Aside from that I spent the morning in the Sudanese blocks with a guy named Sunday Williams. He told me his first name was given to him by a white woman who was working in Sudan after he was born on a Sunday. We sat drinking tea and eating bread, listening to Tu Pac Shakur. Afterward I investigated the shelter systems practiced by the Sudanese, which is nearly identical to the Gambellans, although they will often use different color soils to decorate their houses with designs of lions, zebras, and Christian or tribal motifs.
Tomorrow I will be spending the day making mud bricks. I only hope that I don't draw a crowd, as I frequently must deal with this problem. As lone white people are never seen in the "blocks," a crowd will often gather when I stop and talk to people. One day it was a total mess as about 50 people gathered and I saw UN Security coming to investigate/diffuse the situation. I simply turned and walked away. I have to be very careful about this. But it might be difficult tomorrow as the image of a white man making mud bricks is an exceptional, if not surreal image among the refugee community.
Not much else to say, the weather is acting strange and it is likely to storm. Not only can you see the grayness of the falling rain as it sweeps across the desert plane, but you can hear it slamming down upon the scorched earth before it reaches you. It has rained offre an on for the last few days which is Extremely unusual here. I'm really afraid that it will flood here in the next couple months as it did last October, displacing 20,000 refugees, destroying the roads, and killing dozens as their mud brick homes collapsed down upon them. The people here do not need another flood with meter high water rushing down the streets, they have enough problems as it is.
Right now there is a measles epidemic in the camp. On Sunday I heard that one case had been diagnosed, today I was told by the camp director that the number has risen to 35.
Yesterday I had written a rather long letter to my mother only to watch it disappear as the computer crashed. I had spent about an hour writing, and it was quite lengthy, yet I really am not up to doing it all over again. However, I thought perhaps I could rewrite part of it, and share this story with everyone. Although anyone working in development and aid will encounter the most wretched, profound, and poetic excesses of humanity, I found this example worth sharing.
Over the last two weeks I spent a some off hours hanging out with a girl named Kate, a nursing student at Oxford-Brookes University in England who had completed a BS in Social Anthropology before deciding to pursue a BS in Nursing. She was working here with GTZ and has quite a bit of previous field experience in other parts of Africa.
Kate told me about a woman she knows from the UK who was working for the Red Cross in Ethiopia some years back when the country was deteriorating from famine and violence. The nurse was entrusted with the heart-wrenching task of choosing which infants and young children were to receive medical attention from the highly limited medical supplies and which children would be denied aid. Consequently it was her decision which children were to live and which children were not. As the emergency conditions render the necessary supplies to be scarce, only the children with a strong chance of survival receive attention while those with inferior conditions must be neglected. It is not a fair system, but it is necessary, or else no one will receive enough attention and very few will live.
The nurse did her job the best she could, utilizing her skills and previous experience to do the most she could for all children in need, and at the same time she did her best to face the hopeless situations with a professional detachment. However on one particular day she encountered an infant consumed by malnutrition and sickness. Although it was obvious that the child would not survive for very long, regardless of medical intervention, the woman followed a strong inner impulse to send the baby to the medical ward.
After returning to England, the nurse lived with pangs of guilt and remorse for nearly two decades. When approached by a documentary director with an offer to return to Ethiopia and meet the surviving community, she feared to find a community imbued with anger, and yet she eventually acquiesced.
Upon her return she found no anger or remorse, but a mass of people thanking her for the work that she had done. She found herself surrounded by a congregation of young men and women who were all alive because of the opportunity she had given them when they were sick and in need. The nurse had encountered many familiar faces as well as many new ones, each greeting her with enthusiasm and delight. After moving forward into the heart of the community, the nurse was suddenly approached by a beautiful young woman who was in fact the particular hopeless child chosen to receive medical attention, regardless the bleak outlook.
Although it easy to become something of an apathetic zombie when continually faced with hellish challenges and limited outcomes, it is stories such as this which tend to warm the hearts among aid workers, and rekindle their hope to make a positive contribution to the present situation. When a finish line has suddenly appeared after miles of hurdles, and a glimmer of success is manifest among the people you are attempting to facilitate, the personal struggle is justified; better yet, it is altogether compensated by the personal satisfaction of having accomplished an impossible goal of having ended a terrible suffering, or even by the simple pleasure having provided a the innocent child with the gift of a smile.
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