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Everything is not gwar in Sudan

By Alberta Schweitzer - posted Tuesday, 13 June 2006


We have only one female paramedic. She also came from an Ethiopian refugee camp, but was brought back to Sudan because her husband bought her from there. She speaks, therefore, quite good English and is our best paramedic. We would like to try and find some more women to work in the clinic as the men, without exception, have a zero caring factor, but most of the girls haven’t returned from the camps yet, and probably won’t until the area is more stable.

Sarah (some of them do have English names) the paramedic, is about 19, and pregnant. Her husband isn’t working, though she works full time. She had to ask for a day off yesterday as her husband said she had to go and buy food. So she had to walk for five hours to the nearest place she could buy grain, and back again, while he sat and waited and spat.

The security situation here is pretty iffy. Actually the whole of south Sudan is. The aid organisation I work for has evacuated several missions this past two months. Only last week the entire staff of a clinic had to spend a scary night on the floor of the clinic while bullets flew over their heads. They were evacuated the next day.

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A couple of clinics were completely looted when the staff evacuated. They even emptied all the medications out of the plastic containers so they could use the containers. They trashed the whole clinic compound as well as the staff compound, so staff lost all their personal belongings, most of which they hadn’t been able to take on the evacuation aircraft. About 30 locals were shot by the White Army (which is what they call themselves - a pretty silly name I think for a bunch of very black men). I'm not quite sure of what their agenda is, but they must be short of plastic containers.

Nor am I sure what the organisation's long term plan is about remaining somewhere that keeps getting shot at and then razed to the ground. But, I guess, since we are an emergency medical organisation, if we pulled out of everywhere there was shooting, there wouldn’t be many places we could go. And again, it boils down to the fact without our presence, these people have absolutely no medical facilities, and the vulnerable are not the ones running around in army fatigues.

It goes on and on, and every day we get a new security brief, and an update on the evacuation procedure, and we find out more about the likelihood of being in the firing line here. It is not likely at all, we have been assured, but still I am pleased security is taken so seriously.

We lost our lab tech the other day to the army. Can you imagine anything less logical than the SPLA (or maybe it was the Government of Sudan - who knows or cares, they are all murderers) recruiting the only lab tech who works in the only health facility for hundreds of kilometres, and is solely responsible for the diagnostics on all their dreadful diseases. But the boys came into town looking for new canon fodder, and took our lab tech.

Thank goodness our organisation sent in a replacement, or my recent illness may have been diagnosed later and consequently been worse. I have only just surfaced after being flattened by some insidious, ghastly, gut-invading lurgy which caused extremely unattractive, non-stop, high-velocity trots; a fever which caused my teeth to chatter and my brain to explode; combined with cramps which were like the excruciating variety in child-birth, but with no reward at the end, only extreme lethargy and a feeling of having been run over by a steam roller.

Fortunately, high tech PHCC (Primary Health Care Clinic) that we are, we have a lab, and a lab tech, and he tested the vile excrement, took blood for malaria trials and other cell count type diagnostics and found I had amoebic dysentery. It has been zapped with the appropriate drug, and now I am at least off my bed and have graduated to drinking sweet black tea without having to rush to the loo.

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On those nights that are clear, the Southern Cross is a beacon. It is so close I could touch it. I was so surprised to find that it could be seen this far north of the equator. It is the last thing I see every night before I enter my tukul. It is a beacon which reminds me about our beautiful, clean, safe, democratic, educated, idyllic country, and how utterly blessed we are to live in it.

I would rip off someone’s arms at the moment to get to a clean, crisp, delicious, fresh salad and grilled fish which was not going to reappear again within 30 minutes in mutant form. Tonight is my cooking night, so I have to go to the store and choose which can of bland vegetable will be to added to spongy potatoes and fried onions. None of which I can eat at the moment, but everyone else will.

Probably what I will have will be a Tusker (the very excellent Kenyan beer) and a couple of cigarettes. Sadly I have succumbed to the aid organisation affliction - but I just had to give myself a break on something, and it is only three at night, never during the day.

And we have the 10-day rotation plane to look forward to. This delivers some stringy fresh food which lasts about three days and a piece of horrendous billy-goat hock, which gets boiled all day, and added to the bland vegetables. It tastes like really old, really grissly, really smelly billy-goat. One that has been flogged all its life in the cattle camp, and had to walk from Uganda to the sale yard in Loki. Which, no doubt, it is.

My R & R comes up in three weeks and I am going to Lamu, an island off the Somali coast. Reputed to be very beautiful, historic, and safe, and has food that does not come in tins. Hope it isn’t a rerun of my R & R in River No 2 in Sierra Leone where I was greeted with poo floating on the water.

Be safe - I sure as hell am going to do my best to remain so.

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About the Author

Alberta Schweitzer is a health worker for an aid organisation in South Sudan. This is a pseudonym to protect her safety and that of her co-workers.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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