Authors: Keneally Thomas
‘I can train you and Erwit in the evenings on how a survey should be conducted, and the questions asked. You’ll be part of what could be called a Monitoring Committee. So would I. I can also draw in skilled personnel from other locations – from amongst the staff of two Khartoum hospitals, should we need them. And we could use women who are already there, in the camps. In this quack’s humble opinion, local women are good brains for the job of surveys. The
women
see the young die.’
Prim put her whisky glass down. There had been a great deal happening. The routine of the last few months was to her like a lost garden. Potent intention, not only her own, but Stoner’s and Sherif’s, now ran below the surface of her skin. She had the indecency, even in the light of what she had beheld in Darfur, to be elated by possibilities. She did not dare down her drink. Unlike Dimp, who wanted booze to be part of every moment of exaltation, she was scared her powers of discrimination would be flooded.
She drank some of her tepid tea. ‘Well, I would have to submit these ideas to Austfam. But I can’t see obvious reason why we could not work together.’
‘Well, that’s splendid,’ said Sherif. He sat forward, as if about to leave. ‘No doubt, you wish to call your accomplice, Mr Stoner.’
‘Oh yes,’ she said. Her conference with Hamadain had become remote during all this talk of health surveys. ‘He wouldn’t be there, of course. I’ll let him know first thing tomorrow.’
Sherif quickly drained his drink, pulled from his pocket a tiny atomiser, and sprayed his open mouth so that, on the street, he would seem law-abiding.
‘May I leave the bottle here as a deposit against future debriefings?’
‘Of course.’
He rose, pleading some operations he had to attend to in the morning at Omdurman women’s hospital. When she questioned him he mentioned ovarian cysts – a peculiar specialty for someone interested in public health and epidemiology.
‘Middle-class women?’ asked Prim.
‘Oh yes. But also I repair fistulas which are looked upon as a curse by Sudanese society. That is good and satisfying work, since a simple procedure gives women back their womanhood. I enjoyed our meeting, Miss Bettany. I hope we will meet again soon.’
Prim knew walking with him to the car, to extend their contact, would not be allowed under the protocols of Sudanese street culture. She saw him to the door, locked up, took a few steps towards the base of the stairs, but leaned back against the filing cabinet full of reports of food dumps established, wells dug, midwives trained, livestock distributed – the largesse of Austfam.
‘Sherif Taha,’ she murmured. ‘Oh Jesus.’ She was desperately tempted to believe that whatever Auger had stolen from her had been brought back to her door by Sherif’s angular goodwill.
Next morning Stoner was predictably pleased to hear from her – ‘You know, delighted!’ Two mornings later she heard from him. ‘It’s on! Congratulations. Not only do we two bozos locate a famine, we chivvy permission to study its extent and initiate the relief effort! You’ll come with us, in the recce phase?’
Prim found in the days following her excursion with Sherif and his visit to her residence that she began to take more notice of Helene Codderby’s prognostications on the BBC African News and of the
Sudan Post
, the English language newspaper, as if the country was suddenly more
intimately connected to her. And the destiny of President Nimeiri seemed also to engross her in a new way. Nimeiri, who had advanced modern agriculture and brought the peasants in to work as labourers in the cotton plantations, now faced a collapse in commodity prices. To pay his excessive foreign debt and the expense of war, he was earning less and less. Students and other critics went to prison for being vociferous. The president had gathered in the support of the Muslim Brotherhood and the National Islamic Front (the NIF) and various church leaders in the provinces. But even the radicals of the NIF were disgruntled with him. They wanted a more thorough-going and efficient Islamic republic than he could provide. The president had not yet, and was unlikely to confess publicly to the Darfur problem. There was enough bad news for him in the capital, without his drawing on the disaster in Darfur.
In the meantime, Dr Taha’s curriculum vitae was brought to the office by a hospital messenger. There were references and supporting papers, one of them published in the
United States Journal of Public Health
and entitled ‘The Aetiological Fraction in the Case of the Water Supply of Shendi, Sudan, 1982–3.’ To it, Sherif had attached a note. ‘This study grew from a contract the Ministry of Health financed. Though I believed that under the terms of the arrangement I was free to publish, the ministry took a dim view.’
