Our health compound in Yida, South Sudan
I’m sitting on my new front porch eating hash browns and
drinking some very delicious coffee. Everything around me at this moment looks
and feels like numerous vacations I’ve taken in the last few years, and so it’s
hard to grasp that this is where I live now. Liberia is making a very good first impression.
I was terribly homesick the day I arrived. This place is so
different from Uganda and so unfamiliar. They say that when you go to a new
culture it’s like you become a two year old- you can’t communicate, you don’t
know how to cross the road, you don’t know what is polite to ask in a
conversation and so on. I feel like in Uganda I had at least progressed to my teenage
years, but now I am a two year old again. Anyways, on Day 1 that thought was a
bit overwhelming, but now I’m just excited. I’m really excited to be here.
I haven’t written anything anywhere about leaving Uganda. I
don’t think it’s likely that I will, at least not right now. It was sad to go.
There were lots of tears my last few weeks. I love my program there. I’m so
proud of my staff. I’m so confident that their efforts can bring a real change
to the communities they serve. I feel so privileged to have been part of
something I felt so passionate about. Working with the women in Karamoja evoked
a ferocious sense of mission in me that I had never experienced before. I
felt like my heart was on fire inside my chest. It was a good fight, but it was
a fight and every battle has its casualties.
For a long time, once I decided to leave Karamoja, I felt guilty, like I had
failed, like I shouldn’t have been beaten. But I don’t feel that way anymore.
Just because you’re beaten doesn’t mean that you picked the wrong battle. It might just mean that you fought really, really hard.
If I try and think back over the past few years a lot of it
just feels like a fog. It was so busy, so intense, so everything it can seem
like this indistinguishable blob of experiences. There are a few exceptions
though- a few incidents or moments that stand out crystal clear in my memory.
One of the clearest ones is of a night in Yida, South Sudan.
It was my last night in Yida when the market place in the
refugee camp somehow caught fire. The entire camp was built of sticks and
grass, and there had been not a drop of rain for months so the market stalls
went up like match sticks. From our compound we could see the orange glow suddenly
staining the night sky. Our medical centre (maternity and inpatient/outpatient
nutrition) was located just adjacent to the market, with only a road in between
and was also built of dry sticks and grass. We jumped in to our pick-up truck
and drove as close as we could to the market, then ran the rest of the way to
the medical compound.
The fire was unlike anything I had seen before. It was truly
an inferno, absolutely huge, so hot, so loud and so close. Refugees were
running with cans of water from the borehole, mostly I think to try and wet
down nearby structures that weren’t yet ablaze, because there was no feasible
way to check the fire itself. When we
got to our centre we found that the nurses on call had already broken a hole
through the back fence so that the patients and their mothers could escape. The
staff, along with many of the refugees, were busy hauling everything out of the
compound through the hole in the fence- records, therapeutic foods,
medications, our hospital beds. I think we all assumed that our compound was
going to catch fire too, and so we were running, running, running, working
together to throw everything in to our big metal trunks and carry them to a
safe place.
Both our permanent nurse and permanent midwife were on
leave, so I had been acting as overseer for our medical services. I felt like
it was my responsibility to be the last to leave our compound, checking each
structure to make sure that all our supplies had been retrieved, that there
wasn’t one frightened person hiding in a corner somewhere.
Along with the numerous grass thatch structures in our compound,
we had two large white medical tents- one for maternity and one for our
inpatient nutrition. The last place I walked through was the nutrition tent.
Everything had been removed except for the mosquito nets which had hung over
the beds. They were tied to the ceiling of the tent and I assume they were deemed
too time consuming to try and remove. Without the bed frames to give them some
structure the nets were just dangling from the ceiling, twisting and turning
from the breeze coming from the fire. They looked like ghosts. That’s my
memory- walking through that tent with the specters on either side of me and
the fire roaring like a dragon behind my back.
In the end everything was (relatively speaking) fine. No one
died in the fire. I don’t even think there were any serious injuries, if memory
serves. Our centre, miraculously, wasn't even singed. By the time I had finished checking the compound the nurses were
already digging through the piles of rescued supplies to find the med trunk so
they could do their night rounds. Our little nutrition patients and their
mothers were chatting contentedly on their hospital beds set up under some
trees. The night was warm. Everything was safe. The next day rebuilding would
have to begin, but the worst was definitely over.
I’m not sure why my mind has held on to that moment so
strongly. I couldn’t say for certain, but I do wonder if it’s because my time
in Karamoja reminded me of how I felt that night in Yida. That frantic,
overwhelming feeling, feeling if you weren’t fast enough everything would burn
to the ground. Feeling like I was alone, responsible, inadequate. Feeling like
I wanted to fight, fight, fight until I didn’t have any fight left in me. I
tend to think metaphorically, and that moment could be a good metaphor for the last
few years. Hope coexisting with desolation. Peace alongside of panic.
