Keep on Keepin' On

I learned a few things in the field this week. One: it’s fly season in the Sudan. I have never seen so many flies in my life. If Alfred Hitchcock were still alive and interested in making some sort of sequel to that bird movie, Sudan would be the place to do it. They are disgusting, pesky, and everywhere you don’t want them to be—in your latrine for instance, or at the breakfast table, or in the car buzzing around your face. Two: Sudan brings an entirely new appreciation to the word “inaccessible”. I feel like I’ve seen enough of Africa in the past few years to have a pretty accurate understanding of how remote villages can be, how difficult it is to access water, health care, education. Well, let me just say a thing or two about Southern Sudan. It’s large—enormously large. We spent the majority of the week visiting health facilities and attending meetings in Duk County, which consistently suffers from frequent insecurity between tribes, flooding and poor roads, making it virtually inaccessible for roughly six months out of the year. We made these site visits just on the tail end of dry season, often travelling three hours in one direction to reach our destination. It was a lot of time in the car. Calling the roads “bad” would be comparable to making a statement like, “Americans like reality television.” It’s comically understated and doesn’t come close to grasping the reality of the situation. Goats, cattle, the occasional acacia tree and tukuls dot the landscape as far as the eye can see, on some of the flattest, driest, unforgiving land I have ever seen…land that will be flooded in another month, and will remain this way until October or November. I simply can’t comprehend how the Sudanese live the way they do.

I’m continuously amazed at how incredibly hopeful and wonderful the Sudanese are, after decades of conflict and a completely devastated infrastructure. They greet us at community meetings with soft drinks and smiles, using utterly charming English phrases like “Yes, this is well and good” or in response to a statement, “Ah, correctly” or “What say you?” I really, really like the Sudanese. The frustrations bubble to the surface when you realize how little we as humanitarian organizations are capable of doing, how overwhelming vast the needs are, how we are barely scratching the surface. I sat at meetings this week where people are “footing” 5 hours to reach a health clinic that has one community health worker and one traditional birth attendant. No midwife, no clinical officer, no lab technician. They are sharing a stethoscope, have no access to sanitation facilities, receive medications months late due to impassable roads and lack of transportation.

And yet we sit, meeting after meeting, day after day, listening to dedicated staff at each facility list their challenges and requests calmly and without criticism, making requests for things as basic as soap or buckets for deliveries, kerosene for the vaccination fridge, uniforms for the staff. It’s heartbreaking and defeating, yet we do the best that we can. The meetings always start late and last way too long. The available food typically makes us sick. The heat leads to restless nights. The bumpy car ride gives us pounding headaches. Yet we’re still here. We write more proposals. We try to fill gaps. We work longer days. Somehow, this peek into the other side of the human condition—the struggle, the commitment, the resilience and capacity to keep going—to strive for better, to remain hopeful, is what we need to push on.