Book review: Six Months in Sudan

Published on Thursday 21 May 2009 17:43

BY JAMES MASKALYK Canongate, 339pp, £14.99 Review by MARY CROCKETT

THERE ARE TWO MAPS SIDE BY side at the front of James Maskalyk's book. They share essential details – Sudan's neighbours, for instance. Clockwise from north, that's Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Chad and Libya. From a single glance, you know you're in the thick of it. Then you take in the fine lines, the ones that divide Sudan itself into regions, a slightly thicker one separating north from south; and your eye is drawn to the western fringes, to Darfur, itself split into three. You are prepared for war.

You look more closely at the right-hand map and see, heading north-east from roughly the centre to a stretch of coastline bordering the Red Sea, two blobbed lines denoting oil pipelines.

Beyond sketching the basics of the confused and tense political situation – an uneasy truce between Northern and Southern Sudan, a pause in one of the longest civil wars Africa has ever known; the three crucial areas, besides Darfur, that are still disputed – Maskalyk doesn't dwell on the pipelines. This is an account of his six months in 2007 with Mdecins sans Frontires; it's not a political analysis. But the pipelines are there, like the local militia and the conflict in neighbouring Darfur, casting their long shadows over everything. You make the obvious connections: oil wealth; disputed territories; war; abject poverty; sickness; futility – and wonder, naively, why it has to come to this.

Maskalyk is from Alberta in Canada, so he's used to wide open spaces. As a doctor specialising in emergency medicine he had arranged to travel with MSF to Darfur but that assignment was pulled when staff security could no longer be guaranteed. It's MSF policy not to operate in the midst of fighting – an often forlorn stance designed to deter the violence.

Two months after the Darfur assignment fell through, an e-mail arrived, headed simply, "Sudan?". Requirements, apart from specialist knowledge in the areas of reproductive health, tropical medicine and minor surgery, were psychological strength and an interest in working in remote environments. He hit the Send button instantly.

There was another reason for going. He had tentative permission from MSF headquarters to write a blog. He'd spent part of the previous year travelling in Africa, blogging about HIV. This time he wanted to report back from as near as he could get to a conflict: "I understood outrage at injustice. But war, I didn't know. Not yet. Not well. But it's in me somewhere."

So this book started out as a blog; although not a blog as you might expect it. Maskalyk says, a little disingenuously perhaps, that it was a way of bringing his family and friends closer to his hot, hot days; but it's much more than that. The prose in his messages is carefully crafted, often poetic, always deliberate – self-conscious, sometimes. It gained a following far beyond his inner circle. What matters here is what he does with it – making it the core of a bigger story, a moving reflection written back home after an experience he always knew would be life-changing.

From the moment he disembarks from a World Food Programme plane at the airstrip in Abyei, in southern Kordofan, you're there, in the dust with him – and, when the rains come, in the sea of mud.

You're there in the makeshift shelters that act as operating theatre, consulting rooms and isolation unit; you spy on him snacking on emergency high energy bars in the storeroom; you're with him at staff briefing meetings; and you're there as he sleeps under the stars to escape the stifling heat, or wakes to the beauty of an African dawn.

Most stirringly, you're with him as he watches the first of many babies die of malnutrition; as he and the small field team fight to stem a measles epidemic; as he treats a soldier shot in an exchange between rival militias; as a man with septicemia gives up his fight for life; as a woman dies after a traditional abortion; as he tells grieving relatives that it is not MSF's job to help them with funeral arrangements.

One of the books Maskalyk takes with him to Abyei is James Joyce's Ulysses. He doesn't say so, but you know it's because he's looking for inspiration for his writing style. Then the heat melts the binding, and he chucks it away. This visceral account is all the better for it. That he has already told you how it will end – with renewed fighting and the evacuation of the MSF workers – gives it added poignancy.