Woman of God Read online

  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.

  “Go,” said Colin. “You don’t need to explain.”

  I went. I walked along the dusty track to the ladies’ dorm. I waved to the people who called my name, and minutes later, I was in my little room. I wolfed down the crackers and tinned, porklike meat and slurped up the delicious bowl of canned peaches that Toni had left on the table by my bed.

  After stripping off my scrubs and kicking off my shoes, I showered in cold water, and it was good. I wrapped myself in a wet sheet and got into the creaking, sagging cot, which was the best and most welcome spot in all of South Sudan.

  I had a few words with God, asking Him to please try a little harder to protect the people whose lives were entwined with mine, and dropped into a dead sleep.

  I awoke to someone calling me. It was Colin.

  “No, no, no,” I said, rolling over, facing the wall. “Leave me alone. I have to sleep. I have to…”

  But he didn’t go. He pulled a chair over to my bedside and told me that it had been a good day. “We saved more than we lost. New tally. Fifty-one percent to the good.”

  Why was Colin in my room, talking to me in the dark? I rolled over and asked him, “What’s going on, Colin? You okay?”

  He reached out and put his hand behind my neck and gently brought my face to his. And he kissed me.

  He kissed me. I opened my eyes, and in that moment, he was gone—but I was wide-awake.

  What had come over Colin? What a strange, strange man he was, but I had to admit to the only person I could talk to about this—me—that I liked the kiss.

  I liked Colin, too. Seriously liked him. It was stupid to have a crush on this abrasive and combative and often thoughtless man. But there I was—instead of sleeping, I was staring up at the ridges in the corrugated tin roof, dreamily replaying a brief, whiskery kiss from Dr. Colin Whitehead.

  Chapter 7

  AZIZA AND Jemilla were waiting for me in the staff dining hall when I got there for my morning cup of tea.

  It was a real stretch to call this room a hall, but it was a pleasant space, with a hand-hewn slab table and two benches, three windows, and a ceiling fan. An old Philips radio rested on top of the fridge, and when there was no one eating here, the medical staff had been known to dance.

  But there would be no dancing this morning. The girls had come for their math class, along with a whole-grainy cereal with goat’s milk and bananas, their paycheck for running errands around the hospital compound.

  I hugged them both at once, and the giggling cracked me up. I braided Aziza’s hair while Jemilla braided mine, and after breakfast and tidying up, class began.

  Math is far from my strongest subject, but I manage basic arithmetic with dried beans. This morning, math devolved from bean counting to bean jumping on a kalah board, a game something like checkers, which Aziza took seriously but which made Jemilla literally fall off the bench laughing.

  Breakfast and beans over, the girls and I hurried to the O.R. I was gowning up in the scrub room when young Rafi flew through the door and grabbed me around the waist, screaming, “They killed them! It’s Zuberi’s work, Doctor. It’s a massacre!”

  I’d seen pictures of Zuberi’s work. It was beyond hellish. In another realm altogether. I felt faint, but I fought it off, dug in my feet, and grabbed Rafi’s shoulders. I yelled down into his terrified, upturned face.

  “What happened, Rafi?”

  “They killed so many.”

  I disengaged from the little boy and shouted to my colleagues in the O.R., who were up to their wrists in blood.

  “There’s been—I don’t know. Something bad. I’ll go.”

  Sabeena came with me. We climbed into the donkey cart we use as an ambulance, Sabeena taking the reins. We caught up with Rafi as he ran down
the road, and slowed to let him into the cart. I put my arm around him and held him tightly as the donkey pulled us to the front gate.

  I didn’t say this out loud, but in my mind, I was asking God, What now? What bloody horror now?

  The gate is made of hinged chain-link fencing anchored to concrete posts and walls that are topped with barbed wire. There were more than a hundred people bunched up at the gate, and I couldn’t see around them. Someone helped me down from the cart, I don’t know who. The crowd parted to let me through, and I remember the terrible wailing.

  I stepped outside the settlement walls alone and saw something so gruesome, so inhuman, that at first, I couldn’t make myself believe what I saw. The hacked and shot-up bodies, stacked like firewood and covered with a moving blanket of flies, were real.

