James Patterson: Woman of God

Throughout this period, IDPs had only one option, the Kind Hands settlement located outside Nimule, though by now, our hands were full. Ironically, just when it seemed completely hopeless, as we were weighing scrapping our mission, a message was relayed by an ambulance driver. He said that twenty thousand volunteer soldiers-all military veterans-were on the way to protect us.

Was this true? And, if true, would they arrive in time?

As I sat against a bed pondering all of this, Aziza, another of our little orphan runners, burst breathlessly into the O.R.

“They’re here, Dr. Brigid. Our army has arrived, and they’re shooting at the Grays.”

“You’re sure, darling?”

“Oh, yes. It’s true.”

Oh, thank you, God.

But Aziza hadn’t finished her report.

“The Grays have so many. Our new army is too…too small. ”

“How many?” I asked, although I knew full well that Aziza could not count.

“Like, three cups full of pebbles. The Grays are shooting them as they try to save us.”

SABEENA FLEW through the operating-room door, running directly to me as my patient was being removed from my table.

“We’ve got incoming. Some of our new fighters have been shot. Brigid. They’re all black.”

“Say that again?”

“Our new army. They’re all black. Men and women. Europeans and Americans, too. Dr. Jimmy is bringing in a boy from New Jersey. He’s conscious but bleeding profusely from a head wound.”

The ambulance and other vehicles roared up to the O.R., and as our volunteers unloaded the patients, I did triage, sending those with bullets that could be dug out with a knife tip to Maternity.

We kept the rest.

Our instruments had been sterilized before the shooting began, but we had no place for the wounded except on empty grain sacks laid out on the floor.

We had to work faster and more efficiently than ever. The generator was back on, charging up our mini X-ray and ultrasound machines. Runners carried blood samples to our so-called lab for typing. Sabeena and I marked treatment notes on dressings and directly on the patients’ bodies. And throughout it all, the gunfire continued.

Dr. Jimmy Wuster was working feverishly on the volunteer soldier from New Jersey. As Sabeena had said, the young man was bleeding profusely. He had gunshot wounds to his head and chest, and we didn’t have enough blood to perfuse him. Of course, Dr. Jimmy still tried to keep the boy alive, until Jup pulled him away from the body.

Jimmy yelled, “ Fuck! Get away from me.”

Jup persisted until Jimmy stormed out of the O.R. I followed him and found the reed-thin thoracic surgeon leaning against a parched tree, his chest heaving.

He said to me, “That kid is from West Orange. I grew up there. I told him I would keep him alive.”

“We all do that, Jimmy. What else can you do?”

“He’s wearing a dog tag. His name is Henry Webb. His unit is called BLM.”

“What does it mean?”

“Black Like Me. A solidarity movement, I suppose. Damn it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Do you have a cigarette?”

I shook my head no.

He said, “I stink like rat shit in a meatpacking plant, but I need a hug.”

I needed one, too. I took him into my arms.

He was sobbing when Colin’s Land Rover returned from the gates and our aides unloaded the freshly wounded. I squeezed Jimmy’s hand, and then we went back to the O.R. I helped Colin do a bloody leg amputation with a Gigli saw, but after our patient endured the surgery, he died from cardiac arrest.

Colin walked to the sink and put his head under the trickle of cold water. I handed him a dry rag, and when he looked at me, he saw the blank shock on my face.

“Brigid. Surgery here is life-or-death. We’re not going to have miracles every day. Get used to it.”

“I won’t. I’m not like you.”

Colin reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a nut-and-grain bar laced with chocolate. He handed it to me.

“Take this before I change my mind. And don’t give it to anyone. Stand right there so I can watch you.”

My hands were shaking so hard, I couldn’t tear the wrapper. Colin pulled the cellophane apart and watched me eat and cry at the same time.

Then he went to the next table and started a new life-or-death surgery on a patient he was seeing for the first time.

That this was a desperately bad place was indisputable, and the badness never stopped. I’d fought for a position and won it over hundreds of applicants. I was twenty-seven, idealistic, and also an optimist. Two years into this mission, I was asking myself how much more I could take. Another week? Another day?

I imagined dressing in street clothes, returning to Boston, where I could have had a bedroom with a real bed and a window, a bathroom with hot water, a kitchen with a refrigerator and, inside it, bottles of cold drinks.

But I couldn’t imagine leaving these people. I loved them. And the idea of not working with Colin-I couldn’t bear the thought.

Two teenage boys entered the O.R. and wrangled a writhing soldier onto the surgical table. It was a safe bet that she was from a clean, sane place and had come here with an aspiration and a plan. Now that she’d been shot to pieces, there were fresh odds on her surviving another hour. Fifty-fifty.

Colin yelled in my general direction, “Break’s over!”

I wanted to scream, loudly and for a long time.

I went back to work.

I FELL asleep in my sliver of a room as the midday sun beat down oppressively on the roofs and the parched, dusty camp and the people filling buckets from the slow, muddy tributary of the White Nile.

Time must have passed, because I awoke to dark skies and the lovely, lilting sound of children singing in the little L-shaped enclosure between the women’s house and the maternity ward.

Nurse Berna had gathered a dozen girls and boys together. They sat in a line on a split log balanced on two rocks, and Berna stood in front of them, leading them in a song about the gbodi, or bushbuck, a kind of antelope that lives in sub-Saharan Africa.

Berna sang, “Gbodi mangi were.”

And the kids answered, “Gbodi mangi were, gbodi o!”

I’d learned from Berna that this means, “See what the bushbuck does, the bushbuck, oh!”

It was Berna’s turn again. This time she sang, “Gbodi wo ti turn.” The children stuck up their forefingers along the sides of their heads and waggled them, singing, “Gbodi wo ti turn, gbodi o!”

Translated: “The bushbuck turns her ears. The bushbuck, oh!”

The children laughed and clapped their hands as they sang. Even the donkeys braying outside the enclosure seemed to join in.

I was struck by the resilience of the orphaned, displaced children, and of Berna, too. She had loved so many, tended to their wounds, buried the dead, and repeated it day after day for four years running. While God had not forsaken this place, He was clearly expecting us to hold up our end, as it appeared He was needed elsewhere.

I left the singing children to do rounds and went first to Nuru and his family, lying in a bed together in Recovery. I clasped Nuru’s mother’s hand and bent over the little boy, who was sleeping under a scrap of cloth.

“How’s little brave-hearted Nuru today?” I asked. He opened his eyes, looked right into mine-and wailed.

I laughed, and so did his mom.

“Better, yes?” she asked.

“Way better. He’s mad. ”

After checking Nuru’s vitals and changing his dressings, I struck out for the O.R. and dove back into the bloody work. I set bones, cleaned infected wounds, stitched together the ragged edges of injuries, until late into the night. I was grateful that there was no shooting and that our brave contingent of volunteers was armed and at the perimeter.