Prim sent these documents to Canberra with an accompanying letter which indicated the distinct services and the prestige she believed a man of his qualifications could offer Austfam. She had not yet had any feedback from Canberra and did not know whether she was considered heroine or villain for her report from Darfur. If the former, they would answer her wishes and authorise her to work with Sherif.
As she waited, she remembered and weighed the content of his sentences – plain words, but informed by rhythm, by a musical emphasis which made them more significant than they might seem. She held in her head an image of his hands, functionality again masking something more significant. Fistulae, he had said. An act of mercy worked within rubber gloves on a series of birth-induced ruptures connecting bladder to uterus, or in some ill-starred cases bowel to uterus. Womanhood thereby restored to women traditionally thought unclean and accursed.
Even though Canberra had not spoken, Sherif rang and said he’d like to take her through the questions he believed should be asked in any community health survey. She agreed that he should come to the office– residence the next day about five in the afternoon. Since that was an
hour when he could, with more propriety than last time, be invited upstairs into the living room, in early afternoon heat she was overtaken by what she considered nesting instincts. She tidied the small kitchen, the L-shaped living room facing the street, and then the bedroom. She did not expect him to visit there, and in fact she was devoted to the idea he should neither be there or be imagined to be there. But she didn’t want any imperfection from within to penetrate what he would see. Nurse-like, she unnecessarily straightened the thin raucous quilt of red, green, yellow, blue, bought for her bed in the Omdurman
souk
. It was like the bed of a nun or a patient, iron, knobby, covered in chipped blue paint.
There was not much to do. All she had to do to the living room was close and fold a rice-paper
Guardian Weekly
, which crackled like rubbed lizard-skin in the dry air, and remove a coffee cup. She dreaded the arrival of the promised senior colleague from Austfam, which would mean turning this space into a bedroom, hers.
In Canberra it was the next calendar day and morning faxes from Austfam headquarters were arriving as Sherif pressed the bell at the gate and announced himself. She met him at the open office door. He was in shirt sleeves and carried a raffia bag, not by the handles but scrunched at its neck. He frowned, hearing the fax machine. ‘But you have incoming mail.’
‘Oh,’ said Prim, ‘I don’t need to look at that till tomorrow. Most of it’s projects in Asia, anyhow.’
‘Ah,’ said Sherif. ‘They used to say, trade follows the flag. Now it’s aid that follows the flag.’
The raffia bag proved to contain gin. Dr Taha seemed to have a mission to provide her with a cocktail cabinet, in a republic which forbade such things. ‘Not that I encourage you, Miss Bettany, to be lawless.’
In her living room, over tea, and later at an Eritrean restaurant on the Blue Nile where they ate dinner with Erwit, Sherif – who already knew what questions should be posed and data should be sought in random sample surveys of what he called ‘displaced communities’ – asked for suggestions from Prim.
Agreed on the significance of Infant Mortality Rate and its relationship to the Crude Birth Rate, they made notes on the corners of the paper tablecloth left free by the large metal dishes of
injera
bread, by the bowls of lamb and chickpea paste, as they decided what other baseline data should be gathered.
‘Those people most in need within the camp? Those who have no animals?’ asked Prim.
‘Sure,’ said Sherif and tilted his head.
‘Listen, you know what questions to ask. You don’t need me to dream them up.’
‘You are, after all, the boss. I’m the volunteer.’
So the discussion continued. Who had skills which might generate income? Mat-making? Curio-making? Tailoring, embroidery? Refugees could take these goods for sale to
souks
in villages. Not to be forgotten: those with earning power as shamans. The women who wrote love amulets. Yes, charcoal-burning, as she had seen at Mawashei. Teaching. Could likely women be financed to become teachers? So the hardest up were those without animals
and
without any source of income or any skills to trade. But say there was some income, couldn’t it be used to create a co-operative store? Couldn’t it be used to buy a motor-driven mill so that women who were able to grow or buy a little grain didn’t become weakened by the hours-long daily task of grinding it so it could be cooked?
Further questions. Total number of persons in households, ages and sex of family members, tribe, place of origin, former occupations – pastoralist, farmer, both? Reasons for coming to somewhere like Adi Hamit? Slaughter, burning, confiscation of cattle? Terror, hunger, both?
