Six Months in Sudan: A Young Doctor in a War-Torn Villageby Dr. James Maskalyk
Doubleday Canada (2009), 352 pp.
Despite a series of trips spent ministering to the sick in some of the most desperate corners of the earth, Toronto physician James Maskalyk is the last person who would relish being likened to a saint. As he explains in his commanding new memoir about the half-year he worked for the international aid group Médecins Sans Frontières, altruism is only part of what drives him. There’s also his congenital restlessness; he keeps his belongings to a backpack-sized minimum, maintains a hazy attachment to a girlfriend, and works in an emergency room to avoid the commitment of a full-time practice. Mostly, though, he’s haunted by an experience from medical school, when he had to tell a patient that she had a fatal brain tumour. “For the first time,” he writes, “[I] understood that though I was living, I was also dying.”
So, in an effort to stare down his mortality, Maskalyk decides to sidle up to death, to live in what he considers “the real world” of urgent need, disease, and suffering. And in Abyei, a charmless outpost in central Sudan, he finds more than enough of the real world — from his multinational tribe of exhausted colleagues to the post-colonial antipathy and global oil greed that have held the nation in a near-constant state of conflict for decades. While the town is removed from the worst horrors of the genocide to the west in Darfur, war is never far away; alongside patients suffering from malaria, tuberculosis, malnutrition, and measles, there are those wounded by grenades, bullets, and rapes. Yet, somehow, Maskalyk manages to remain optimistic: “Hope,” he writes, “not only meets despair in equal measure, it drowns it.”
Like James Orbinski, one of the founders of MSF Canada and the author of his own acclaimed memoir, An Imperfect Offering (2008), Maskalyk finds his purpose in bearing witness to lives — and deaths — that might otherwise be overlooked. Six Months in Sudan began as (what else?) a blog, and Maskalyk’s initial posts set off a small controversy; some critics suggested that blogging about such missions commodifies humanitarianism. But his empathy is palpable. A reticent man by nature, made even more so by the desolation of Abyei, he seems most himself among his patients and the local medical staff, particularly Mohamed, a warm-hearted young doctor from Khartoum, and Aweil, a resilient orphan, whom Maskalyk briefly — and rashly — considers adopting.
As he details daily life on the drab compound — the inescapable heat and dust, the terrible food served by their hostile Sudanese cook, the petty bullying of the local militia — and the wrenching demands of the hospital, the book is vivid, and at times even funny. Surprisingly, it’s when Maskalyk returns to Canada that he, and, to a degree, his writing, becomes self-conscious. It’s as if having travelled to “the real world” of Sudan, he can no longer be at home in his own. Of his fellow aid workers he writes, “We talk about how difficult it is to assimilate, to assume routine, to sample familiar pleasures... The rift, of course, is not in the world: it is within us.”
More book reviews: Stuart Ross’s Buying Cigarettes For The Dog
