Close Call for Doc PJ in Sudan

I am a medical doctor based in Breckenridge. I recently returned from a medical mission in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. I spent the month of October volunteering at the Mother of Mercy Hospital in Gidel near the village of Kauda in South Kordofan, Sudan.

I am about the only U.S. citizen to have been in this area in the past six months and can testify to the fact that the aerial bombings of civilians are real. We cared for many men, women and children who were the victims of these senseless attacks. I feel an obligation to share what I saw and urge everyone in the strongest way possible to use whatever means are available through the U.S. government to pressure the rulers of Sudan to stop terrorizing and killing their own people.

Whether this meets the technical definition of genocide or not, what is going on now in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan is very wrong and we can't stand by and do nothing as this continues.

What follows are a few impressions the best I can remember. Sorry I can't transcribe the stories directly from by travel journals or share any photographs. Thinking I may be a spy, SPLA-N rebels (Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army — North) confiscated everything I had as I escaped the area. I don't want to sound overly dramatic, but this is a life-and-death situation on a grand scale. Please contact me or forward this email to anyone interested in helping.

Doc PJ

C. Louis Perrinjaquet, MD, MPH

President, High Country Health Care, Summit County

Gratitude, grief, relief and despair

It was hard to interpret the look in the 15-year-old girl-woman's eyes. Her lower leg had been struck by shrapnel of a bomb pushed out of the cargo door of an Antanov aircraft. The bomb landed near her home in the middle of the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. She was not a soldier. She was just another innocent civilian helping her family struggle to subsist in a desolate place. By no fault of her own. She was at the wrong place, at the wrong time. By the time she arrived at the hospital, the exposed fragments of her ankle bones were infected, and gangrene had spread to her knee.

To save her life, Dr. Tom had just amputated her leg mid-thigh and handed me a file that looked like a wood rasp with instructions to smooth out the rough end of freshly sawn femur so, if she were ever lucky enough to get a prosthetic leg, the end of the bone would not be too sharp to bear her weight.

She had a spinal anesthetic. She was awake, but felt nothing below her waist. That was safer than a general anesthetic for someone who had lost a lot of blood. The unit of blood I donated that morning was running into her left arm. I looked over the surgical drape to make sure she was not feeling pain from my filing the end of her thighbone. The force required to grind her strong young bone was shaking the operating table.

Her gaze caught mine for an infinite moment — then I blinked and focused back on the sweat sliding down my face and the work of helping finish her surgery.

As we moved her to a gurney to roll her out of the operating theater, she pointed to her lifeless limb in the corner. She then lifted her head to see the freshly bandaged stump of her amputated left leg. With a look that I interpreted as relief, but could have been despair, she laid back at least knowing the agony of the infected wound would be gone, that she would most likely live and started wondering what life with one leg would be like.

I think of her often as the memory of her dark black eyes locked with mine, pale blue, reminds me that circumstance is happenstance — I could have been born in Africa instead of Iowa — that my gifts and blessings are just that, more given than earned and most importantly, that I need to do more.

October 2011, Mother of Mercy Hospital, Gidel, Nuba Mountains, Sudan

A frightening encounter

Written in flight from Juba, South Sudan to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Nov. 1

Just left South Sudan airspace. I'm feeling safer and can write down what happened.

Sunday morning Oct. 30, at 5:15 a.m. got up to pee in the grass and heard a truck pull into the compound, earlier than expected, but relieved that something was happening and that there may actually be a flight back to Juba, the capital of South Sudan. At the last minute, Abdul, my Nuban guide, assistant, translator, now friend told me he would not be going with me, stating: “Don't take any pictures or talk to anyone, everything will be fine.” Not the most reassuring, but that's the tone of voice he'd been using all month, so I accepted that there just wasn't going to be room on the plane for him and that he would join me in Juba soon, as soon as there was another humanitarian flight.

