Six months in Sudan A young doctor in a war-torn village

James Maskalyk, 1973-

Book - 2009

Saved in:

2nd Floor Show me where

610.92/Maskalyk
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor 610.92/Maskalyk Checked In
Subjects
Published
New York : Spiegel & Grau c2009.
Language
English
Main Author
James Maskalyk, 1973- (-)
Edition
1st U.S. ed
Physical Description
xii, 320 p. : ill., maps ; 22 cm
ISBN
9780385526517
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Some people leave home to make good. Emergency medicine physician Maskalyk left home to do good or, rather, to just do to be in Sudan, to live, and to bring the rest of the world with him. It is why he maintained a blog while stationed as a Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) doctor in Ayei, a region on the border between north and south Sudan. It is why he wrote this absorbing book. He left his Toronto home with its creature comforts and moved to a place where he watched creatures dine on the grass roof of his hut, where he sifted other creatures out of the sugar, where it was so hot a thermometer sitting on a table had to cool down to take a patient's temperature. Mostly, it is why he learned to endure the agony of helplessness, knowing that nothing could be done for some of the most severely sick except to watch them and chronicle the hour and cause fever of death. By alternating selections from his blog and post-tour recollections, Maskalyk limns a gut-wrenching picture of what MSF volunteers face in such poverty-ridden and dangerous circumstances and of how he learned to cope and how his experiences changed him.--Chavez, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

When he signed up to do a stint with Medecins Sans FrontiEres in 2006, Maskalyk, currently assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Toronto, volunteered to go anywhere the organization wanted to send him, writing, "No wife, no kids, no house, no debt, no one waiting for me to get back." He was posted in Abyei, an oil-rich region set squarely on the demarcation between north and south Sudan, where one of the bloodiest civil wars in Africa had recently ended. In a makeshift hospital, he saw dozens of sick people, most suffering-even dying-from treatable illnesses. In his six months of service, Maskalyk oversaw a measles outbreak and treated tuberculosis patients, mothers fatally injured during childbirth and countless malnourished children. Even if Maskalyk frustrates in his apolitical stance, refusing to ask why so many are suffering and merely lamenting the fact, he provides a raw and deeply felt account of his time in Sudan. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

