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.

My area in the news...

Here is a link to a developing issue in our area. We are still looking at ways to help with this situation since we are strategically located to do something.

Reuters Africa News

Capacity Building

When a country, especially one that did not have much to begin with, has been at war for more than twenty years there isn’t a whole lot left for anyone to build on. As one of several NGOs working in this area of the country we do a lot of talking about capacity building. I am not entirely certain I have a great grasp of what exactly we mean when we use that term, “capacity building”, but we like to throw it around the way halleluiahs are used in church.
At its core, I suppose we are referring to our poor attempts to up the standard of living and develop peoples’ life skills. In a broader sense we are also talking about the peace dividends we hope are being reaped by the establishment of proper healthcare and schools. We try to offer basic skills in mechanics and building by offering people jobs who have no expertise in those areas to begin with. This can be painfully frustrating at times as our vehicles are sometimes mishandled and our construction work hampered by bad craftsmanship. An excellent example of this can be seen in the lessons I have learned while trying to get some painting done on a few of our buildings. I quickly learned not to leave the scene for more than an hour, lest I return to find paint of different colors splattered haphazardly everywhere. It has taken several paint jobs, and the work still is not very pretty, but slowly we have trained a crew of guys who are developing into somewhat skilled painters.
The problem we face is the scope of the need. South Sudan has almost no infrastructure, very little healthcare, inadequate schooling and its people have spent twenty years living off of handouts in refugee camps. We are trying to offer services for people who have nothing and it simply is not enough. The government does not yet have the capacity to meet the needs of the people and the NGOs jobs are to fill the gaps left by the government, which in this case means everything. A typical discussion among NGOs in this area goes something like this. UNHCR says, “We have just brought back 5000 Sudanese from refugee camps in Ethiopia and they are without food, schools or healthcare. What are you going to do about it?” Then the rest of us look at each other rather blankly, because we are already stretched thin with what we are doing, and respond, “Um, we don’t have the resources to meet those needs. That is the work of the government. Why aren’t they helping?” What we don’t say is that we think UNHCR was stupid for bringing the people back with no structure in place to begin with, but then again who can blame them for wanting to shut down refugee camps that have been in place for over twenty years.
And so the story goes. We run the only hospital in area as large as New Jersey and it simply is not enough. Imagine living in Newark and trying to walk to Philadelphia through mile after mile of mud during the peak of rainy season so that you can take your child to a hospital or outlying clinic for treatment of malaria…or, as is more likely the case, you simply don’t get treatment and hope the child survives.
We talk about capacity building a lot, and I think it is because it makes us feel a little better about ourselves; it makes us feel like we are actually doing something here, and if we look around I guess we really are…its just not enough. In this entire region there is one secondary school with enough room for less than one hundred pupils...which means we are building capacity on a maximum of a primary education in most cases.
We have a LONG way to go.

Recent weeks.

I realize that it has been a while since I have sat down and really communicated what exactly I’ve been up to. When I returned from the US in June, the team here went through several changes as the Program Manager, Fletcher, left and was replaced by Angelo. It has taken a few months for everyone to figure out what to expect with the new arrival and things have pretty much returned to business as usual.
A month ago I went out to Nairobi and on to Thailand for my two week R&R and returned to take over the reigns from Angelo as he left for a month in the US, visiting friends and family. With him gone I have found myself busier than usual; in addition to my usual logistics duties, I am also handling most of the administrative and programmatic duties of Angelo until he returns.
We are continuing the reconstruction of the hospital ward that burned down in February, though the work has actually stalled until we can get a new welder in from Nairobi. The logistics of keeping a construction job going has added to the usual work of keeping our programs equipped with the supplies they need.
The rains have also continued to come and probably won’t end until at least mid-October. I cannot even begin to describe the difficulties that arise from the poor infrastructure in this area. During the rainy season a simple 30km journey can take a whole day. We try ,as much as possible, to keep our vehicles from traveling too far away from town, but with ongoing programs and construction work we have inevitably needed supplies from farther north which has meant a few harrowing journeys for our drivers. A team of our drivers recently spent several days in the bush when one of our tractors broke down in the middle of nowhere, but the alternative is to hire others to do the work and this time of year prices are through the roof.
On the compound we have had a few discouraging break-ins which have left us a little baffled. Several items were stolen that suggested one or several of our compound staff might have been involved which always leaves the predicament of what to do with the people you had hoped you could count on. There are many, many idle, young people who have been brought back to this area from refugee camps in Ethiopia and in many ways it is inevitable that they will begin to get into trouble unless opportunities for employment or leisure activities present themselves. The poverty in this area is extreme and after 20 years of war there has not yet been any real development, leaving people to scratch out a living in any way possible.
September is the time of year when many budgets and proposals are put together for the next year’s activities. With Angelo gone I have found myself involved in the process of putting together several proposals for our work here to continue. While it is not really exciting work, I have actually quite enjoyed the task of thinking through what is next for this area. After a year of mostly doing physical work it has been nice to re-engage my brain a bit and put it to use.