It was very hard to get any information, even wrong information, about any travel because at the start of the war, when Egyptian United Nations soldiers were “guarding the airport” every time there was a flight, the airstrip was bombed by Antonovs from Khartoum, the capital of (north) Sudan. So, they started having passengers just hanging around for a few days and at the last minute, dash to some distant, unmarked airstrip and hope the plane could come in and out before the enemy knew they were there.

When I flew into the Nuba Mountains, I thought the pilot was joking when, before leaving Juba, he asked if he needed to “come in hot and leave the engines running” — which is what he did. He had his passengers and cargo off and new passengers loaded and was gone within 10 minutes max, swearing and sweating the whole time.

No bombs fell that day, so I just thought he was the jumpy type and was over-reacting. Then, after seeing Antonovs pass overhead and have everyone scatter two or three times per day and seeing maimed and wounded women and children, I started to get a little jumpy myself.

In the early morning starlight we made several stops. The truck quickly filled the double cab and the back with luggage and families with small children. Everyone was trying to get out of the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan before the roads, which turn to mud in rainy season, dried enough to allow troop movement and the war to gear up again.

After an hour of banging down rutted “roads” — foot trails made wider with motor vehicles — I knew we were not using the airstrip near Kauda where I had been working, but were driving to an area that was felt to be more secure. We arrived about 8 a.m., the temperature already in the 80s and eagerly awaited a plane; though no one knew or was telling me what time a plane was scheduled to arrive. No one had prepared for a long wait, so by 2 p.m., after six hours sitting in the sun without food or water, our eagerness to be out of that place was even more acute.

At 2:30 p.m., a small group of camouflage green pickup trucks raced in, and not long after, a cargo plane with capacity to carry five tons landed in a billow of dust, taxied back from the end of the runway and immediately the soldiers were unloading what looked like boxes of guns. Once packed to the height of the top of the cab, the two full pickups tore off. Soldiers at the back cargo door pushed out 50-gallon drums of diesel bouncing onto truck tires placed on the ground below. A few other random soldiers directed the passengers to enter the front cargo door, climbing up an aluminum garden ladder as our bags were being loaded in the back.

I was about to raise my own pack up and quickly get in line when Mamoon, the coordinator who had ridden out with me to make sure our pickup load of people got on the plane, told me to grab my bags and follow him. I had given him a pack of new guitar strings I brought from the states to restring an old guitar. He invited Abdul and me to his tiny Tukul hut for dinner one night with his girlfriend and a pastor friend of his, where he played some Arabic Gospel songs he had written. He was actually a really friendly guy I trusted a lot, so at first I was only concerned that this may delay our flight or that for some reason there would not be room for me. I was being led by three armed soldiers and the further we walked, 50, 100 feet from the plane, the more I thought: “Is this where they're going to shoot the white guy?”

At the far side of the airstrip, Mamoon asked the soldiers to stop and said that was far enough. Then the leader of the soldiers spoke something in Arabic, of course I understood nothing and Mamoon translated. “Just give them your bags. I'll make sure they're OK.” The tone of his voice was strained, like this whole bag-check thing really wasn't his idea. I got a little more worried when I reached into my bag for my wallet and he said: “No, just leave all your bags here and get on the plane.” OK, then how about my travel journal, obviously there are no weapons hidden in there. “No, just leave all your bags here and get on the plane.” Cellphone? There's so much information I would hate to lose. “No, just leave all your bags here and get on the plane!” His voice more direct and robotic and the looks on the soldiers' faces more severe.

OK, they would have shot me by then if they were going to, but if I didn't get on the plane quickly I'd be left behind indefinitely which I really didn't want to do. “Always be nice to the men with guns,” a great principle to live longer by. I put my hands in the air, slowly pointed to the waist belt where I kept my passport and asked if it was OK to keep that. After a thorough frisking and looking through my waist belt and finding only a couple Band-Aids and my passport, I quickly left my belongings behind and, without looking back, bee-lined it to the plane.