When the Journey Takes Us

Sometimes the journey takes us. When we least expect it adventure, or perhaps misadventure, comes knocking at our door and before we know it the journey has taken us beyond the constraints of our imagination and the limitations of our reality to places and through places we might never have gone. The journey takes us – it pushes, stretches, pokes and prattles until we are exhausted from the effort but somehow content, as if we have learned some new secret along the way. And perhaps we have. It is always easier when we enter adventures of our own choosing but accidents happen and sometimes we find ourselves journeying along whether we want to or not and at this point attitude makes all the difference.
It is two in the morning and it looks as if we have, at last, reached a road upon which we will not get stuck. I take over the driving from Nile, who for the last thirteen hours has used every trick he can muster up to keep our truck from getting irretrievably struck in the sticky, slippery black cotton mud that seems to stretch for endless miles over this land. When we left town in the early afternoon I knew this was not going to be an easy trip but certainly wasn’t prepared for the roads that lay ahead. I should have figured it out when, after only fifteen minutes of driving, the truck slipped into seasoned ruts and the tires spun to no avail. If that wasn’t a clue then the forty-five minutes it took to get us unstuck should have been. Only after we were stuck again, one kilometer down the road, did I truly begin to suspect I was in for more than I had bargained for. Nothing could have prepared me for the two feet of mud that stuck cylindrically out from the wheel rims of our truck, or the trenches left in the road by overloaded tractors, or the roads we had to blaze through ten foot tall grass. I definitely wasn’t prepared to winch the truck out of a hole every other hour.
In situations like this the sun always sets too soon, and it did for us. Finding a road through the mud is difficult enough in the daylight and once the sun goes down it is like living in a nightmare; a nightmare that continues on through river beds, sorghum fields and sleeping villages that appear out of the bush like a birthday surprise you never saw coming. The moon is almost full, but when you are scouring for stones to place beneath your sinking tires, it is hard to look past the light it provides to the beauty of the cool, clear evening, accentuated by crickets in song and the murmur from distance villages dancing to celebrate the season of fire.
We persevered, continuing on through the hours of the night; slipping and sliding our way around tree stumps, swampy sink holes and past silhouetted mountains. It was only after the third time being stuck, that the hand-winch began to work, and as we plotted along, with exhaustion setting in, we were grateful it had finally worked. Attaching it to resilient thorn trees, we pulled our selves from the trenches time and time again.
As we drive along, now sailing down the packed gravel road, it is hard to stay focused on the driving. Nile, sitting next to me, is nodding off to sleep and every time I hit the brakes or a bump in the road his head goes swinging wildly forward. Gorshi stays awake to keep me company, throwing out a random comment now and again that keeps me from drifting off in my thoughts which wander aimlessly through the events of the day and the night as it continues to unfold. Rabbits and stray, mangy dogs dart off the road as my headlights hit them, and as the giant moon drifts off into the western sky it illuminates small encampments of the nomadic Falata people, their cows with giant horns resting quietly near their dome-like tents.
It is not long before I can see, in the far reaches of my headlights, the disaster that has brought about this journey. I slow to a halt, fixing the lights on the bent frame of a red, Honda quadbike that has been pushed to the side of the road. One tire has come loose from the steering rod and rests crookedly beneath the vehicle. The seat has come off entirely and the battery that lies below it is broken in two. We scour the area looking for clues and decide that a nearby dip in the road must have been the cause, sending the quadbike crashing out of control. The injured persons have long since been taken to a nearby hospital, having suffered head injuries and severe scrapes and bruises. It is no wonder, given the state of the quadbike. It is for them that we have journeyed through the night, persevering to ensure that they receive proper treatment and the attention that their injuries require.
We continue on toward morning, bouncing down the dry, empty road. In the west the moon begins to set and the eastern sky shifts from the black of night to the indigo indicative of the approaching dawn. At five we stop to rest for an hour, drawing the vehicle to a stop at a vacant roadside market. Gorshi scrounges in a nearby tea house for a small grass-woven bed and falls asleep near the truck. Nile finds a mat and joins him. I spread out across the seats and try to sleep but despite the hours without rest, I find it hard to relax and give up completely when donkey drawn water carts begin to roam the small village. The Muslim call to prayer chants its way into my morning subconscious and it is time to get moving again.
After only an hour, we enter Damazin as the small city is beginning to stir. The streets are dotted with tea and coffee shops; women in headscarves sit behind petite pots of boiling brew and serve it in miniature cups to lounging customers as they slowly ease their way into the day. We dodge potholes, tuk-tuks, donkeys and horse-drawn carts as we weave our way down the narrow streets to the guesthouse that awaits our arrival. We pull up just as most of the guests are heading out for their daily duties and are warmly greeted and congratulated on the feat we have just accomplished in having made it at all. We prepare to unpack and shower with the intention of visiting our injured colleague as soon as possible. As we unpack my phone rings and a friend on the other end informs me that our colleague has been transferred to Khartoum during the night. I thank him for the information and try to hide my frustration at having just driven sixteen hours for nothing. We cannot quite understand why our friend has chosen to go north in the night when we have already arranged transportation to Kenya for him but decide not to dwell on the events we could not control.
It only takes a few minutes to unpack and shower, and after a quick call to my boss I find myself fast asleep. It is a sleep like none I’ve had in a long time; deep, dreamless sleep unaware at all of the passing of time.

