artists. But she saw them as suffering people doing us a favor, allowing us the grace of charity.
And off we go to Africa, a couple of plane rides, Cairo, Nairobi, and now a Land Cruiser over red dirt roads, to the border between Kenya and Sudan. I found I was right at home, because Africa is like one huge bad trailer park in north Florida, very hot, bug ridden, rich in biting flies, sweaty, smelling of sewage and vegetable decay and cheap cooking, full of poor poor people wearing Tshirts with sports logos. There are fewer shoes and no wrecked cars in the front yards, however. We went to Lokichoko, in Kenya, which is the main base for the vast empire of Help. Nora despises Loki and all it stands for, the rich working out their guilt in relatively comfortable surroundings, eating three squares a day among the starved, trying out their improving schemes upon the wretched of the earth, oops that didn’t work, let’s try this! and when the bullets fly, it’s oh my, so long poor folks, we can’t stay, because we’re white and our bodies are simply worth more than yours are.
The Society had its Sudan operation headquartered at Mokilo about ten kilometers closer to Sudan so as not to be contaminated by the Helpers. There was an airfield, tents to sleep in, an office tent, a field of storage containers surrounded by barbed wire, and a wooden control tower. On the field was an antique Convair 580 being worked on by a couple of greasy sisters in cut-down bleus, and a little bit after we got there a newer Fokker 27 landed in a cloud of red dust.
In the Society the head of a regional operation is called a prefect, and the prefect here was Sr. Isobel Alecran, a barrel-shaped Filipina with a hard flat face that converted itself into a broad gold-toothed grin when my Nora walked into the office tent. She greeted me more formally and announced that since they had no need for my language skills at Mokilo, she was going to put me in logistics. It turned out that logistics was yet another thing, like religion and languages, that I was not much interested in but I was a dab hand at, I am a walking demonstration of God’s mysterious ways.
Medical logistics starts with the patient-day (and the treatment unit for outpatient work) and from each of these there flows a physical stream of necessities from drugs to rubber gloves to pillowcases. These are embodied in packagings of a zillion different weights and dimensions and these in turn must be entombed in standard air- droppable palletized crates of particular volumes and weights, so given that say a F-27 can haul 6.3 metric tonnes in a usable volume of 62 cubic meters, figure out how to get the maximum number of packages per flight while ensuring that there is no day when your recipient has all catheters and no morphine. Needless to say the Society has been doing this for a long time and they have it down, but still it is useful to have a person who has all the logistics charts in her head, especially when the computers crash, as they so often do in African conditions.
So I worked in the ops center writing out pack tables for the Sudan sites, Wau and Juba and Bor and the outlying places, Wibok and Pibor Post, where we were going. Our flights were made at night because they are all into the no-fly zone that the Government of Sudan has declared in the regions controlled by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, with whom it has been fighting a war since 1955 except for a short break in the 1970s. GOS and SPLA, as we call them, have between them caused the death of around two million people and made another five million into refugees. There have been many efforts to stop the war but all have failed because all the valuable resources are in the southern part of the country, especially the oil in the Bahr al-Ghazal basin, and the political control is in the northern part, and the northerners think they are Arabs and thus superior to the southern people, who are Nilotics, although I believe every single person in that country would be considered a nigger in Caluga County, Florida. The northerners are Muslims and would like the whole country to be ruled by Muslim shari’a law, but the southerners are mainly Christians or traditionalists, what we used to call pagans I suppose, and they don’t want this at all.
The real reason is racial and cultural, according to Nora. The Islamized Sudanese used to raid slaves in the south, that was the only real business in the country before the Brits took it over, and they still call any southernerabd, which means slave, and they still have slavery, that’s how they drive the southerners away from the oil regions, they give Islamized tribes weapons and set them loose to raid and rape. And all that about Islam is a crock anyway because they attack the Nuer, whoare Muslims, but that doesn’t count because they are alsoabd.And so the SPLA are the good guys? Well, no, not really because they’re always breaking off little tribal or clan or warlord groups, sometimes siding with the GOS or some local confederation of thugs. Honestly I never got the politics and now it’s so boring that I can’t talk about it anymore and it would be just crap except it killed all those people.
