Six Months in Sudan (27 page)

“M-m-mohamed m-m-m-makes the b-b-best tea,” says the man to his right, John, a nurse. In the hospital, I rarely hear his stutter. He must be nervous.

“No, no, thank you. Tim and I are just stopping by to say hello. We have to go and help out at compound 1. Paola’s party tonight, right? She leaves tomorrow. Insh’allah.”

The men around the table are disappointed. Despite promising, we don’t make the visit to compound 2 very often. It is about five hundred meters from our compound, and this is my third time. They rarely come to ours. Too full of work.

“Tim? We have time for a cup of tea?”

“Nothing but time.”

“Two teas, please.”

Mohamed disappears into the kitchen tent. Tim and I sit down, inch closer to the table.

“Dominoes, hey?” Tim says. “Who wants to teach me?”

Each of the three men starts to offer advice, pulling pieces from the pile and laying them out in sequence. I am having trouble following their enthusiastic instructions. I turn my attention back to the birds.

Mohamed returns with a Thermos and carefully pours three glasses of tea, sugar swirling at their bottom. He picks one up by the rim and hands it to me, the other to Tim.

“Shukran … shukran,” we say. He nods.

Mohamed and I sit sipping tea, a few feet back from the table, watching Tim and John angle dominoes into a growing maze. Every now and again, the metal gate creeps open and one of our staff walks in, blinking in surprise at seeing Tim and me this close outside of the hospital.

A chorus of generators begins to ascend, and I drain the last grains of my sweet tea.

“I think we have to go. Paola’s last day, and we promised we would help her. You guys coming?”

The men around the table shrug. Tim pushes his stool back.

“Thanks for the tea. We have to come here more often. It’s like paradise. Tea, games, birds singing,” I say.

“You’re w-w-welcome an-n-y time.”

We shake everyone’s hand, and they return to their game. We open the gate. The sun is setting, and now that it is no longer in their eyes, the men have moved their chairs to the other side of the road. We wave to them.

“See you tonight?” Tim yells.

“Oh, maybe. I’m verrry tired.”

“Come if you can. We are making lots of food.”

We wave goodbye and walk towards our compound.

22/05: cows rule.

if one is lucky, he might witness the extraordinary, maybe even the magical. if he sees it just once, he will spend the rest of his life looking for it.

today, the sun was high and hot, and it burned through bands of thin white clouds. i sat watching them, trying to determine whether the wind would hold the darker ones on the horizon away or shuffle them in. i couldn’t determine which direction they were moving. north … no, south. wait. north. the narrow strands of cloud were being blown back, and forth, and back, and forth, stuttering, a glitch, a loop in time. they stayed there, tossed around from side to side, for a minute or more. dizzying.

the life around abyei is not linear, it is curved. it moves in ellipses and arcs. the huts are round. the cattle paths meander back and forth. there are no straight sidewalks when one nears a home, but a gently angled padded approach. in canada we can trace our lives with a ruler. our doors, our stairs, our house, our property, the shortest path to work, to the movie theater. whenever i arrive home after months away like this, my first thought is always “wow. everything is so square.”

as i have mentioned before, many of the paths in the part of sudan where i work are made by the dinka. they are one of the largest tribes in the south, and make up a majority of the patients that i see in the hospital. consequently, i know them the best. easily recognizable, tall and thin with high cheekbones and almond eyes, they are nilotic cousins of the more famous masai from kenya. among the most famous of the dinkas is manute bol, who, at seven foot seven, was the tallest player in nba history. anthropologists wonder at how they preserve their unique height. someone once told me that the dinkas in southern sudan changed weight/height charts for the entire world.

historically, many of the dinka were pastoralists. they spent their time herding cattle from one grazing area to the other, looking at the clouds and following the seasons. if the unit of human understanding is the story, the story at least in this part of the world includes the cow. they are of the highest worth. they are used to pay a woman’s family for permission to marry. their number is a measure of social status, of power and wealth. they are tended and loved. often, a man will favor a particular cow, befriend it, write poems about it. on the full moon, some tribes tie colorful bands to the bulls’ horns, and sing and dance until morning.

