© James Maskalyk
MSF reads
Suddenly… a book n the tenuous border area between the north and south of Sudan sits Abyei, a town of 60,000. Oil and the sharing of wealth in Sudan played a huge role in a 21-year conflict that only ended in 2005. It is anyone’s guess whether a planned referendum to determine separation of the south will ever come to pass. Abyei, always at risk for renewed hostility, was virtually destroyed in May 2008 during attacks. At that time Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which has been there since 2006, was treating 700 children for malnutrition.
Maskalyk’s quest seemed to be to create time and place travel so that no matter where they were, anyone reading would be present in the moments he was recounting – “That boy, the one whose bone we drilled into with a hypodermic cannula, the one who I used as an example of our small therapeutic successes, the one who came to life after lying dry, drooping in his mother’s arms, he died. I was told the next day. The cannula had stopped working, but he was drinking. An hour later, when the nurse next went to check, he was dead. A husk.
The suddenness and devastation of that attack underscores the work of MSF and the vital need for that work to continue. While the place of Abyei can be erased, the truth of it – that it existed, that the people there truly lived and breathed – is more deeply etched in the fabric of human consciousness by the penetrating and incisive depictions in Toronto physician James Maskalyk’s highly acclaimed blog, “Suddenly...Sudan.” Maskalyk wrote the blog from February to July of 2007, while working in Abyei on his first mission with MSF. Through his blog and his forthcoming book, Six Months in Sudan, due out in April 2009, Abyei and all of its heartbeats will continue to persist inside of us.
“Diarrhea is a killer. I see it nearly every day. It kills children, turns them to husks. The work it takes to keep their machinery turning with the desert outside and one inside, is simply too much. They cave in, exhausted, and creak to a stop.”
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Dispatches Vol.11, Ed.1
Throughout the months of writing, Maskalyk’s blog embodied the meaning of témoignage, or bearing witness. He forces us to breathe the faint breaths of the helpless, brushes their skin up against our own, and draws our gaze into the soft eyes of those who smile as we smile, cry as we cry. Victories are one heartbeat at a time. Deaths, the same. Maskalyk’s témoignage teaches us to
give in, to let go and simply be – with the two-year-old abandoned near a tree by his family, with the young woman suffering from TB who walked for days to get to the clinic to deliver a premature baby “no bigger than a bird,” with the waiting, the laughing, the silent. Many read his blog – professionals, students, thinkers, family. They all got it. They understood. As one person put it, “I am grateful for your images and words but sometimes they twist inside my heart.” The original blog: www.msf.ca/blogs/JamesM.php The forthcoming book: www.randomhouse.ca
Calvin White Mental health counsellor
Calvin White is a mental health counsellor and writer who lives in Salmon Arm, British Columbia. In 2009 he plans to leave on his first mission with MSF, as a mental health officer.