  Chapter 8

  THAT NIGHT, Jemilla and Aziza came to my open door and crowded into my room. They’d slept with me before, but I didn’t want this to become a habit. The room was hardly bigger than the narrow bed, and tonight, I was so done, I had nothing left, even for the two girls.

  “Not tonight, kids, okay? I need the whole bed. I have to sleep. I’m on call, you know?”

  Jemilla was persistent, and Aziza looked terrified, and I relented, of course. When Aziza was lying on my left side, tight up against the wall, and Jemilla, with her gun clutched in both hands, had pinned me in on my right side, Rafi came in and shut the door.

  A great cloud of suffocating heat had collected under the tin roof and went all the way down to the dirt floor. We needed any small movement of air in this windowless room. Needed it. Rafi leaned hard against the door with his shoulder to make sure that the latch was closed, then he said, “I’ll be right here.”

  I couldn’t see him in the dark, but I heard him settle down on the floor between the bed and the door. I had thought that the children wanted me to keep them company. Now I understood. They were there protecting me.

  We sweated together in the dark, and I tried to think. After the bodies of the twelve soldiers had been buried, and while I was doing an appendectomy, there had been meetings. Senior staff, meaning not me, had gotten together in the dining hall. Then the staff had called the home office in Cleveland.

  As Colin explained it to me, the two-thousand-person contingent of Black Like Me soldiers hadn’t planned to stay at Kind Hands. That had been a wishful interpretation of what was meant to be a stop on their way to help in a larger battle against the Grays in the ongoing, unofficial civil war.

  Colin had told me, “They’re leaving within a few days. All we can do is wish them luck.”

  Lying in this oven with the children, I began to shake. The attacks were increasing. We had limited means to hold off the militia, and now we were losing our last hope.

  I had come here without a clue. Now I had one hell of a clue. We could all die. I could die.

  Aziza squeezed my hand.

  I knew a lot about Jemilla, but Aziza had kept the horrors she’d lived through to herself. She looked to be about thirteen, but even she didn’t know her age. I loved these orphans. I was pretty much an orphan myself.

  Aziza asked now, “Do you believe in God, Dr. Brigid?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “What is His idea for us? Why must we suffer so?”

  “I don’t know, sweetheart. But I know He has a reason.”

  She sighed deeply, truly breaking my heart, and got a tighter grip on me. She held on, fiercely.

  I didn’t want to cry, but the tears were coming anyway, and I couldn’t get my hands free to wipe them away. I wished I could answer Aziza’s question to my own satisfaction, but sometimes, while failing to save yet another wounded or starving or disease-ridden child, I had the same doubts.

  Jemilla whispered, “Try to sleep, Dr. Brigid.”

  “You too.”

  “I love you, Doctor.”

  “Shhhh. Shhhhh. I love you, too.”

  What would happen to the people in this place if we were sent home? What would God do?

  Chapter 9

  THAT MORNING, patients lined the benches outside the operating room. Our beds, our operating tables, and the spaces between them were fully occupied.

  The medical staff were working like machines—maximum efficiency, no time for rethinking or consulting—and none of us had been trained for this.

  I was assisting Colin, whose patient, a twenty-three-year-old BLM soldier named Neil Farley, had refused anesthesia for the infected bullet wound in his thigh. He was gripping the table, thrashing his head from side to side, and groaning, trying not to move his leg but not really managing it.

  Farley’s C.O., Captain Bernard Odom, stood at the table, his arms crossed behind his back, feet shoulders’ length apart, at ease as he watched Colin dig for the bullet that had made a roadway for the infection that had traveled far and deep.

  “What are you trying to prove, Neil?” Colin asked his writhing patient.

  “Just keeping you on your toes, sir,” said the young vet through clenched teeth. Clearly, this show of bravery was to impress his C.O. and was completely counterproductive.

  “Neil, you’re wheezing,” I said. “I’m going to give you a shot of Benadryl. It won’t affect your reflexes or anything.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Uh-huh. If I learned one thing in my six years in med school, this was it.”

