RESCUE IN SUDAN

Wednesday, Oct. 01, 1997 By WILLIAM DOWELL
Article Tools
Print
Reprints
Sphere
RSS

(6 of 6)
With a Nuer nurse holding the boy tightly, Seaman jabbed the IV into his arm and then, dissatisfied, pulled it out. "It's not right," she explained. The boy writhed in agony. Calmly, she inserted the needle four or five times more before she was finally sure that she had it right. At 2 a.m. she ducked back into the boy's hut to give him more medicine. In the morning, astonishingly, he was alive and smiling. The Nuer mother beamed at Seaman, and then she was gone. Seaman sat down at the camp table outside her tent, poured herself a cup of tea and began preparing for her morning patients.

The next big epidemic in Sudan will probably be sleeping sickness. The African trypanosome parasite that causes it is a distant cousin of the kala-azar protozoan. Infection rates in some villages in Western Equatoria, just south of the western Upper Nile, are already running at 20%. Experts question whether the disease can be treated without hospitalization--an option that, because of the large numbers infected, is out of the question. It is the kind of impossible field-medical problem that is tailor-made for Jill Seaman, and she has already indicated that she would like to get involved--if the decision makers in Nairobi ask her.

As for the Duar area, Johan Hesselink says, "We used to fly over here, and there were no tukuls [huts]. Now there are tukuls everywhere. These people have come back because they see a future. That is what life is about." That is no small achievement for an unassuming American girl from Moscow, Idaho.