“Read this book, and see if you don’t agree that change is possible even in as bleak a place as Sudan….” – The Cape Cod Times

July 12, 2009

I finished this memoir over the July Fourth weekend, and it was
heartening yet painful to acknowledge how far away the events of this
book seemed to me, safe, well-fed and protected on Cape Cod. They took
place in 2007, and I have no reason to believe events like them aren’t
taking place as you read this review. In 2007, Dr. James Maskalyk, who
had already practiced emergency medicine in Chile and Cambodia, took an
assignment from Doctors Without Borders to spend six months in Abyei,
Sudan, a tiny village at the nexus between Sudan, Southern Sudan and
the Darfur province. Maskalyk found opportunities to provide the best
medicine local residents likely had ever had, but realized when he left
that very little had changed. Some new procedures had been instituted;
a new building or two were rising from the dust. But nothing had
changed in Sudan. Perhaps nothing ever will. But that’s not what
Maskalyk, now a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto,
believes, and this book and his blog (www.sixmonthsinsudan.com)
demonstrate his hope and that of many others that change is possible
even in as bleak a place as Sudan. Read this book, take a look at the
Web site and see if you don’t agree.