We were told that the settlement’s rudimentary shelter, a trench with wooden beams and corrugated iron bearing a load of replaced earth, had taken a direct hit. The forty or so inside, women crad-ling their already gaunt children, some men pathetically shielding them, had been eviscerated, like the first turns of a kitchen liquidiser through soft fruit.
Back on the road, we encountered some Baggara militia, Arab tribesmen armed by the government. They stood in the road, like children pretending to stage a checkpoint, but what they really wanted was a lift on the truck. They had probably tired of raiding villages, killing the men, enslaving the women, the everyday work of mercenaries.
I kept telling myself what we’d learned, in the rudimentary training of listening to more experienced operatives; that the overwhelming likelihood was that we’d be OK if we stayed in a locked cab, talking to them through open windows. The convention was that aid lorries were proscribed from providing transport for the armed of either side and, other than those crazed by blood-lust and drugs, the fighters on both sides had some deeply buried code of honour that aid workers were to be allowed free passage.
Still, this was no place for a woman to carry a bag of gold and a child and expect to survive. My bag of gold was the truck – and my child was Adrian, if you like – and we were, by our own account, a lone and wounded straggler from our pack. Adrian, somewhat unnecessarily, kept repeating to me to keep my voice calm and to maintain that we were assured of free passage by the UN. I rather wished he’d have spent more time doing so from his own window, but most of the talking fell to me, and I could feel them start the mocking routine from the foot of my door, a worrying prelude to objectifying me and turning violent.
As it turned out, it was only the height and relative precariousness of our load, I think, strapped down with tarpaulins that offered no purchase for ascent, that discouraged our hitch-hikers and after avaricious glances to size up the lorry and its attractions as loot, they retreated down the road we’d travelled without looking back at us. We were the discarded and already forgotten husk of an opportunity.
On the third day, we hit the vicinity of Rumbek, nothing that could be described as outskirts, far less suburbs, more a simple increase in shacks, tribesmen by the road with skeletal oxen and more vehicles swerving to avoid our truck, like fishing boats around a great dreadnought. At a long-disused garage, with absurd piles of tractor tyres and rusting jeeps on bricks, we asked for a route to the airstrip, alongside which we knew there would be a distribution station. We finished the last few miles by late afternoon, the heat beginning its reluctant collapse into night.
The figures by the wayside grew in number, the stronger of the Dinka gathered in small groups around their animals, some singing the laments that went with the dusk.
Finally, the word “airstrip” next to a red cross on a sign, with a crude emblem of wings. Adrian swung the truck in next to a huddle of cabins and faded green tents. In front of us the ground fell away towards a plain and there, silently, was a crowd, stretching away into the middle distance, and makeshift shelters and carts like floating debris on a sea of humanity. The predominant colour was dusty black from a mass of exposed skin, yet the colours of women’s shawls, the stripes of yellow and orange on brown lent the scene a grim gaiety, like football shirts at a massacre.
No one looks at you, I’d learned, and no one moves towards a supply truck at this stage of a famine. The alienating ennui of starvation has set in.
We left the cab to look for distribution staff. In the first cabin were some men lying on mats, one holding his abdomen and retching, dysentery perhaps. Then a cabin, still bearing the name of a civil engineering contractor and possibly shipped here from some wound-down oil development, bore a large, red-painted cross, its horizontal axis running rivulets, like blood or tears.
Next to it was painted the single word Lancelot, a medical relief outlet. Inside, an improbably well-fed Sudanese woman beamed at us and indicated for us to sit on a bench beside a desk with some paperwork. She bustled out, presumably to find someone. We waited, sitting, then wandering about the room, our feet echoing too loudly, looking out of windows that showed nothing, other than the back of another shed.
A while later, a tall, young white woman swung through the door. She didn’t smile but said “Hi” in a neutral, unhostile manner and shook our hands. She wore a linen shirt, baggy against her slim frame, and fatigue trousers under a sleeveless porter’s coat – plenty of pockets – and I saw from her wristband she was a doctor. Her dry fair hair was tied tightly back, showing coffee freckles running up from her neck to her temples. We told her we had a lorryload and what we carried.
“Great,” she said, with neither contempt nor joy. “I’m Miriam.”
We moved the truck across to a distribution yard, where strong, young, local men and a couple of English public schoolboys on a gap year broke up and assigned our load, bagging up smaller packages to be carried long-distance on foot. Adrian and I slept beside each other that night, on the floor of a tool shed, under opened sleeping bags, feeling some body warmth, cherishing nourished flesh.
Early the following morning, we went down to see if we could help with distribution. A mixture of aiders and
