This was where Brits hung out and we sat on a small terrace, separated from the gritty road by a metal fence, a little too large and heavy for the informality of a street cafe. It was soon clear why it was there; children and a few of their elders came begging, pushing their light palms through the bars at our ankle level. Occasionally the proprietor came out to curse them in Sudanese and take an optimistic swing with his foot at the skinny arms, which shot back through the railings like eels into rocks.
We drank coffee and iced crushes and smoked small cigars, picking at olives and oily vine leaves, as the bar began to fill from the Council and its surrounding hostels. We’d turned our branded gilets inside out, so that The Fed’s logo – with its “Feed the Body” motto – didn’t show, in case word was out for two lorry hustlers. But we still attracted the odd inquiry about where we’d been and the state of Bahr from the English-speaking young men and women who came in for kebabs and cola.
Adrian had a decent knack for dealing with these encounters, a friendly but economic exchange that conveyed information without freighting it with energy and, importantly, drawing no one in. Or maybe he was just like that – another thought is that he never had much conversation. We must have entered that period of decompression for aidies that follows a drop or a “mercy”, as some of them called a station placement, a period of no more than an evening in failing light as you reconnect with the living, thriving world. That process was seasoned this time by the illicit nature of our operation, so there was even less to say to strangers than to each other, the opposite of how these rehabilitation sessions usually worked. We’d been outside Rumbek, we said, up from Uganda.
A draped string of light bulbs, with tin cans for shades, flickered on to illuminate us and we attracted the attention of a small group – perhaps five – of earnest young ex-pats with very fair skin and short haircuts. Their leader, a tall lad with a crucifix ostentatiously hanging around his neck on a leather bootlace, presented himself. This one was going to be harder to shake. After Adrian had delivered his standard replies in monosyllables, he moved on to me.
“Natalie. I’m Natalie.”
“We’re an educational project. Mostly building schools.”
I nodded. There was something of a pecking order in aid. Famine relief ranked high. Schools didn’t.
“I see it as a struggle between good and evil,” he was saying.
I nodded again. Right so far, though I imagine he didn’t mean local dictators backed by Western bankers versus starving farmers.
“The challenge is to keep them trusting in God, so they don’t revert back to witchcraft.”
“Uh huh. We just try to feed them, I guess.”
It’s difficult to join in this sort of conversation without sounding rude. And he was leading off now, a one-man mission. Once the act of evangelism is started, it must be made complete.
“There was a school building, brand new. But they were still meeting under the trees. They needed to cleanse their school. And they couldn’t afford an animal for sacrifice.”
“Or they’d eaten them all.”
“Ha, right,” he said, showing his teeth. “I told them that God had given them the school. In His grace – it was OK. And Jesus Christ had already made the perfect sacrifice, the only one that matters. Anyway, I got them to join hands around the schoolrooms and we said a prayer of blessing. Then – and this is the funny bit – I walked up to the wall of the school and patted it with the palm of my hand, saying, ‘God bless this school.’ And when I turned around, all these Sudanese kids were doing the same, patting the walls.”
I deployed an exhalation of tobacco smoke into the night to mark the moment.
“And I told them, we’ve got to trust in the Lord. That’s what I truly believe.”
“I don’t think you do,” I said.
I was looking up at him, this gangly man with his simple answers, God’s displacement therapist for the horrors of Sudan. I wasn’t about to pull rank with my priesthood. That would have just been a get-out. Better to stay undercover.
“I don’t think you truly believe that at all,” I repeated.
“Oh, so you don’t have a Christian faith,” he said with faux disappointment, warming to his task of conversion. “So what motiv-ates you to do your work? I bet it’s the love of Christ, same as me, you just call it something different.”
“I didn’t say that, but God is what you fall back on when everything else has failed.”
“No, it’s not like that. God is everything that never fails.”
“Is that so?”
I was smiling up at him now, as a benign heretic, not a priest. I went for the line that was most regularly put to me by aidies who interrogated my faith: “You don’t feel that he may have let the people of Sudan down a teeny bit?”
“It’s the world that’s let Sudan down, not God. We’re doing His work in putting that right.” Those capitals again. “I really hope you let Him reveal Himself to you.”
“Oh, I think He’s done that all right,” I heard myself say.
“So you’re coming to faith? That’s really great.”
“I don’t think anyone comes to faith actually. I think faith comes to us. Sort of squats like an annoying friend. For me, it came for a night and now I can’t get it off my sofa.”
“You’re funny. I love it. It’s just wonderful how Jesus works in people.”
“I didn’t say that either.”
“I know. I just did. How would you put it then?”
He’d clearly been on a mission training course.
“Probably that I’ve reached out and touched the hem of a passing garment. And it’s not me who’s bleeding any more. It’s been twelve years, you know.”
He stood grinning
