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.
Chapter 6
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.
By the time all surgical patients were in the recovery ward and the operating tables were empty, my back was stooped like that of a little old lady, and my joints ached, too. Jup yelled, “Bar the door!” and we were all too tired to laugh.
I was seeing double, and I was starting to talk to myself.
“That’s it, Brigid. Put down the knife. Take off your mask. Day is over. You’ve done good.”
I sang out to Jup and Colin—well, croaked out, to be accurate: “I’m leaving now. Don’t anyone try to stop me. I can’t do anything else. I’m used up, worn out, past dead on my feet.”
“Good night, Brigid,” Jup called.