“Life lessons in ‘Six Months..” – Minneapolis Star Tribune

Dr. James Maskalyk was no stranger to the Third World. As a medical student, he’d spent six weeks training in Santiago, Chile. He’d traveled twice to poor outposts in Cambodia to practice medicine, and later documented HIV treatments in Bolivia and southern Africa.

But when Maskalyk agreed to go to Abyei, Sudan, for the international aid group Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), the place looked to him like a mere “smudge in the sand” on a Google Earth map. Reality on the ground wasn’t much different.

Abyei sits on the edge of an oil-rich region in south-central Sudan, where residents live in the cross hairs of two regions that have been fighting for nearly three decades.

The people are poor and in grave need of basic health care. But they have hope.

Maskalyk, a Toronto-based emergency-room physician, takes it on in his sobering memoir, “Six Months in Sudan: A Young Doctor in a War-Torn Village” (Spiegel & Grau, 320 pages, $25), which sprang from a blog he wrote from his hut in Abyei.

With a writing style that is poetic, descriptive, evocative and stark, Maskalyk bears witness to what he calls the “impossible decisions” of humanitarian work.

He tells of the family that sells its only goat to neighbors to get their dying daughter to the hospital, only to arrive too late.

“They are grieving, and penniless,” Maskalyk writes. “There is nowhere to put the body, nor for them to sleep. Pleading, they ask our help to take the body to the graveyard. They are heartbroken. We say no.”

Maskalyk and the hospital staff could easily take one of their cars, and even pay for a burial. But they don’t. They cannot be a hospital and a hearse service — or an ambulance service or adoption agency. It is a heartbreaking choice.