A cheap wooden screen door, grayed with age presented a browned metal handle to open it, a single spring to close it and two hinges to hold it to the frame, the only decorations Hanley saw on the building. The priest entered first, leading Hanley down a hallway made entirely of unpainted plywood. Their boots thudded on the thin floor, creating a shallow echo between it and the earth below. They walked the length of the building, a dormitory of sorts, to the last room on the left, the room where Hanley would be living for the year or more he might stay in Sudan. Another thin wooden door opened to a small room, no more than eight feet square, with a cot, a small table and a shiny black metal trunk, the kind freshman haul to college.
Hanley’s room was, he would learn, the same as that of the doctors and nurses at the mission, a small cell with room enough for the few comforts he saw before him. The walls were thin and the door was old, perhaps taken from another older building. Hanley found a thin foam pad covered his cot with a very thin white sheet and thin woolen blanket on top. A large net suspended from the rafters hung over the bed. On the small table, Hanley found a large candle and holder.
“This is your room, one of our best rooms, you should know,” the old priest said. “It is a corner room next to a door leading outside. It has a window and gets sun in the morning. Quite nice for our small mission. I think you’ll be comfortable here.”
Hanley laid his satchel by the table and his duffle on the bed. “It reminds me of my room my freshman year in college,” he said.
“Where was that?” Father Robineau asked.
“Ball State in Indiana.”
“Like baseball? Did they teach sports at your school?”
Hanley hoped the priest was being sarcastic. “If they did, they weren’t successful,” Hanley said, recalling the school’s record in any athletic endeavor he could recall.
Sitting on the end of the bed, the priest asked, “What do you know of our mission and of this area?”
“I know a bit of what you do here, of the nature of your operation. I’m sure Sophie and Michael have told you about my meeting Father Bertrand at their home. It’s been almost two years now,” Hanley said. This, Hanley learned through his talks with Father Bertrand, the head of the Fathers of Notre Dame, the Catholic organization sponsoring the mission at Mapuordit, as well as several other missions around the world. A chance meeting with the priest at the home of Michael Campbell and his wife Sophie Robineau started the conversations that eventually led to Hanley’s decision to work for the mission in Sudan. Michael, as Hanley called him, were friends, having met when Michael worked for Beech and then Raytheon in America. Airbus eventually hired Michael who moved to France where he met Sophie, the niece of Father Robineau. They lived in France.
Hanley knew from his research the mission had several doctors practicing at any time, rotating in and out after a month or two, most coming from eastern Europe. On the ride back from the airstrip, Father Robineau told Hanley there was a doctor from Ireland at the mission, but Hanley already knew this. The nurses and staff were mostly French, a few were Italian. Over the past eighteen months, Hanley read as much as he could about the Mapuordit mission station.
Hanley said, “I know this mission is part of the Catholic Diocese of Rumbek, which is northwest of here. The mission operates a primary and secondary school as well as a medical clinic. I know you treat leprosy in a separate clinic across the road.”
Hanley knew the mission at Mapuordit was founded early in the 1990s, the location selected for the understandable reason of being isolated, sparing it from attack by the Khartoum forces or the local militia such as the Janajweed, a group supported and protected by Khartoum. Through his research, Hanley knew even the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army and the SPLM, the rebel movement in western and southern Sudan, were a threat to the Christian missions operating in the region.
Another chance meeting, this one with Sister Mary Kathleen O’Brien, started Hanley thinking of working for the Catholic mission in Sudan. They met on a flight from Washington D.C. to Indianapolis. It was then Hanley believed he saw a pattern developing to the events that would change his life. Eventually, Sister Mary Kathleen said she saw them too. Hanley became wary of Sister Mary Kathleen and her assertions.
Sister O’Brien taught International Studies at Notre Dame. She was born in Baltimore. When they met, she was on sabbatical from Wheeling Jesuit College in Wheeling, West Virginia. He also learned they shared a love for the Pittsburgh Steelers, a team she adopted after the Colts moved to Indianapolis. She claimed to carry her Terrible Towel with her everywhere, even sometimes to mass. He knew the Terrible Towel was a cloth talisman waved by loyal Steeler fans at the games on Sunday, where Sister Mary Kathleen said all good Catholics go after mass. “I believe God is a Steeler fan, I really do,” she said with a look of genuine belief tinged with a small amount of shame.
“The mission at Mapuordit is on the trail refugees use to reach Ethiopia and Kenya,” the priest explained. Hanley already knew this. Many late-night telephone conversations with Sister O’Brien and packages she sent to him containing background information gave Hanley much of the history and conditions he would come across in southern Sudan. From his research, Hanley learned the number of refugees passing through the area near the clinic recently ballooned as the mission offered the only medical care in the region. The Fur and Zaghawa tribes made up the