in abyei, there is one large bull that is free to roam about town. his horns are incredibly large, difficult to believe. they are as disproportionate to his frame as mantis antennae, and very heavy. unable to find equilibrium, his head bobs from side to side.

cows are rarely killed for food. usually, only their milk is taken. traditionally, at adolescence, a dinka boy is relieved of his childhood duties, of which milking the cows is an important one. with an initiation rite, he is welcomed into the world of men, and with this arrival, the permission to accumulate cattle of his own, and to take a wife.

many of the men who i work with bear the marks of this initiation. on their foreheads are deep scars, tracing the brows and meeting in the middle. they are intended to resemble horns. at thirteen or so, after an adrenalin-filled night of dancing and singing and homage to ancestors, an elder takes a sharp knife and cuts deep into the forehead of the initiate, who neither cries nor flinches; a jitter in a smooth scar would be a permanent sign of his cowardice. the blood is then wiped away, and his forehead bound. the cuts are deep. i have read that sometimes when a skull is discovered one can tell the tribe it belonged to because of the marks left in the bone.

i have not found out why some of the people i see have different patterns of scars. delicate series of lines, dots, circles stretching from
their faces, down their arms, over their chests. they are remarkable, elegant, and final. occasionally, i will see women with such intricate scars, but haven’t been able to glean their significance. i will do more research.

there are other unique, distinguishing features particular to some of my patients, as well as some of my colleagues. some, for instance, have their four front teeth removed. i have seen it done both on the top and the bottom. others have their teeth pulled to right angles from their jaw. completely perpendicular to their face, they jut beneath their lip. it is thought that it makes women, in particular, look beautifully fierce.

i remember asking my translator in cambodia why he kept the nail on his fifth finger so long. he shrugged. “i think it looks good,” he said.

it is an unfortunate thing that i will not be in abyei long enough, and am unable to mix with its population well enough, to get more than glimpses into the complex patterns of human history and beliefs that surround me. already, one can see ties to the past loosening. in abyei, 50 cent shirts are more common than traditional garb. one of the people i worked with asked how much it would cost to have his teeth reinserted. such traditions are relics, part of an old sudan that has no place in a global future.

as i often do, i wonder what we lose as we drop another piece of human pageantry, another extraordinary piece of our history. perhaps nothing. and it makes good sense to me as a canadian, good rational sense, to not give a fourteen-year-old boy scars on his face he might be ashamed of fifteen years later. however, i suspect the part of us that encourages uniformity, that engenders such shame, that puts as arbiter a sensibility that sees differences as deviances, is more to blame than his parents. north americans do not need to look far to see how easy forced integration, borders, and culture is for a native, nomadic population.

however for now, and for the foreseeable future, no matter how many eminem and wwe shirts parade around abyei, cows still rule. the dinka are slowly recovering from the turmoil of africa’s largest war, and they are moving with their growing herds to find green grass and to celebrate marriages. change may be inevitable, but here at least, it will be slow.

“A
LL RIGHT, SO PAOLA
showed you most of the things, right?”

“More or less,” Angela answers in a heavy Australian accent. “I’ve got to say, though, I’m completely lost.”

“It won’t take long to figure it out.”

We walk past the veranda on the far side of the hospital. Under the thin gauze of a mosquito net is a woman who has second-and third-degree burns to her torso and arm. She is sitting there quietly, as always, her head hanging. Her back is a mass of early scarring and open wounds. One of the nurses has covered it in gentian violet, the blue dye staining the white bandages on her arm. Flies buzz around her.

“Jesus,” Angela says.

“Yeah. She’s been here for a month. We keep on bandaging her arm. Full-thickness burn. She’ll need a graft, but I don’t know anywhere that will do it. Once she heals, I guess we’ll tell her to go to Khartoum. When I first got here, I would debride these types of wounds, but they all got infected. One little kid died. Too dirty here. Okay, this … this is Abul. She got hit by a car a few weeks ago and fractured her leg.”

Mohamed sits down beside a woman with white hair, a long cast on her leg. Scattered beneath her are white chips of plaster.

