A South African Doctor in Darfur

My tummy is tickled when a woman about to deliver her 8th child anyday now and the bambino found lying transversely across her uterus instead of head down, are pled with to go in the referral car for a c/section before she arrives at 3am and I’m helpless. She refuses so I ask her if she truly understands why we are concerned for her… and her response knocks me off my feet when she replies ‘it’s cos you are a humanitarian”……where did she get this? It’s so funny that I’m laughing as I type this. Just as this word is bandied about, that you know that MSF has been here a long long time!! I double over even harder when I learn the ‘Jens’, the name of our expat nurse means sex in Arabic!! So calling ‘Jens Jens for Prinitha’ on the radio has had the staff sniggering to themselves and ‘we are happy to have Jens in the project’ triggered shy chuckles.

Actually we are very happy to have Jens here, he has been a wonderful addition to the team with his saccharine charm and deep appreciation for Tom Waits and Blazing Saddles alike; Rachel who I had the pleasure of working with in South Sudan and now graces me with a shared history of the Mad Strange Fools life as we know it; and thus we have matted together as Serif Umra team. This and my much appreciated, flat turned delight-FULL daily debriefings with Daniel and our little quirky budding friendship provides all the armour I need when I leave the confines and safety of the house to walk to the dispensary to attend, where I cant tell the peculiar from the aberrant or the habitual from the ordinary.

A wedding though is and should be all about joy, communing, fusion of families and elated feasts. Here gunshots mark the misery instead of celebration and they certainly did that for the Friday family riddled with bullets- 2 who died, 2 with minor injuries and the 13 year old girl with a gunshot right dead centre between her eyes into her budding brain. I feel like shouting out loud against the injustice and I feel like swearing this family who shot their little girl. I feel like saying the cruellest things… cruelty is a touch of hardness that comes from drowning in the worst of sorrows. I’m sinking fast. No counsel leads to comfort as our collective heads dips and our collective pain tremors. I wish someone can pilot away  all the pain in the world.

Night time brings it joys and its horrors. Night time in the dispensary resembles instant gravity. It’s Friday again, and I try to muster some much needed slumber. ‘Ma moomkin’…not possible!  I’m called to attend to a family riddled with gunshots.

If the night is not fraught with the constant battle of troubled sleeping with the deafening opera of braying donkeys, the hours are spent debriding the burns of a family whose house went to flames. The papa got away with 20% of his body surface area burned. He will not use his hands or feet again. It seems painstakingly obvious his body was shielded as he grabbed his wife dragging her out and so his hands and feet suffered the onslaught. mama however has 70% of her body burnt. Now, for the non medicals…even you can admit that her body will not sing a song again. Amazing they uttered not a single word in the 5 hours that Jens (nurse) and I peeled away their skin like a boiled potato and dressed their wounds. No oohs no aaahs not a word. It might well have been the morphine I was careful to dope them with as the pain of a burn will tear your heart apart and very little compares to that.

Problem is that the baby, found by the neighbour and brought in first had 99% burns, as he started to fade and with a sorry momentary lapse of reason on my part, that the staff and other patients had to tear me off as I refused to cease breathing into his mouth and trouncing his chest. Fighting a lost battle. I despise pragmatism. Who knows what happened exactly, a fire for food left to sinder a bit too long, someone torching the place that’s no new occurrence in Darfur…no one here tells the whole story.  I can only speculate that fear is infiltrated their beings and loss has mutated their genetic makeup……

This past week we have had an influx of new IDPs (internally displaced persons) from north of Serif Umra, about 500 a day. They have settled on the outskirts of the town, fleeing the area they live after a spate of attacks and deaths. Outskirts means… no water, no shelter and they have the dear little that they grabbed when they ran. After some obstacles encountered, we successfully managed to do something for them. The logistic team, a team of pure sinew had the arduous task to build a 2metre sandbag structure for a bladder that accommodates 15.000 litres of water and a water tap so that the displaced would not desiccate away in the 40 degree swelter. Their makeshift shelters were really carpets hanging on 4 sticks and some reeds planted together to shield from the wind on 3 sides. The sun beats down in a vengeful stare that usually on my 5 minute walk to the dispensary melts my brain. So shelter prevents them frying theirs. We build some trench latrines and distribute non food items, like blankets, soap and jerry cans to carry the merciful water. As Daniel said, it feels like a drop on a hot stone, what we have done for them. Protection, well that’s all the harder for the mostly female headed/guarded households as the men stay behind to safeguard what they have left. One of the new IDPS was shot last week. He too, dead on arrival, despite being less than 5 km away from the dispensary.