But Nora loved the Dinka. Not what they call themselves, the first literate person who met a Dinka asked him what people he sprang from and the Dinka said we are of Deng kak, giving the name of their clan ancestor, and so Dinka they became, but they call themselves Monyjang, which means the husbands of men, meaning they are so manly that other men are women compared to them, which gives you some idea of their haughty views. But they also call themselves the slaves of cattle. They loved their cows, and not in the 4-H way they did in Caluga County, cattle are wealth, pride, honor. They write love poetry to their cows, one of their major art forms. Every boy has what they call a personality ox to which he devotes the kind of attention Americans devote to their girlfriends if the girls are lucky. Women are valued by how many cows they bring as bride-wealth and if they produce sons. So women get the shaft as usual I said, but Nora said, not really, it’s hard to explain, the women are as proud as the men, they’re all aristocrats, even if they have nothing they own except spears, cows, pots, and poetry. There’s also a great tradition of women warriors among the Dinka, the thing they respect more than anything is spiritual power. The Dinka we were going to stay with?the Peng Dinka?traced their origin to a woman named Atiam 150 years ago, who led them across the Nile to a promised land, just like Moses.
Nora was a tribal kind of person like all the Irish are, she thought Africa was like Europe was in the Dark Ages, desperate, murderous, but laden with hope, she thought it could be converted, not missionary-converted, but really, by the Holy Spirit and saints, like the European barbarians were. She thought the Dinka were just like the Irish before St. Patrick?warriors, poets, kings of little plots of land, lovers of cattle, she saw in their tall black forms Cuchulainn and Finn, Queen Maeve and King Ailil and the Cattle Raid of Cooley. I believed her because she had a degree in history from University College Dublin and besides I would have believed the Dinka were Choctaws or the Ten Lost Tribes on her say-so, not only because I was entranced with her but also because she could talk the hinges off a door.
What we did at Mokilo after the long days, we would lie in the hot tent under our netting and she would talk and drink whiskey from a tin cup, a drop to carry her off as she said. We’re of a dying race me girl she would say, alas Babylon, with all our gold and power we can’t make our women bear children or keep our children from killing themselves or keep off the hatred of all the world and don’t you think one day it’ll all come crashing down? Oh not next year or in our lifetimes even, but the mark of death is on us sure, and the church is dying and so is the Society, oh I don’t mean it’ll vanish, but there’ll be a change of form into something new with its own new glory, by God even Rome didn’t vanish after the sack, and the church is not after all a mortal thing.
T’ing. A morrtal t’ing, I can still hear her voice, the accent got thicker with the drink. I guess she was a drunk when all’s told, but I never saw her take a sip between sunrise and sunset there was that much iron in her, but she needed her drop when it got dark in Africa. As who the fuck doesn’t?
We were waiting for a full moon and for our complement of people going to Pibor, a town more or less besieged by GOS forces where we had a refugee hospital. Then a final planeload came in and we were ready, a couple of sister-doctors, some nurses, a sanitarian, some technicians, and among them I found my original Blood sister, Trinidad Salcedo from Miami. She was not surprised to see me or what I’d become, but I was surprised to find her an ordinary person, pleasant, efficient, nothing special, not the strange mystic figure I had made her out to be in Miami, and when I said all this to Nora she said, it’s you who’ve changed darlin’, Trini didn’t shrink down, you grew and of course it turned out that Trini was some kind of special disciple of Nora, and had lived with her once upon a time, which made me jealous, no it was just the ghost of jealousy and I told Nora about it and we had a laugh.
We went in at night on the first of April, many jokes about the date, eight of us in blue coveralls and hockey helmets in the Fokker, flown by a couple of sister-pilots and a sister-jumpmaster and four men, Africans, for cargo kickers. We took off at sundown, a tin tube full of nerves and noise. I looked over at Nora her face strange in the red glow and she smiled a rack of pink teeth at me. Then the plane veered and dropped to altitude and the cargo kickers got up and harnessed themselves and the clam shell yawned open aft and the gritty African wind poured in and the kickers ran the pallets out. We came around for another run, leveled, the red light turned ghastly green, sister-jumpmaster gave the commands, we hooked up our static lines, and then in just a little more time than it takes to tell it, we trotted down the aisle and into the moonlight.
It was a good drop. None of the containers burst, the trucks from Pibor were where they should be, no one
