So I wandered in the direction of the camp, where the listless throng sat with their emaciated offspring. This is no place for tourists, even semi-pros like me, and I wasn’t about to wander aimlessly among the protracted dying, but Miriam, pinned down with diagnostics and prescription in a medical tent, did need some help with prioritisation of new arrivals at the margins of the camp who wouldn’t have the strength to move through the grounded crowd. I could rank-order the critical stages of starvation and come back for a couple of the local med staff as necessary.
It’s not difficult work. They barely see you when they’re semi-detached from their surroundings, their bodies turned in on themselves. They have eaten their insides and are entirely internalised. There is no crying out for help here. Nor is there self-pity. The world is just as it is; it contains life and death and the margin between the two has been so eroded that the wait for death is just negotiable territory between existence and absence, more part of belonging with the dead than the living.
The quick and the dead are judged by omniscient aidies, the former redeemed so far as is possible, the latter disposed of hygienically. But those in limbo have given themselves to being taken either by us or by the stillness of the ground. We call ourselves relief workers sometimes, but part of that is about the quiet acceptance of our mutual exhaustion, knowing absolutely that relief is coming in one form or another. We’re telling them: you will be fed or you will die.
Life isn’t cheap in a famine zone. It’s understood. It’s death that comes cheap, not life.
At the edge of the muster, the groups thinned and I stopped by a small gathering still sitting in the sun, no shelter yet rigged, or no will to rig one. There’s a very particular aura to the locus where someone will soon starve to death, and you come to feel a kind of beat in the air which marks the fading rhythm of living organs.
A young girl, maybe twelve, maybe more, was standing, alongside the matriarch, shawled and proud, her skin like hide, hardened by the sun. A younger mother squatted, her high cheekbones marking the contours of her skull, holding what was left of her child, a boy I think, in her lap. He no longer had the strength to be cradled, lying across the creases of her skirt like he’d fallen from the sky. The oversized head had fallen back, the flies around his eyes not flitting, but taking their fill from the ruins of his eyes, like cows at an oasis, watched from the air. A twitch of those eyes, which barely degenerate in starving children, was the only movement on him.
Reporters always say the skin is like paper, but it’s not. It’s like the last inedible membranes on cooked joints of meat that have been fully carved. All subcutaneous tissue had dried up and withered below his ribcage, which looked set to split from his chest. He had no bottom or hips and would never move his legs again. His mother’s arms, the last of wiry tendons pushing their veins to the surface, fell either side of him, as though he was an offering. She stared without focus and I knew she was no longer absorbing images. But she could be saved.
I knelt beside her. We learn to remain expressionless if we want to communicate. It’s a kind of sign language, needing none of the extraneous baggage of human contact, which requires wasteful energy to handle. But in this instance no contact was strictly necessary. The man had in all likelihood gone looking for shelter, or was dead, hatcheted maybe by government security, and these women would have walked for days with their dying infant cargo. The girl and her grandmother would survive, along with the mother, I could see that, but the boy child would soon be dead.
A plastic bowl of maize and water mush lay beside the mother, and the girl picked at a square of flatbread that lay in it.
These survivors would need medical attention, vitamins, supplements and the dying child would be in inaudible pain as his vital organs started their final collapse, so whoever had brought the holding sustenance should have attracted the attention of one of the medical corps who were moving through the crowd. I knew they should really get to one of Miriam’s tents – this woman’s strength could be supported once she had lost the burden of her child, its body despatched for incineration. I called past her to the sky-blue clad figure of a med scout and he glanced up briefly from another patient to acknowledge that he would work in my direction.
I reached for the little bowl of nutrients, tore a corner of the bread and dipped it in the mix, held it to the mother’s lips to suck. She didn’t move her head, but her insect-hand rose to take the morsel. Then the other arm rose like a crane jib. She was looking at me now.
“Take this,” I said in one of the few Dinka phrases I’d learned.
It was a pointless command. But I needed her to suck on something rehydrating, get some moisture in her mouth.
“Do this,” I repeated, holding the bread in front of her face.
Her hands took it and she separated it, the damp piece went in her mouth and, fixing me now with a blank stare, held out the remainder to me. I straightened slightly as I realised what was happening. She was sharing it with me. I took it quickly
