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The Hardship of Darkness
Southern Sudan is hard.
The soil is hard to plant, water is hard to get, and food is hard to find. Birth is hard, and living is harder. The air is hard to breathe, and the weather is either hot as hell or wetter than the river to it. Southern Sudan is hard.
From 1955 through 2005 the people of southern Sudan knew roughly 11 years of respite from civil war. By some counts, nearly two million civilians were killed during that time and approximately twice that number were displaced. Children were taken from Pieri and villages just like it all over southern Sudan and turned into soldiers, a story I’ve heard first hand from a few of our staff. People were murdered, and villages were massacred; so southern Sudan is hard and it can’t help but harden a mans soul.
My girlfriend works for MSF as well. She supports an HIV project in Bukavu in eastern DRC on the Rwandan border. We try to speak every Sunday by sat phone, and every week I look forward to it more than anything else. But as the days turned into weeks and weeks into my first few months in Sudan, I could feel myself distancing from one of the few people that offered a lifeline to love and a sense of home.
Being surrounded by the ugliness of an unfamiliar and unrelenting hardship led me to start resenting the beautiful things in my own life and to feel a sense of weakness for missing my friends and family when I awoke to famine and the pockmarked face of a cruel world. What have I done other than be born into a plush country with the luxury of land and laws? My ability to help in Sudan is based on nothing more than winning a geo-genetic lottery in Canada 35 years ago. The only thing I really know is that I know nothing, and even with the knowledge of nothing I sense that the sum of my own steps has afflicted more harm than good. Why them and not me? And on and on and on and on it goes. At least that’s how my mind sometimes sounds as I lie and stare through the darkness of my mud hut.
Thankfully the darkest of nights happens but once in a month and even then the sun rises to burn away the bleakness and brings with it a new day, a new month and a new reminder that it is not hardship that bonds the souls of people but rather the humanity of simply caring for another that unites us in something more important than ourselves.
Excuse me – I’ve got to go call my girl.
Salutations from the south,
Michael
May 3rd, 2008 at 8:16 pm
I love reading your blog. I am getting addicted, actually
Chichi
June 2nd, 2009 at 3:51 pm
@The only thing I really know is that I know nothing, and even with the knowledge of nothing I sense that the sum of my own steps has afflicted more harm than good. Why them and not me?@
I been to Africa several times myself, trying to help in Malawi, Zimbabwe, Angola, Ethiopia, etc. and confronted with the same thought of being absolutely of no help. You see all these slogans like “Make a change”, “Give orphans love and affection “. I was trying and trying, being an optimist. I worked for some time in god-knows-what places in Malawi trying to educate indigenous people. Then, I realized that all my knowledge is absolutely zero to their problems. How can I educate girls if they don’t do any homework since after coming home they help their mothers do household activities. I mean, who am I to say to them, “Guys,let’s change all this. Let boys help their mothers as well, so you girls will be able to catch up with boys at school”? I am not devasted, though I don’t really comprehend what am I doing out there? This issue has been troubling me since my first time in Africa. Notwithstanding all this, each time I go there and each time I try to understand myself.
Odd feeling.
I can somehow understand you, as I been to Sudan, Northern Sudan though. Sudanese people are very different from any nation in sub-Saharan Africa. Sometimes, you get the feeling they are made of stone. Stoney faces with long and lanky bodies. People hard as rock. Hard people.
March 29th, 2010 at 12:19 pm
Interesting comment “Why them and not me”. The same thoughts danced through my mind when I was doing an home outpatient psych visit for my undergrad in nursing. So little did I know at that time and now more than 30 years later- the answer is still not known-at least my me.
July 14th, 2011 at 9:25 am
Leaving for South Sudan on the 24th. Can’t wait for the hard times.
See you soon Sudan