  The soldier laughed through his pain. I shot him up with Benadryl, which is not just an antihistamine but also a mild anesthetic. Colin poked around in the wound and finally extracted the bullet. I mopped up.

  “When will Farley be good to walk with his backpack?” the captain asked.

  “In a few days,” said Colin.

  I injected Farley with antibiotics, then gripped his forearm and helped him up into a sitting position.

  The captain asked Colin again, “He can walk tomorrow, right?”

  “What’s the rush?” Colin asked, peering over his mask at the young officer.

  “The rush is that we’re leaving tomorrow at oh six hundred. If he can’t carry his gear, he stays behind.”

  “What do you mean, ‘leaving’?” Colin asked.

  “Leaving, like, we’re pulling out.”

  For the past week, the Black Like Me volunteers had camped inside the settlement walls and patrolled the perimeter in shifts. Now, four days after the massacre of twelve of their troops, their plans to withdraw had firmed up.

  Odom had Colin’s full, highly disturbed attention.

  “You can’t leave us here,” Colin said stiffly. “Do you know what that would mean? You’re leaving us to die.”

  Odom replied, just as stiffly, “I have my orders, Doctor.”

  Farley eased his legs off the table and said to Odom, “I’ll be ready, Captain, just need a good sleep tonight—”

  Colin ripped off his mask and said, “Captain. You didn’t hear me. You can’t leave us right now. Zuberi’s goons will come in and kill everyone. We’re relying on you.”

  “You didn’t hear me, Doctor. It’s not my call—”

  Colin went around the table and grabbed Odom, pulled him up to his toes, then violently shoved him backward. Odom fell against Berna, who stepped away, and a very surprised-looking Odom went down. Colin leapt at the opportunity to straddle Odom and press a length of PVC pipe across his throat. He then shouted into his face, “Get your orders changed. Buy us some time.”

  By then, Jimmy Wuster was yelling at Colin, “Hey, hey, Colin, disengage, buddy!” and he tried to pull him off Odom’s body. Farley had also joined the fray, and I screamed, “Stop, everyone, just stop!”

  Colin got up with a disgusted look on his face and threw the pipe down hard. Farley helped his captain to his feet, limped over to Colin, and extended a hand. As Colin was about to extend his arm, Odom punched Colin in the face.

  Colin staggered back, sputtering “Bloody hell,” and clapped a hand over his eye. He was gathering himself to get in a good return punch when Rafi and Ahme
d got between Odom and Colin with a stretcher, then swung a new patient onto the table. The patient was old, barely clinging to consciousness.

  I bent over him and ripped open his bloody shirt, and Berna tried to take his blood pressure.

  I said, “Mister, I’m Dr. Fitzgerald. What’s your name? Tell me what happened.”

  The patient couldn’t speak. While I assessed his injuries, Colin paced and vented behind me. He cursed about our situation: the fighting a quarter mile from this room, the lack of even basic supplies, the inability to fix what could be fixed easily anywhere but here.

  He was in a crazed state, but he wasn’t crazy.

  We were treading water in the center of a full-blown tsunami. I admired Colin for taking a stand, for speaking up, and because he was right.

  If BLM left, we were all doomed.

  Chapter 10

  HELL ON earth continued to dominate the O.R. all day, as the sick and injured flew from vicious attacks on their villages and found their way to Kind Hands.

  I was verging on heat exhaustion and physical collapse when Dr. Victoria Khalil took the scalpel out of my shaking hand, put her hand on my back, and just kept it there until I looked into her eyes.

  “I’ve got it,” she said. “Get out of here.”

  I went outside with a bottle of water and a chocolate bar and sat down with my back against a tree.

  I was blinking into the setting sun when Colin came outside and sat down with me.

  “I would buy you a steak if I could.”

  “With fries?”

  “Fries and bourbon.”

  “Sounds good.” I looked at him. “I should buy you a steak for your eye.”

  “That guy,” he said, not laughing. “He sucker punched me.”

  “You got your licks in, in your way,” I said.

  Colin patted the puffiness around his eye, then said, “Let’s take a walk.”

  “Where to?” I asked him.

  “Big city. Dancing. Pretty people in nice clothes. All kinds of excitement.”