on the cover #M e l a n i e
7
’
T h u rs day, Ja n ua ry 1 7, 2 0 1 3
l e a d e r p o st.co m /qc
The drive for me to write this story and tell this story in the best way I could was so strong that it overtook me.” — Melanie Schnell
Schnell
Author captures Sudanese conflict in her debut novel By Ashley Martin Melanie Schnell’s first impression of Sudan was the certainty that her plane would crash. “I thought I’d experienced turbulence. I’d never experienced turbulence until being in that plane,” she said. It was 10 years ago this month that the tiny aircraft bound from Kenya landed safely in Wun Rok, Sudan — much to Schnell’s relief. After the plane touched down, hordes of people dressed in rags rushed toward it. “I kept thinking, ‘Stay away from the plane, you’re going to get hit.’” Though Schnell first set foot on Sudan’s red soil in January 2003, her relationship with the war-torn country began three years earlier, when a magazine article changed her life. The cover of the April 10, 2000 issue of Maclean’s read “Freeing the slaves of Sudan” in bold type. Inside was an account of the oilmotivated Sudanese war, told in part by Jane Roy and Glen Pearson, a London, Ont. couple who run Canadian Aid for South Sudan (CASS). “(They) would raise money in their hometown and go to Sudan and buy back slaves; people had been enslaved for $50 a head, people who had been enslaved for, like, 10 years.” Schnell might have done as many readers probably did — recycle the issue and file the story in the back of their minds. But she didn’t. “The pictures struck me and I was obsessed with this article. I still have it, actually; I ripped it out and I underlined it and I highlighted it and I read it over and over.” The story of those women and children — in a country more than 11,000 kilometres away from her southeast Saskatchewan hometown of Lampman — stuck with Schnell, a writer living in Toronto.
The article inspired Schnell to create two characters: Adut, a south-Sudanese woman who was stolen as a slave, and Sandra, a Canadian aid volunteer. Schnell started writing their story; then it hit her: “I can’t write a story set in Sudan without going there.” She tracked down Roy and Pearson, took out a line of credit and, to the dismay of her parents David and Kathy, flew to Sudan to volunteer for CASS. She spent five months near Wun Rok in 2003, then seven months near Juba in 2005 and 2006, enduring some difficult times, all in the name of her book. “These characters were so clear to me; they just came along and there they were and that was it, and I had to follow their stories.” ■
■
■
■
After landing in Wun Rok, Schnell was taken to a compound not far from the airstrip. About as large as an average North American residential property, the compound was enclosed by a nine-foot-high thatched grass fence. Inside was a latrine, a shower of sorts (“basically you pour a bucket of water on yourself”), a wooden structure containing the aid organization’s office and kitchen, and a few tukels — round huts about eight feet wide made of local grasses, each with one door and one window. “It was really roughing it.” Schnell and the other volunteers underwent a safety orientation, “just in case our compound was raided,” and after a few days of settling in, she began her volunteer work: distributing school materials and sewing machines, overseeing grain mills and gathering information for grants to finance teacher training. When the heat climbed too high to work — temperatures could reach 50 C — people would laze about in the shade trying to keep cool. Continued on Page 8
Melanie Schnell holds a copy of her first novel, which is set in Sudan. QC Photo by Don Healy