The next push of an aid operation was being run by a bumptious Australian in a branded charity T-shirt. There were a lot of those blue T-shirts. Corporate identity is an important factor in delivering emergency relief. On the third morning, when Ade was helping with some smaller supply trucks, I lit a cigarette and hung about on a porch as the Aussie charge-hand, a self-consciously unshaven ocker called Jimmy, made his calls. Apparently there were trucks that were ten days late, probably raided in Uganda’s bandit territories in the north, I imagine. And he was dealing, like a Sydney commodities trader, with three competing haulage firms for replacements. He was swinging around on the parapet fencing of the porch, saying things like “That’s forty-eight flat rate and if you want to go it alone, you’ll get stuck when the rains come and we’ll have to come and pull you out like we did last year . . . screw ’em.”
He hung up. I asked why we didn’t use some of the small flatbeds that Adrian was fiddling with.
“They’d never make it, honey. Roads are too rough. We need the big boys.”
We certainly do, I thought.
As it happens, the rain started that night. It banged up the dust and flattened the thatching. It had come early, but still too late for crops further north. All this rain was going to do was cruelly extend what they called the hunger season. I watched the liquid air form a constantly tearing gossamer veil from the edges of the roofs and imagined bulging Sudanese eyes in brittle-boned skulls turned to the sky. It’s over, I remember thinking, when I’d felt the rain on previous trips. It’s back to the European breadbasket for me.
I slept in the following morning and was only woken by wildly gunned engines, a familiar dawn chorus on wet, unmetalled African roads as axles are lifted from muddy little trenches. But the rain had stopped and the engines had been started a little later, the grey low mists of a rainy season pre-empted by high broken clouds as a capricious wind swung around. It was a window in the rains, an early warning of the soaking to come. But I knew there was still time for a run.
I walked out into freshened air. There were five or six oppos hanging about, Aussies and Yarpies, more than you’d expect to see when there was the daily business of warehousing to be done. I recognised one of them, Jimmy’s deputy, Jo, and approached her. She told me Sudan was opening three airstrips for three days.
“We’re shipping as much as we can – maize and supps mainly – to Loki to airlift it in by UN.”
I’d once heard a station manager, with English understatement, call the opening of airstrips a mixed blessing. Starvation was the Sudanese government’s weapon of choice for southern Sudan, to tie up the SPLA rebels in a famine zone. The airstrip closures, or no-fly zones, were officially to hinder rebel troop and arms movements. But in effect it was a means of controlling the food supply. Yet more unspeakable were the temporary reopenings of these supply strips. The distribution of food when it arrived would act as a draw to the local populace and the effort of long treks in emaciated frames was effectively a cull of the weakest. Thus was the subtle turning on and off of the Sudanese genocidal tap.
I went to make coffee. Adrian was down in the truck compound, where they were loading what they could of the big bags on to smaller trucks, muscular black bodies, sporting bandanas, whitened by the mist of escaping flour, swinging 400 kg bags on to flatbeds until their tyres touched the wheel arches, then they’d take a couple off.
By early afternoon, the ground was firm to the tread as the heat of the day hit the mid-forties. The loading had to stop. The metal of the trucks became too hot to touch. Staff were listlessly wandering around the encampment, splashing themselves from troughs, when a deeper mechanical rumble than any of our smaller trucks could manage shook the ground. The first of the big artics swung into the camp, a massive leviathan pulling a trailer, its dark-windowed cabin sealing the artificial climate of its crew. Six more followed. They were greeted with no cheers. We stood around, hands on hips, as they lined up on a levelled muster point, purpose built for the transport elite, and their engines idled then died, pulling human voices back into the air. The wiry and paunched drivers and crew tumbled from cabs like birds leaving elephants’ heads and they shed clothing as they hit the heat.
“Back to Plan A,” I said to Jo as I walked back into the shade. She said nothing, but winced back into the brightness of the lorry park. She seemed preoccupied, nervous.
“We can go with a road delivery now, right?” I pressed, trying to make eye contact with her.
“I don’t know,” she said.
I sought out Jimmy: “What are you going to do?”
“Get these loaded up and over to Loki airport just