In recent weeks I have been doing a lot of thinking about the enormity of human suffering and despair that is evident every day. As I have read the news and looked around me here, I have found myself often deeply discouraged – what impact can I really have in this ocean of hopeless humanity?? But, I am also reminded that the King filled himself up to the full with this humanity of ours. A few weeks ago I was reading a sermon by a favorite author of mine in which he talked about the birth of Jesus. As I was reading it struck me, perhaps for the first time, how frightening it must have been for the Ancient of Days, the timeless One, to come out of the comfort of eternity into this world of ours, covered in the mess that accompanies us at birth; that mess that doesn’t ever really wash off until we die. He covered himself with our humanity from the get-go, and I don’t think it is too far of a stretch to imagine that his first cry was not merely the wondrous cry of a baby gasping for that first breath but the frightened cry of having entered into our blemished flesh and blood. He knows how messed up we really are and he HAS done something about it. I hope my life and my actions point to that.

A Longing for Change

I have seen a lot in the last few weeks, or at least it feels like I have. I have witnessed sights and sensed things both new and old; been caught up in the euphoria of beautiful surroundings and the despair of the destitute.
I am back in Sudan now, but have just returned from a two week break in Thailand. Several colleagues of mine were traveling there and invited me to join in on the adventure, and since I have never been to Asia, I decided it would be a wonderful opportunity to see another part of the world. Thailand is an extremely beautiful country, covered in lush green forests that descend to the azure oceans and seas that surround its western edge. Its people are incredibly helpful and friendly, willing to point wayward tourists like myself in the right direction with big smiles on their faces.
I spent most of my week and a half there on an island called Koh Chang, relaxing on the beach, swinging from a hammock in my bungalow and eating delicious Thai food for absurdly cheap prices. It was a much needed break from the chaos that seems to grow naturally from this Sudanese soil and provided some wonderful times of reflection on the work that I am doing and why I am here.
Although my time on Koh Chang was the most memorable part of my trip, I was perhaps more deeply impacted by the day I spent walking through the streets of Bangkok. I was amazed by many of the elaborate malls I passed as I walked aimlessly around. There are huge, 5-6 story department stores offering expensive name-brand clothing and other items, and people wander in and out throwing away their money on the latest fashion. Outside the stores there are often shrines where people stop to say prayers and light candles and incense, and if you walk a few blocks away the extravagance quickly turns to more rundown shopping areas, chaotic with the number of people drifting up and down the sidewalks. What got me though, were the beggars. There weren’t an astonishing number of them, at least no more than any other city I’ve been to, but I think it was the contrast with their surroundings that got to me. They live in a country that is magnificently beautiful, in a city adorned with elaborate buildings, and they sit outside of the skytrain and on the sidewalks begging for the means to sustain their hopelessly pathetic lives. There was the old, blind man playing some sort of stringed instrument, the ragged mother breastfeeding her baby by the side of the road and the two little girls sitting alone on the walkway, waiting for someone to drop a coin in their cup. I have seen a lot of homeless people and walked past too many street children to count, but the faces I saw in Bangkok are stuck in my mind in a way I will never forget. I have never felt so helpless to do anything before in my life. I was in a strange country, in a strange city, full of strange people and I was heart broken by the people I passed on the street. And it filled me with longing; longing for change.
Back in Sudan now, the longings to do not go away; the longings for peace, for hope to fill this place, for people to be offered education and healthcare and a chance to grow old, for change to come with glorious goodness and mercy on its wings. Yesterday I attended the closing ceremony for the girls program we run when the other schools in town our out of session. It is a chance for the girls to stay active and out of trouble. We offer some basic classes as well as sports and craft activities and at the end of the program each girl receives a certificate and a small gift. As I sat there watching the girls and listening to various people make speeches all I could think of was how much change we need. These girls are already at odds to finish the schooling that is available which only goes through eighth grade. If they do make it to eighth grade, they have nowhere else to go as there isn’t a secondary school anywhere around and the schools that are being built are for students who know Arabic. I stood up and told them to dream big, to dream of being doctors and lawyers and the next leaders of Sudan and to stay in school to achieve those things. But in the end I felt like the hugest liar because without much needed change there is little hope that any of them will become those things. Sometimes this world is in such desperate times that it all but crushes our hope. And yet, there is still that longing – that longing for change to come because it is needed so badly, not just in this physical world that we know but in our hearts because after all we are the ones who come up with so much of the wickedness that consumes us.
I have seen so much in the last few weeks and it fills me with an incredible longing. Longing for change. Longing for the King to come at last and make all things new because that is what we desperately need – to be made new.


“Hear, O God, the prayers of all thy children everywhere: for forgiveness and healing, for courage, for faith; prayers for the needs of others; prayers for peace among the desperate nations. Whether thou givest or withholdest what we ask, whether thou asnwerest us in words that burn like fire or silence that burs like fire, increase in us the knowledge that thou art always more near to us than breathing, that thy will for us is love.
And deep beneath all our asking, so deep beneath that we are all but deaf to it ourselves, hear, O God, the secret song of every human heart praising thee for being what thou art, rejoicing with the morning stars that thou art God and we thy children. Make strong and wild this secret song within until it bursts forth at last to thy glory and our saving. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen” ~ Frederick Buechner