Six Months in South Sudan

Two years ago, I was typing into my phone on my first MSF mission, ruminating on my motivations for going on mission.  A memorable lead-up to my application to MSF was a book by a doctor working for MSF called Six Months in Sudan, which was a string of blog posts, lacking any capital letters, recounting his six-month mission somewhere in Sudan.  Years after reading that book, I was on my first MSF mission, for Six Months in Malawi.  A couple years after that, I'm in the Sudan.  Now there's a South Sudan, the world's newest country, so I'll have to look up where his mission took him.  I could be following in his footsteps, with my Six Months in South Sudan.

For the next six months, I'll be the Logistics Referent for our project at a regional referral hospital in a large town in North Bahr el Ghazal, in the northwest of the country.  We're pretty near the 14-mile zone, which is a controversial buffer between Sudan and its civil-war-torn spin-off to the south, but the area is relatively calm.  That can change in an instant though, so we diligently go through our security routines, following movement guidelines, radio checks, and curfews.

It's the dry season, meaning it's logistics season.  There's some construction to do, and a lot of supplies to lay up for the rainy season.  As with all MSF projects, things are in a bit of a disarray when I arrive.  They're usually unusual, in the sense that nothing is every smooth, calm, stable, or easy.  We say to each other that if it's easy, it's not MSF.  Gaps in filling positions makes even the best-run project devolve into a mired mess of miscommunication.  When anyone from coordination or international headquarters visits, everything of course breaks, reverses, intensifies, or somehow dissolves into chaos, just to prove that even the best-run projects are tenuously close to derailing.  We always know the 'usual,' the 'normal, base operating level,' which never seems to get around to being experienced.  We're always in high season, rainy season, measles season, construction season, visiting season, planning season, or changeover season.  Sometimes a few at once.

But if it were easy, I wouldn't be here.  None of us would.