Monday and Tuesday pass by in a blur. We have tried and failed to meet up with our injured comrade and we have tried and failed in our endeavors to return home. The quadbike is now loaded in the back of the pickup and after a day of rain our attempts at continuing toward home have met with more mud than we wish to endure. We have stopped half-way as we wait for the road to dry and for our tractor to come and pull us through the quagmire. A compassionate villager offers us his house for the night and we enjoy a restful sleep, lulled by the songs sifting through the calm air from the full moon dance.
Our tractor arrives and we begin the final journey; the journey home. Our way is much simpler now that the road has dried and we have the sun to see by. Places where we have gotten bogged down before are avoided but still this road is far too great an obstacle for us to avoid getting stuck. The tractor pulls us out again and again but for once we don’t have to spend so much time digging or cranking the hand winch. The tractor also blazes new trails for us in the worst places, going far around the trenches left in the hardening soil by bigger vehicles than ours. As we travel the skies begin to build up with thunderstorms and the vehicle echoes our prayers that we will arrive without rain to wash away the road. We drive on, apprehensively watching the skies. Where the road is good the tractor is left to catch up with us later and we press on toward home.
As we near home, we inevitably get stuck once again. This time we power the winch as if our lives depend on it; we want nothing more than this journey’s end. Our path takes us through town and people stare at us in wonderment, as if they have never seen a vehicle so covered in mud before. We reach home to the astonished congratulations of our colleagues who can’t believe we have actually made it. And then, of course, at this our journey’s end, it rains. It really rains; the kind of rain that comes down in buckets until the whole ground is a river moving somewhere and everything is wet. And as it rains I am happy to be home; happy to have journeyed and to have learned a thing or two about perseverance and patience. And, of course, about why never to travel in rainy season again!

Pirates and the Sud

Click here to know why a group of pirates are playing a big role in raising tensions in this area.

Another week...

This past week has been super busy. It began with visitors from the US. Those of us who work in the field kindly refer to these visits as “VIP visits”. These visits usually include some of the upper brass from our headquarters in the states with a group of potential donors for the work out here.
This particular group was made up mostly of pastors from the states who had never been out here and were hoping to learn about the work that goes on. They were a pleasant group to host and asked good questions about what we do and the situation on the ground. One comment I would like to make though is about their size. Before they ever arrived, my colleagues and I made bets about how many of them would be overweight and sadly the person who guessed the highest was correct. The very fact that we were betting about this says something about the people we have come to expect on these VIP trips, but I also think that it is a sad commentary on our society – especially when many of the visitors we have are some of the top Christian leaders in our country. The Muslims here have just finished the month of Ramadan in which they fast for a month – perhaps we could use a month of fasting. Just a thought.
The week continued on rather slowly after our visitors left. The celebration of Eid el-Fitr, which is to mark the end of Ramadan, began on Tuesday so many of our workers have been off for the week. This meant less work for most of the week. However, on Thursday, calamity struck our hospital once again. You may remember my post regarding the burned hospital ward in February, well we have once again had to face the forces of nature head-on. On Wednesday a huge storm blew up with strong winds and took the roof right off of our Operating Theatre. There were actually some people inside at the time being stitched up but thankfully no one was injured. This event certainly added some excitement to the week as we immediately set about procuring the needed materials to repair the building. With roads the way they are, it will be several more days before all the supplies arrive but we should have the building repaired by the end of the week.




My week ended with an adventure yesterday. We have been trying to find ways to help the communities south of here that are struggling with a shortage of food and healthcare. There has been very little good information regarding two of the villages so yesterday I headed south on quad-bikes with several colleagues from the NGOs here to try and reach the villages so as to do a small assessment of the needs. In the end, we did not even reach the first village which is about 60kms south of here. After four hours of splashing and pushing and pulling ourselves through the mud we were eventually defeated by the road and had to turn around. We found ourselves stuck in a swamp and were kindly told by some guys on foot that a river too deep for our quad-bikes lay just ahead. And so it was. After four hours of trying, we were defeated by the logistical nightmare that exists in rainy-season Sudan. We will try again another day. This is just the way it is here. I will say though, a little mud never hurt anyone….pictures below.