Isoke

We got up at about 6 a.m. to go to Isoke. It was a relatively spur of the moment trip decision, but we were packed and ready to go around 7 and we headed out with some bread for breakfast. The drive there was bumpy, but nice. Isoke is located in the mountains, so it is about three hours of driving through these incredible valleys and hills with palm trees splayed up into the sky.
When we got to Isoke, we found we were in someplace utterly different from Torit. Torit is green, but Isoke is vivid with plants. Tall trees that reminded me of oaks lined the road we drove down, past the hospital and up to the Diocese mission where we were staying. It was like something out of one of my trips to France; these tree lined boulevards with people lounging in the shade.
At the sister’s house we met Sister Helen. She is my favorite nun ever. (Seriously nuns love me and I love nuns). She brought us into their parlor, which was so quaint. It had pictures of priests and sisters on the walls, and plush red chairs with knitted doilies on them, and a table covered in lace, which, when she removed the lace, was groaning under the weight of the breakfast she was serving us. Tea and coffee and fresh mango jam and mango honey and steaming chapatti and fresh oranges. It was delicious.
After breakfast we walked down to the hospital itself. It is snuggled in the crevice between two huge mountains, so wherever you look, you see walls of rock jutting up in front of you. The main building of the hospital was bright blue and ranch-style, three buildings set up around an open courtyard where about a hundred women with squalling children were seated under a tree. The porches of the hospital spilled over with patients, some lying on blankets with their eyes closed, some huddled on steps, some lounging with bum legs propped up on a rock.
The hospital was a brutal wake up. Isoke is one of the best hospitals in Eastern Equatoria, with the best staff, the most equipment, and the nicest facilities. But it was still harsh. Sister Helen took us to the hospital room for children first. There were about 25 beds and every single one was sagging under the weight of three mothers and three babies, sitting legs dangling over the edges. The smell was oppressive and heavy. Some of the babies were crying but worse were the ones who were just lying on their mother’s lap, vacant eyes staring ahead, mouths worried by flies, heads falling over their mother’s arm like their necks were made of rope, rather than bone. The mothers looked harried, thin and tired. Half of them were breast feeding, their shirts unbuttoned to their stomachs, and they too gazed into space (although when we walked in, their eyes snapped onto us). Ed questioned the doctor on duty who was walking from bed to bed inspecting the children. As we left, more women were called in from the waiting crowd outside, to join the ranks of the women on the beds.
From there we went and saw the dispensary; a warehouse with walls and walls of shelves, piled high with medicines, and run by this very nice, neatly dressed woman named Jane. They actually used ACTs for treatment there, which was phenomenal given how difficult it can be to obtain. From there we went up and saw rooms for surgery, and were told that one woman was shot five times by people trying to get revenge against her husband; once each in the throat, arm, chest, stomach and butt, yet the doctors managed to stabilize her enough to get her to Kitkum in Uganda. I was impressed. It is an hour and a half drive over rutted potholes to get to Kitkum.
A nurse named Taban showed us the rooms for adults. There was a man who had been shot in the leg who had pulled off the dressings from it in delirium during the night. His leg was now propped up on a sling, with screws into his ankle to keep it steady. The bandages were already stained a rusty, diluted red from blood and pus. The same smell as in the children’s ward clung around it, and followed us outside, to where some men were sitting on the patio and a child was lying on a blanket with a purple marker taped to his wrist. I think I know what this smell is. It is the smell of sweat from people who eat sorghum, a compounded, intensified odor of the sour sweet smell of sorghum and the salty tang of sweat, combined with the crusted smell of sickness. I don’t know how to describe it, except to say that it was overpowering, lingering, and everywhere. It was the most accurate smell of sickness I’ve ever come across.
We went to the lab next, and saw under the microscope the malaria parasite. Neesha got a picture of it through the lens, after MUCH effort. George was in his element. Jerome was enamoured of the lab technician, Joyleen. Taban was impatient. He took us to the TB ward next, which was empty because the patients (39 of them) were outside getting air under the tree. So, obviously, he took us to the tree as well. Jerome was freaked out because he didn’t want to catch TB (a valid fear) and Neesha didn’t look happy about it either. I wasn’t that concerned. I didn’t get vaccinated for TB (its kind of useless) but no one coughed on me so I think I’ll be fine. They all looked very tired, and one woman, nursing a small child, had lesions on her stomach which she pulled back to show us. Another small child, who didn’t have TB, was sitting under the tree, helping take care of her sick mother and younger brother. They smiled at us, but in a lonely way. I felt bad, but no one touched them, no one shook their hands. We left quickly and they watched us go.
We saw the registration desk and the administration rooms, and periodically from the children’s ward you would hear the babies, individual cries melding into one wailing sound, like the window howling through the trees in the winter that blew in and out of our ears as we walked. They took us to the maternity ward next, where two midwives came to greet us, and Taban left us. They took us into the clinic where they would give women their vitamins and HIV tests and medicines, and Ed questioned them and I eased my way down onto a stool, as my legs were still screaming in pain from the lunges. Then they brought us into the birthing room. It was terrifying. On one wall, a sink, and a shelf covered in a plastic sheet covered rubber boots, gloves, medicines, towels and metal objects. Another table had a scale. But the main part of the room was taken up by a bed, with wooden stirrups and a metal IV pole and dark black leather pads and crude steps leading up to it. The midwives were telling us how women were afraid to come to the Ante-natal clinics, and that they preferred to give birth in a tukul, and looking at the bed, I didn’t blame them. Birth seemed terribly real, in a messy, bloody way, standing in that room. It didn’t seem like healthy babies could be born there. It seemed like it was a room for emergencies only.
