Six Months in Sudan Read Free Page A

walked from the train station, with my backpack on and my suitcase rolling behind. The office was twenty minutes away by foot. Geneva was temperate, its streets bare of snow. Taxicabs slowed beside me and honked. I waved them on.
    On a final corner sat a building draped in scaffolding, and behind bright metal bones a banner shouted: “Malaria!” I pushed through the glass doors and into a hallway lined with posters. One showed a pill set like a jewel into a gold ring; another decried rape in the Congo. People walked past them, talking loudly, papers under their arms. A woman with a large backpack on edged past me and out the door. I walked to the front desk. The woman behind it hung up the phone to have it ring again. I smiled and waited.
    On a whiteboard beside her was written a list of names and countries: people leaving on mission, people coming home. Mine sat misspelled in the “Out” column and, beside it in brackets, “MD North Sudan.” When she was done, I pointed at it.
    “That’s me.”
    She looked down at her busy desk. On it was a piece of paper with names and times: my briefing schedule. She handed it to me. At the top was: “James Maskalyk MD (Sudan) Stay in Geneva: 12.02.07 to ????”
    She showed me to a room where I could store my things. It was fullof luggage. People leaving, people coming home. The walls were lined with rows and rows of gray plastic boxes, on their mouths written “DRC” or “Mozambique” or “Myanmar.” Inside some were letters, or small bound parcels making their way to the field. They were grouped together geographically. I traced my finger from Asia to Africa, from South to North, and next to “Tschad” sat a box labeled “Northern Sudan.” I shook it. It was empty. I stepped from the room and closed the door.
    I sat in meeting after meeting, sleep headache bunched behind my eyes, and tried to concentrate. Facts that were meant to illuminate my days, the course of my months, were laid out before me. I was told about life on mission, how one should behave around alcohol, around drugs, about the perils of sleeping with one’s team members. I was given the layout of the hospital, the pattern of pathology, the hierarchy of responsibility. I was told about the diseases I would see, ones that my medical training rarely touched, ones I had encountered mostly in textbooks. Malaria, tuberculosis, guinea worm. In my satchel was a sheaf of papers I had already printed off, some on leishmaniasis, some on leprosy.
    I would have no access to x-rays in Abyei, no basic lab tests. The nearest surgeon was three hours away, and the road to him was not always safe. I would be expected to birth babies and handle trauma. I was asked if I would perform an abortion if it was medically necessary. I said that I would.
    I was responsible for the Sudanese people in the hospital, but so too the expatriates on my team. I was told that the doctor I was replacing was leaving after only three months to pursue a master’s. I wondered how many master’s started in March.
    During my last meeting of the day, I learned more about Abyei. The project was the crucible where North meets South. In a peace agreement signed two years before, the one that ended Africa’s longest, bloodiest war, it was agreed that the Abyei question would be settled later. Soldiers from each side faced each other across an invisible divide and between them sat the hospital. And our compound. And soon, me.
    Everything around Abyei was a vacuum built by twenty years of guns. One that both sides, South and North, were trying to get people from all over Sudan to fill in preparation for a referendum that was to determine Abyei’s fate, and with it the destiny of Sudan.
    There were a few other NGOs in the area, and a large UN mission. Together we were in the middle of nowhere. Us and thousands of Sudanese people returning to make a home where there was none; canaries in a coal mine.
    I shook my head clear. I was in the security