“She got hit by a car in the market because she was lying on the ground there. That’s where she lived. She must have schizophrenia, or Alzheimer’s or something. Anyway, she broke her leg, and now she keeps on picking off her cast. She has no family or friends. Except us. Right, Abul?” I take her hand away from the hole she is digging in her cast. She smiles.

“What are you going to do with her?” Angela asks.

“I don’t know. The mothers around here are getting frustrated because she is so bizarre. She grabbed one of their children yesterday and hugged him too hard. We have to figure something out.”

Abul starts picking at her cast again. I pull her hand away.

“Marco and I have been talking with her chief. Usually they take some responsibility for people in their chiefdom. But that could take a
while, so we’re thinking we will take her to compound 2. For the time being.”

Mohamed looks up.

“Mohamed is looking for a wife anyway.” He shakes his head.

Angela and I move on. Mohamed stays behind to chat with Abul. They find each other delightful.

“This is the TB office. I do a clinic here on Wednesday and Thursday, for the outpatients. We have about eight or so inpatients at the back of the hospital. We’ve had some people stay persistently TB-positive, and I couldn’t figure out why. Then I thought maybe it’s the rifampicin pills. They’re heat labile and have been sitting out here in, like, 104 Fahrenheit for I don’t know how long. So I moved them to the pharmacy. Like, yesterday. They’re just kinda sitting there in the middle of the floor. Sorry.”

“Right. No worries.”

“This room here, the broom closet, is cursed. Or so people think, anyway. We had someone stay there for three months, and he just got worse and worse. The next patient was this old woman with diarrhea. She died last week. Right now it’s empty. Nobody wants to be there. We are talking about making it our morgue. Long story.”

“Okay.”

We pass the women’s ward, patients sprawled out in the hallway. A girl with a freshly amputated limb looks up at us.

“This is the maternity ward,” I say, standing at the doorway. “Basically, I have no idea what is going on in there. We had a midwife, but she split.”

Angela’s eyes are wide. Around us, children cry, mothers mill about, forty outpatients are queued at the front, some holding babies, others with their heads in their hands. One of our cleaners starts our gas water pump, and it roars to life. He puts one end in a blue barrel, filling it. As he pulls it into the next, it sprays loudly, splashing us in the transition. Chaos.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “It gets smaller.”

“I wasn’t expecting this,” she says. “Where do you start?”

“I’ll help you out with that. Paola, before she left, was working mostly in the feeding center. It’s a good place to work. You’ll see. Maybe
just give yourself some time to get used to things before you start making changes. Once you feel you’re on top of it, you can decide where to begin. I think basic nursing tasks might be a good place. Vital signs, medical assessment, medicine administration. That kind of thing.”

“Right. No problem.”

“And, just personally, it will be good to have someone else in the hospital.”

“Well, I know kids. But in Australia. I have a lot to learn here.”

“Don’t worry. I was the same. I’ll help you out.”

“That would be great.”

I look at her and see myself, new, lost in this huge place.

“It’s a lot, hey?”

“Yeah. A lot.”

“Just do what you can.”

“Right.”

“And take care of yourself.”

“Right.”

“Because if you think you are going to change it all in six months, you’re going to leave sick with regret.”

We pick our way through the feeding center, towards the kitchen. The floor is full of families and listless children with loose skin, paper bags of bones. One of them is crying hoarsely, pulling at the feeding tube in her nose with gauze-wrapped hands. Her mother watches us pass.

In the kitchen, one of the cooks is stirring a large pot of beans. Several of our staff sit at a table, drinking tea, cleaning up the dregs of the morning meal with pieces of bread.

“Dr. James!” the cook says, grinning, and slaps my hand. She likes me for some reason.

“So, people in the hospital get two meals a day. Mostly beans. The ones who are here for more than a few days hate it. Paola and I were talking about switching it up more. Especially for the TB patients. There’s calorie guidelines and stuff. We’ll talk about it another time.”

“Right.”

We turn back towards the nursing room. We pass Aweil. She
squeals at me, puts her fist in her mouth. She started walking a few days ago.