“….Maskalyk teaches us to let go and simply be….”

The suddenness of that attack and devastation underscores the work of MSF and the vital need for that work to continue. While the place of Abyei can be erased, the truth of it – that it was, that the people there truly were – is more deeply etched in the fabric of human consciousness by the penetrating and incisive depictions in Dr. Maskalyk’s highly acclaimed blog. Because of his blog and his forthcoming book, SIX MONTHS IN SUDAN, due out from Doubleday Canada in April 2009, Abyei and all of its heartbeats will continue to persist inside of us for as long as people can read.

There really are no words that accurately portray the dynamic and the brilliance of Maskalyk’s writing. This is because his quest was to create time and space travel so that no matter where they were anywhere else in the world, anyone reading would be present right then in the moments he was recounting. – “that boy, the one whose bone we drilled into with an hypodermic cannula, the one who I used as an example of our small therapeutic successes, the one who came to life after lying dry, drooping in his mother’s arms, he died. I was told the next day. The cannula had stopped working, but he was drinking. An hour later, when the nurse next went to check, he was dead. A husk.

“Diarrhea is a killer. I see it nearly every day. It kills children, turns them to husks. The work it takes to keep their machinery turning with the desert outside and one inside, is simply too much. They cave in, exhausted, and creak to a stop.”

Throughout, the months of writing, Maskalyk’s blog embodied the meaning of temoignage. He forces us to breathe the faint breaths of the helpless, brushes their skin up against our own, and draws our gaze into the soft eyes of those who smile as we smile, cry as we cry. Victories are one heartbeat at a time. Deaths, the same. Maskalyk’s temoignage teaches us to give in, to let go and simply be – with the two year old abandoned by a tree by its family, with the young woman suffering from TB who walked for days to get to the clinic to deliver a premature baby, “no bigger than a bird”,  with the waiting, the laughing, the silent – the children we were and are, the truth that was Abyei. Many read his blog - professionals, students, thinkers, family. They all got it. They understood. As one reader put it, “I am grateful for your images and words but sometimes they twist inside my heart.” That is temoignage.