partial truth

one of those days.  one of those belly-rumbling, slightly-more-aware-of-ones-muscles-and-joints, dizzy-headed-even-while-lying-down, days.  This one spent in bed, reading.  Book of the month = Cutting For Stone.  I’m not a very good missionary, in that I’ve read very very little of what’s written (fictional or non) about the countries/continent which I call home.  This particular choice is a fictional tale set in our neighbor to the east, Ethiopia.  I have some faint recollection that President Obama made a big deal (in a positive way) about it when it was first published...and several members of my family have read and recommended it.  So far tales of medicine, that since I’ve been mostly out of the acute clinical practice setting now for a year and a half or so, I can enjoy in my “time off”...a tale of family and it’s looser-than-biology definitions...a tale of culture...a tale of hearts and souls and life and the lackthereof and the stuffs of those lives that are important.  It’s good.  I doze in and out as a read, not yet sweating in my pajamas.  Various teammates come in to check on me, and eventually I emerge for something for lunch.

After achieving nourishment, I head back to the Shire and on the way notice that there’s an issue of Outside magazine I haven’t read yet on the coffee table.  I swipe it and continue on.  The cover promises a never yet told version of the famous American ascent of Mt. Everest 50 years ago along with something about a speed run down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon and racing horses across Mongolia.  Sounds hopeful for proper sick-day escapist reading material.  I lift up my net and along with my magazine climb back into the happy place otherwise known as my bed.

See, every few months, we get an installation of our mail from friends in Arua.  We brought said installation with us last week when we returned from R&R in Uganda.  Included in said installation was several months worth of Michael Masso’s Outside Magazine subscription.  We’re always eager for current-ish reports of the goings on of the “outside” world, and this publication never seems to disappoint.  Well written, often blunt and amusing reports of people even crazier than we are, doing things we would never dream of doing...okay, things I would never dream of doing (can’t speak for our slew of 23 year old male interns...one never knows what they deem reasonably do-able) in places we’re easily convinced need to be on our next travel itinerary.

I open up to the Everest article because when downloading Cutting for Stone from the St. Louis Public Library onto my Kindle, I’d looked for Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer but was disappointed not to find it available in ebook format...so, the mountain was already on my mind.  Christine asked me if I’d ever try to climb Everest...clearly she was never present on any of my family backpacking/hiking/camping vacations growing up...I quickly told her absolutely not...it doesn’t sound to me like fun by any stretch of the imagination ...well, except the beauty...okay, AND the adventure...AND the thrill of summiting...but lets be honest, I could never EVER hack it...even without the oxygen tanks and frostbite and altitude sickness and such...so, no, no thank you.  But reading about it?! Fascinating...

“Like all great feats of alpinism the West Ridge is only possible for those who fully commit.  Perhaps Hornbein put it best, describing his mentality that final day as ‘the total feeling of detachment with anything else in the world that seemed to matter - family, child - only Mount Everest was there at the time, and only the summit above us seemed to be beckoning me.” 

- Grayson Schaffer’s last paragraph in the article

...and after a glance at the Marmot Polartec NeoShell jacket ad opposite the end of the article, I turned the page... “Born on the 9th of July”...and a dramatic photo of an ash covered Mundari cattle herder with his white long horned cattle in the background...whoah.  taken aback.  South Sudan was born on the 9th of July, 2011...South Sudan is home to the Mundari cattle herding tribe...and the Dinka, called in the article “the Tribe of Hummers” (refering to their affinity for the oversized and over priced 4x4 vehicles)...and the Moru, the predominant tribe here in Mundri where we live...wait wait wait...hang on...flip back the page... “Jon Krakauer”... “Life magazine”... fallen climbers’ bodies emerging from the icefall 6 years after their climb attempt of the highest mountain in the world...and an insullating shell jacket ad promoting their product with the phrase - “What gives you life?”...let’s try this again, and I flip forward a page...same Mundari shot...same mentions of Juba and brand spankin’ white Land Cruisers with the light blue and yellow EU symbol on the sides and road travel held up by potential land mine extraction procedures...from Everest to Juba, from frostbite and down insulated jackets to the dust covered bodies and stiff bone/rubber bracelets of the Mundari...un. real.  striking. along the lines of an out of body experience, to see the place you call home presented as such a wild and untamed wilderness with vast potential for tourism and adventure capital...in the context of this adrenaline rich publication geared towards people with way too much time and money on their hands...

Most of what this article about South Sudan presents is truth, but it’s only part of the truth...the photos are real, and dramatic, but really only represent a part of what I see and hear and smell on a daily basis.  It’s exciting to see and hear people “talking” about South Sudan, to see it get a place “on the map” so-to-speak...to see people write about the vast resources this land has to offer the world, to hear outsiders comment on the reality that is your life in ways you’ve never heard/thought of before...

“We are headed out of the dismal capital, driving south for four hours toward the Imatong Mountains...The ambassador wants to tour the south of South Sudan, get some exercise, and then fling himself off the peak in his paraglinder, avoiding a crash landing in the Central African jungles while claiming some fun distinction like First Unpowered Descent from a Place No One Has Heard of...”

- he he he :) and...

“South Sudan is not a society in recovery: there never was any real infrastructure, government, civil society, rules, laws, or rule of law here, so there is nothing to recover.  Instead it’s a scratch country, invented as a solution to an insoluble problem of semi-permanent war and defined by what it lacks.  There is no electrical grid, no mail service, almost no roads even of the dirt kind, and perhaps a few hundred miles of asphalt if you count every paved block in Juba.  The have-nots have a lot of not: barely a smidgen of schools, almost no health care, a population living on zero dollars per day in a subsistence-farming economy where cattle are traded like currency.  There are more guns than people who can read; refugee camps are more common than towns; snow would be easier to find than a road sign.”

wow.  well when you put it like that...or...

“Juba is more encampment than city, a sprawling settlement of homely huts and instant apartments whose population has swelled to more than a million as waves of returning exiles and rural people have moved in.  Many thousands of foreigners have come here as well, riding around in white Land Cruisers during the twice-a-day traffic jams that are a mark of pride for locals.  The most common signage is anything beginning with the letters “UN,” and a trip across town uses reference points like “Go past WHO” and “Turn left at WFP”... “In a place where hotel rooms are made from empty shipping containers and everything from gasoline to rice is imported on the back of a truck from Kenya, inflation has sky rocketed: a taxi across Juba costs twice as much as in New York, hastily built apartments are priced as if in central Rome...”

hm. crazy but ‘tis true.

But Patrick Symmes doesn’t mention the toothy ear to ear smiles that I love so much,

Mary

Vicki

 the cozy crackling sound of charcoal with a pot of, well, anything on top,

Mary & Mel making sweet potato fries 

the taste of a too-hot-to-touch cup of kere kede that’s been simmering for a while with sticks of cinnamon and is chock full-o-sugar...the waves and greetings along the road, the turn of a child’s face from wide-eyed wonder at your strangely pale skin to a smile creeping across their face when they look you in the eyes and realize you’re smiling and not going to eat them or hurt them like they’re told in the stories they hear...

Caleba

he doesn’t mention the teachers that really care and really are trying with what little they have to give the future of their country an education,

 he doesn’t mention the injections given by staff that care in health centers across the country that save lives from malaria, the wounds cleaned and dressed and healed as a result,

Mama Roda and yours truly

the babies born and thriving,

Salome and baby "Heidi" - my namesake - spelled for accuracy by request

the churches rockin’ with handmade drums and gourd shakers...he has only told half of the story.  But that’s okay, he’s left the other half for me.