The midwives also told us that many women didn’t want to come to the ANCs because they thought they wouldn’t be allowed to give birth squatting, which was how they wanted to. Ed made some suggestions, and told me that it might be interesting to come back and work on maternal health, in part by convincing women to go to the clinics, next summer.
After the trip to the hospital we went back to the sisters. We had lunch (chicken! Pasta! Carrots!) and then up to the church, which is, interestingly enough, one of the first brick buildings I’ve seen in Sudan. Real bricks. Handmade bricks. Set up against the mountains, it looked like something out of the Sound of Music. I expected Julie Andrews to burst out of the doors at any moment, singing about how wonderful the mountains are, but needless to say, she didn’t. We went inside the church, which was huge and European, though the paintings on the walls were of Sudanese people standing on the point between heaven and hell. The church itself was a pale blue inside, decorated with (white) statues of the Virgin Mary and some drums sat right by the alter. So we sat down and started to thump at them. School children heard us and came into the church, slowly, and we invited them to help us play them. It soon became incredibly apparent that it is very true that white people don’t have rhythm. They made these drums play music while we just made noise.
From there, we walked with this Italian doctor (Dr. Santini who had bad teeth and eight children, and smelled good) to the school run by the Diocese. It went all the way up to senior secondary, and the compound was covered in children. It was beautiful, because the mountains framed behind it. The kids who followed us had distended bellies, and runny noses, but Dr. Santini marched right up to them and inspected their fingernails, showing them to us and saying “Look! They paint their nails like girls!” The boy in question snatched his hand away and looked at us shyly. He had the sweetest face, that I got a picture of all of them, just so I would remember him.
Then we took naps, before going to the Hospital staff meeting. It was under a tree, and suppose to be two hours long. It was four hours long, and half of it ended up being inside, when the skies opened up and it started to rain. A gimpy puppy was sleeping under Ed’s chair and I kept trying to lure it to me with no success. Another dog, an adult, wandered into the circle during the meeting, and a brutal looking man whipped it with a switch and it ran off yelping. One woman sitting on a blanket for the meeting was crippled, with locked up legs, imprisoned, wooden.
Lots of things were touched on in the meeting, though it went on forever and I just wanted to leave at the end of it. Then Neesha and I carried our chairs back in the dark, and I fell in a ditch full of leaves and sank up to my waist, and we had dinner and watched BBC news and debated politics. I took a shower ( a glorious shower, considering how sticky I felt) and chatted with the Reverend Mother Pasquena about civil war and race hatred and then I wandered off to bed in a comfortable room with the temperature the exact same as my body. During the night, there was howling, which I thought, sleepily, was a woman shouting “Echo! Echo!” down the hillside, and being answered by packs of dogs. But it was actually leopards. Go figure.
The next morning we got a wake up call at six am by marching and singing people stamping down the street outside our window. It was the local school. Every Saturday they went running, accompanied by whistles, people in town who wanted to run, and chants. It was a nice way to wake up, and I sat out on the patio with a cup of tea and a book and watched them march past and relaxed. The sisters came over to me and held my hand warmly in both of theirs and asked me how my night had been and seemed so happy to see me. They remembered my name more readily than Neesha’s because her name is just kind of difficult for Sudanese people in general. They were all so motherly and quiet and it was lovely just sitting there with them. We had breakfast (homemade: peanut butter, thick mango jam, honey, tea, chapatti, rolls) and then sat outside in the shade of our car and the mango trees while girls from the school came and helped to do laundry and cleaning, and Ed tried to fix a generator, and Neesha tried to track down Emmanual (whose nickname, we discovered, is “The Runaway Priest” because he ran away from seminary school.) Sister Helen gave me her address and told me that she wanted me to say there, and that she would give me her veil so I could become a sister too. She even offered to come to Torit and cook for us and take care of us and I wish she actually could. She baked us fresh bread for the road, and gave us a bag of cabbage, so that when we got underway we wouldn’t be hungry. The bread was still hot from the oven when she packed it into our car. A tailor was there sewing the new uniforms, which was so fascinating to watch. He was excellent. I wish I could make my own clothing because what he made looked so cool and refreshing. Taban came for his fitting, and was upset because it wasn’t tight enough on his butt, and I laughed at him and he looked slightly shamefaced. The sister’s even made us pizza, because they knew we were American. Sister Helen called me in and gave it to me like a present, and asked me to cut it. It was fish pizza (my luck) but I ate it anyway, because honestly, when someone goes through that amount of trouble, you don’t turn up your nose at it. She also told us that they know how to make cake. Can you imagine? Cake!
There was even a cat named Scooby, who bit people, but I cuddled him anyway. During lunch when I accidentally shot a piece of goat meat at the Reverend Mother, Scooby stole it and was quite happy with me about it. (Reverend Mother was amused, even though it almost hit her face) Sister Helen recognized that I loved animals, but she paid me a very high compliment (and voiced something I hadn’t thought much about) by saying that I was a lovely girl because “most people who love animals don’t love people.” Then she showed me this small animal, kind of like an antelope but the size of a small dog, named a dik dik (I don’t know how you spell that). It was tied to a tree, having been caught by some men, and it had big doe eyes and it let me pet it, even though it was a wild animal. It wasn’t afraid of me, and I scratched it behind it’s big bat like ears and it nuzzled me while I took picture’s of its tiny hooves. It was so cool! (Sorry dad, it seems I am unconcerned about rabies). Then we left, heading off to Kimotong.