Blog
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Experiences at Duk
January 3, 2010
By Tom Dannan
Our team from the John Dau Foundation had been in Duk Payuel at the Clinic for a few days. I was the new guy, who’d been with JDF for six months or so, accompanied by a couple doctors who’d been with the Foundation from the beginning and were on their third trip to the Clinic.
I was hired in the states, and this was my first time to Sudan. In the time before coming, I’d heard a lot about various aspects of the Clinic, about the staff, the medicine supply, the climate, the donated satellite dish and Internet connection, and this amazing thing that is the cold chain supply. Though I’d worked in the developing world before—and a lot of people who have also say this about Duk when they first come—Duk Payuel can still surprise even those who think the naivete has been worked out of them from their past experiences. Not that Duk isn’t a nice place—it’s very charming and beautiful and the people, who’ve suffered unbelievable tragedies and nothing short of an attempted genocide, are incredibly hospitable and gracious for the help offered by complete strangers around the world. But you realize that it really is that far from a city, that going 10k really takes 45 minutes, by car, if you’re lucky, that the little airstrip built out here and the small charter plane flights from African Inland Mission have served as a literal life-line, bringing in life-saving supplies every month, donated by incredibly generous persons—koiye miooc, in Dinka, the local language.
All this in my mind a few days into my trip, where I was already finding myself settled and adjusted. After a long day of meetings and travel and work on the computer, it had gotten to that still point in the mid-evening of African nights, where things seem to just slow down and the day is finally ending. I went to the cold-chain room, unlocked the door, and went to the spare cooler where water is sometimes kept and pulled out the jug. Facing one of the vaccine refrigerators, I unscrewed my water cannister and set it down on top of it. At some moment in the middle of it all I paused, and had one of those very rare, unexpected, and incredibly joyous moments, in the stillness of this Sudanese night. This is rare I say because in such work as this, one has to be an eternal skeptic to make sure funds are well-spent, programs are designed right, and people are helped. You can’t slow down to stop and admire the view, or rest on your laurels.
But this moment was surreal. In this quiet night, as I stood alone in the Clinic and the staff and visitors outside were relaxing before bed, I looked down at this cooler humming quietly and imagined: Inside this lay these vaccines, each small vial with the potential to literally save a life. Behind the wall was a state-of-the-art system of storage batteries and solar panels, designed by volunteers from the U.S., that has kept them running continuously since they’ve been here. All this in the middle of this remote African village, of which people in the U.S. and throughout the world see pictures and sometimes news stories on the all-too-frequent hardships and tragedies that range from easily preventable diseases to full-fledged genocide. Here was truly a life-line. Here was development and giving at its finest. Here was the generosity of so many hearts of people a half a world away directly affecting many thousands of people’s lives, almost 4,000 in the past six months alone. A culmination of people giving money, of engineers and medical and logistical people giving hours of time and literal sweat to do this. And they did, with great success—every vaccine administered in this 10,000-square kilometer area is possible because of this system.
The constant message from our organization’s founder, John Dau, one of the so-called “Lost Boys” of Sudan who has experienced all of the above tragedy and worse, stays with me in my back pocket: Never give up. Hope is never lost.
In the midst of all the problems we face, in our hearts and homes and lives, whether in the West or the developing world and everywhere in between, these words—never give up, hope is never lost—are perhaps one of the few truths we can hold on to no matter what, made evident in that Sudanese night.