In 2007, physician and med school professor Maskalyk (emergency medicine, Univ. of Toronto) worked for Doctors Without Borders in the Sudanese village of Abyei. This memoir is an extension of the blogs he posted during that stint, with some of his original blog entries interspersed here. While Maskalyk's sacrifices and hard work in Sudan are surely admirable, his idiosyncratic and sometimes irritating stream-of-consciousness writing style detracts from what is otherwise an eye-opening and thought-provoking account of his challenging daily struggle to assist a Sudanese population afflicted by the dire ravages of poverty, malnutrition, war, and epidemics of contagious disease. Maskalyk's casual, impressionistic writing feels somewhat fragmented and disjointed, and the reader is left frustrated by the elusive, half-formed narrative of his immediate personal experiences before, during, and after his time in Africa. Readers seeking to better understand the causes of the Sudanese conflict might prefer Daoud Hari's The Translator. An optional choice for general readers and also suitable for medical school or hospital libraries where there is interest in international public health or Doctors Without Borders.-Ingrid Levin, Salve Regina Univ. Lib., Newport, RI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A doctor's memoir expands on his blogs, written while he worked at a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Sudan. In 2007, Maskalyk (Emergency Medicine/Univ. of Toronto)young, single and willing to go to an isolated, dangerous placearrived in Abyei, a small village where conflict between militias of North and South Sudan compounded the stresses of extreme poverty. Here, the author avoids the political story, concentrating instead on the human one. Just getting from Canada to Sudan was a test of patience and endurance, valuable traits for anyone charged with providing medical care under the conditions in Abyei. The hospital's job was to treat acute illness, but it was besieged with emergency cases as wellvictims of gunshot wounds and car accidents, women in protracted labor, children with rabies. A measles epidemic began shortly after Maskalyk's arrival, adding to the usual cases of tuberculosis, pneumonia, infections and fevers. Not everyone could be treatedthose with chronic or minor problems had to be turned away, and hunger and death were common. The author's own trials included brutal heat, sleeplessness and a pervading feeling of helplessness. Maskalyk alternates entries from his blog with more reflective chapters written after he returned to Canada. The blogs have been slightly edited but retain the syntax and general format of the original, which slows reading but lends his work a you-are-there immediacy. A few photographs bear out his descriptions of the conditions. More about the culture of the Dinka, the tribe that made up most of his patients, would have enhanced Maskalyk's account, but he could not speak their languagea translator accompanied him in the hospitaland he spent most of his nonworking hours inside the compound that he shared with his co-workers. A grim glimpse of stopgap measures in a world where humanity is desperately needed. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The End I decided that this book should start at the end. It is the place I am trying most to understand. This is it. I am standing in a field watching the sparks from a huge bonfire floating so high on hot drafts of air that they become stars. It is autumn in upstate New York, and the night is dark and cool. Wedding guests huddle together, white blankets loose over their shoulders. They murmur, point at the fire, then at the sparks. I am standing by myself, swirling warming wine. A man to whom I had been introduced that night, a friend of the bride, rekindles our conversation. He is talking about an acquaintance, a nurse, who worked during an Ebola outbreak in the Congo years before. He recounts her story of how, after days of helplessly watching people die of the incurable virus, she and her team decided that if there was nothing to offer those infected, no treatment, no respite, they would give them a bath. They put on goggles and masks, taped their gloves to their gowns, and cleaned their sick patients. Before he can go on, I stop him. I can't talk about this. "I'm sorry. No, no, it's okay. It's nothing you did. I'm going to go inside. Glad to have met you." I had been back from Sudan for a month. I had worked there as a physician in a small overwhelmed hospital run by the ngo Médecins Sans Frontières. I returned to Toronto sick and exhausted but convinced I was going to make the great escape. I was working in emergency rooms again, surrounded by friends. Things would be like always. In this field of cold grass, where hours before my friends had been married, I heard ten seconds of a story, and during them realized there were things I had not reckoned on. It was the taping of the gloves. The whine of the white tape as it stretched around their wrists, forming a seal between their world and the bleeding one in front of them. I could imagine the grimness with which it was done, could see the flat faces of the doctors and nurses as they stepped into the room. As he was talking, I cast back to the measles outbreak that was just starting as I arrived in Abyei. One day we had two patients with measles in the hospital, the next day four, the next nine, the next fifteen. The rising tide of the epidemic soon swept over us. I rewound to a film loop of me kneeling on the dirt floor of the long hut we had built out of wood and grass to accommodate the surge of infected people. I was kneeling beside the bed of an infant who was feverish and had stopped drinking. I was trying, with another doctor, to find a vein. The baby's mother sat helpless on the bed as we poked her child full of holes. She was crying. She wanted us to stop. Small pearls of blood dotted his neck, his groin. We failed, his breathing worsened, and he died. I stood up, threw the needles in the sharps container, and walked away to attend someone else. Behind me his mother wailed. I can see my flat face. Who was that person? I am not sure if I know him, not sure that I want to. People who do this type of work talk about the rupture we feel on our return, an irreconcilable invisible distance between us and others. We talk about how difficult it is to assimilate, to assume routine, to sample familiar pleasures. Though I could convince myself that the fissure was narrow enough to be ignored, it only took a glance to see how dizzyingly deep it was. The rift, of course, is not in the world: it is within us. And the distance is not only ours. We return from the field, from an Ebola outbreak or violent clashes in Sudan, with no mistake about how the world is. It is a hard place a beautiful place, but so too an urgent one. And we realize that all of us, through our actions or inactions, make it what it is. The people I left behind in Sudan don't need us to help them towards a health system that can offer immunizations they Excerpted from Six Months in Sudan: A Young Doctor in a War-Torn Village by James Maskalyk All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.