?”
“Yes.”
I pull two chairs off the gazebo floor and put them in the sand. Above us, a sky dusted with stars.
“So,” I say.
“So.”
“This is your first mission as field co, right?”
“First. Yes.”
“You were a log before?”
“Yes. Three missions or so.”
“Where again?”
“Sudan, Angola, Congo.”
“So why field co?”
He shrugs. “I wanted a new … mmm … challenge? To make a project work, but not only by fixing machines. It’s a bigger work. Much work with people, trying to understand them, their problems, how to help them do their job.”
“Are you going to do it again?”
He pauses, shuffles his chair in the sand. “I don’t know. I think about this. The part I like best is the medical activities, the hospitals, the mobiles. I don’t like much sitting in security meetings, or meeting with military commanders. Maybe it would be good with HIV.”
“I think you’re good at it. You made things calm, at least with me. It was good to have you say, ‘We just do what we are doing. We make no changes unless we have to.’ It was important for me and Tim to have someone tell us that.”
He laughs. “It is because I am slow. I need time to think, see the situation. Maybe it changes. I take long decisions.”
“I think that’s good. At least it worked for me.”
“Well, then, we are lucky.”
The generator winds down. I glance at my watch. Ten.
“What did you do before MSF?”
“I was in school for nuclear engineer. But I stop.”
“Why?”
“The first few years were good, I like very much. Just learning about the atom. But i
n the last two years, it was about practical, and I knew that I would be then working in a power plant or something like. I enjoy very much the theory, but I think I wouldn’t enjoy much the job.”
“I always want to know more about that second, that one instant from when nothing went to everything,” I say.
“For me too. That’s why I study.”
“I think I told you. When I was in Africa last, I came here as a writer. I traveled around from country to country, writing about HIV. A blog. I learned a lot.”
“You told me,” he says.
“Well, I traveled through Zambia with a photographer. She was great. We worked well together, and we talked about doing it again. She said she wanted to travel around the world and take photos of different cultures dancing. I said I wanted to go looking for magic.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. I don’t know if ‘magic’ is the right word. I mean … like … the unexplainable.”
“Okay.”
“Just to see if it exists. I used to think it did, but I’m not so sure any more. You know?”
Marco shrugs and butts his cigarette out. I tip back on my chair. We sit there for a while, quiet. Above us the Milky Way is bright, a smear of a thousand suns.
From nothing, everything.
10/07: interspace.
the best way to get a hedgehog out of your room is to poke him with something blunt, like a shoe or a book. then, when he curls into a ball, you just roll him gently from behind your trunk and out the door.
a vine that i have been watching for a few days has now crept into my tukul, and decided, for some reason, to turn left and follow the wall. quietly, nature would reclaim this tukul if i let it. only bats and bugs and vines and clicking crickets. it is one of the things that gives me some solace. if we humans don’t figure it out, if we use everything until there is nothing more to use, and slowly or suddenly join the fossil record, it’s ok. there are other things besides us.
Six Months in Sudan Page 25