Sherif kept returning not only to the benefits of such inquiries, but to their moral force. ‘I published the Shendi article, which concerned water-borne parasites, from professional vanity, to which I am perhaps too susceptible. But also – if this is not too grand a term – to bear witness.’
The dishes were taken away by a waiter. Erwit had gone off to talk with the restaurant owner, a man from Asmara who, like Erwit, had been a rebel soldier in Eritrea’s war against Ethiopia, another of the sad, vast wars of the region. Prim and Sherif began tearing off the notes they had made on the butcher’s paper table-cover. Sherif would need them to devise a questionnaire for the planned surveys.
‘You realise,’ said Prim, ‘that within a week or two I could be involved in the relief effort in Darfur.’
He said of course. That was a chief priority.
‘And there’s one other thing,’ she told him.
‘Oh?’ he said, and frowned.
This is work he wants to do with me, Prim thought.
‘Nothing directly to do with this. Let’s put in a question about slavery.
We don’t have to publish it. But let’s test if the phenomenon is widespread.’
‘Slavery,’ said Sherif flatly.
‘Yes. Another issue that arose from my journey out to Darfur. Mind you, Stoner says the term is very loosely used.’
‘Maybe you should find someone who is in a condition of slavery, and ask them what they think of the term?’
‘I intend to,’ said Prim. ‘I believe I’ve already met one who has been. But how would I find another such person? Well, through these surveys.’
He did not seem as hostile to the proposition of slavery’s possible existence as Stoner had been. ‘You should speak to my friend, Mrs Khalda el Shol. Everyone calls her Mrs el Rahzi, since she’s married to the famous Professor el Rahzi. He’s professor of politics at the University of Khartoum. I have been frequently invited to their house and I am sure they would be delighted to see you. Khalda was one of our first feminists. Our Germaine Greer.’ He laughed. ‘She’s made some inquiries in this matter, and she knows slavery activists. Would you like to visit her?’
‘I’d love to meet your friend.’
‘There’s also a German or Austrian woman named Baroness von Trotke. Then there’s a woman bush pilot, Connie Everdale, from Lokichokio in Kenya. She used to fly whisky to Khartoum and
khat
, the narcotic, to Somalia, but she saw the light of revelation in middle life. Those two visit Khartoum sometimes, and Mrs el Rahzi greets them and confers with them. A very good woman, Mrs el Rahzi. Sometimes she takes one of the slaves – if that’s what the people the baroness rescued really are – as a servant.’
‘It sounds very much like abolitionists in the nineteenth century,’ said Prim.
‘Except that slavery
is
illegal in the Sudan,’ Sherif told her – a warning against exaggeration.
The reconnaissance party to investigate Darfur gathered in Khartoum the same day Peter Whitloaf, the chief executive of Austfam, wrote enthusiastically about involving Dr Taha, initially for two health surveys. Any chance of doing a community somewhere in the South? asked Peter. A sort of pre-refugee study? Whitloaf said that her report to Austfam from Darfur had been admirable, careful – she had not been betrayed into hyperbole. He asked her if she thought she could carry the office for a
while longer on her own. ‘You certainly seem to have made extraordinary contacts there. Theoretically, of course, you should get yearly leave and I know you have a sister back here, in Sydney. It’s just that Cambodia and the Pakistan monsoon between them seem to be absorbing all our spare personnel.’
He said that he would write a request to the Minister for Health asking that Dr Sherif Taha be granted permission to work under contract for Austfam and given all facilities, including travel permits, to make his work possible.
Prim showed the letter to Sherif, whose vast eyes coruscated. Prim rejoiced that they now had a licence for unlimited future meetings and travels.
The party was made up of Saudi representatives of the Red Crescent, three European Community officers, Americans from US Aid, Norwegians and British from Save the Children, and three bureaucrats from the Sudanese Ministry of Health. The party was to be divided into three teams, with Prim and Stoner in separate teams. Darfur was divided into three sectors, the smallest in the more densely populated south of Darfur, and two others named Central North and North-East. Each team was allotted towns or villages to visit. If to cover the ground one team needed help from another, they could call them in by radio.