Battin Zero

When the phone rings at 5am, its not a welcome noise to me. And so it was last weekend when at 515 or so my little Nokia began singing electronically to me. First instinct: grab the alarm clock and stare absent mindedly at it trying to gauge just what is happening here. Second instinct: grab the phone and answer.

"aaaarggh, Hello?"
"Jesse, this is Joseph with IRC in Bahai, aaaahhh, look, go back to bed..."

With those last 4 words that tumbled out of this man's mouth came a wave of relief for a brief moment. Excellent, I get to crawl back into bed and cuddle up to her again for another hour and a half. The relief was soon drowned in a flood of guilt.

The evening before, while Lauren and I were at the French military base rubbing elbows with the Francophone elite, quietly making fun of them and their silly short shorts, I received a call from Sheri at IRC (International Rescue Committee) . She stated that one of her Bahai based employee's children, a small boy, had been caught in a grease fire at one of the camps. He suffered serious burns and required immediate evacuation in the morning...could we help? Definitely, you know we can always be counted on for such things (a statement I soon wondered if I should regret). A plan for an early flight to pick up the child and his mother was completed and my sleep would be greatly reduced, a miniscule tradeoff.

"...yes, go back to bed, the boy is dead. Thank you for your help though, we greatly appreciate it."

What kind of monster am I to have the first wave of emotions after learning of an innocent child's death be: 'Sweet, I get to go back to bed.'?

A few days later IRC called in yet another Medevac request from Bahai, this time for a young man with a perforated abdomen. We were exhausted from flying nonstop for 6 days, moving from our old house to the new one, and sorting out personnel problems but we said 'no problem' again. Upon arrival the young man, about 21 years old, looked at me with anguish contorted eyes. A primitive IV bag lay on the colorful mattress we loaded him in on, and he smelled of sweat, urine and feces mixed with isopropyl alcohol and iodine. His father, an elderly man in his 60s, with a Sahel sun wrinkled face and deep brown eyes, watched helplessly as we tied the son down gently and began closing the doors. Every small movement we made seemed to send the otherwise staunch and emotionless face of the young man into an abyss of pain. I taxied slow down the gravel and rock airstrip to a spot where the piling sand dunes make it to bumpy, turned around and took off. One hour later, after flying as gently as possible over the arid desert below we landed in Abeche. Ten minutes later, the young man was dead.

Yesterday, after flying to the north yet again, making our rounds thru Bahai, Iriba and Guerada, and evacuating unnecessary UNHCR staff from Guerada due to the escalating tribal vs. militia warfare we returned home to our compound to have lunch. Five minutes after the feast of PB and J began my phone rang. Guess who. The number on the caller id told me it was a satellite phone, and I could think of only one reason why someone from the field would be calling me on their sat phone right now: another Medevac. Answering with a mouth full of crunchy peanut butter (an absolute jewel of a novelty here), my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth, I heard Sheri again on the other line. Sounding as if she was standing in a hurricane, she shouted thru the microphone piece that they were treating a fourteen year old boy who had, very unfortunately, found a landmine. It seems there are a few unexploded devices left in the dunes along the Chadian-Sudanese border left over from a war 20 years ago which the Libyans played a major role in. Back to Bahai.

When we landed the IRC trucks pulled up to the double doors at the Otter's rear. The Land Rover's doors opened up revealing a boy who looked as if he were 10, not 14, who was bundled in bloodied bandages. His face was torn and swollen, his hands and feet were just wadded clots of red gauze.

'He may not make it' one man said in broken English as we gently loaded the fragile cargo onto the airplane. I noted the pool of blood sloshing on the plastic stretcher and agreed silently in my head. Seven months ago my head may have been spinning at the amount of gore that lay in front of me, and while I cannot say I am in immune to it, my skin has thickened. Another weather beaten old man climbed the flimsy aluminum stairs to join us onboard as we all stared at the unfortunate boy, it was the father. From a lasting side glance I took in the man's expression and found that he too, was Chadianized.

The day before, while refueling the aircraft in Abeche, I was joking with one of our employees, Remy, about a certain love potion root he was chewing on, a renowned Chadian aphrodisiac. "Why are you chewing that dirt covered shit???" I asked.

"Aah, to make jiggy-jiggy with his femme! To make more petit Remys!" answered Deni, another local worker standing beside him. We all laughed and took cheap shots at Remy.

"But you already have 2 Remy! Why have more????!! Why do you want anymore than that?"

"Ooh, aah, because you have two annnnnd one die, you have only one. You have tree or four and one or two die, you still have two. Its ok."

Cold statistics. Something that our ancestors living 150 years ago thought about while living on the frontier, but that none of us in the westernized world can truly fathom.

I watched the father as he sat down next to his bloodied boy. A look of concern was in his eye, there was no doubt of that, but that was all I could visibly discern. In a land where death is all around, potentially waiting around each corner for those who call this home, thick skin is a must, and looking at things from a cold statistical point of view might be the only way to survive. Physically and emotionally.
I awoke this morning to another early phone call. This time it was Elizabeth, who was suffering from a nasty bout of food poisoning. I dressed quickly and hopped in the car, loaded with a bottle of Ciproflaxin and some re-hydration salts aimed at fixing the girlfriend. When I neared her compound I had to slow and stop as a Muslim funeral procession crossed the road in front of me. Carried atop the heads of a few mourners was a small coffin, bound for the sand nearby.

Shit, I'm 0 for 3.