The beginning.

Ha.  Been fooled about that before.

The other night, I was working overnight in the emergency room.  It was about 4 in the morning, maybe 5, the point in the night where your body wants most desperately to be lying down.  The department was quite busy, and from the bottom of the stack of people waiting, I picked up a chart that said “suicidal ideation”.  As I walked to the room, I glanced at the patient’s information.  A young man.  No fixed address.  No past history.

I could smell the booze before I walked into the room.  In it sat a well dressed man with glassy eyes.  I sat down.

That is the important part, I explain to students sometimes.  The sitting down.  Too often, I explain, when people come in with emotional pain, we don’t treat their symptoms well.  When people come in who have injured their ankle, even if it’s not broken, we still give them ibupfrofen or a tensor bandage.   When people are suffering spiritually, sit down, even for five minutes, and listen.

Too often, I don’t practice what I preach, but that night I remembered.  I sat down, and we talked.

He had a hard life.  He had been drinking since he was a kid, had no family in Toronto, few friends.  He lost his apartment, was staying at shelters.  With no prospects, he could only see one way out.

When I told him there were others, he said “It’s easy for you to say.  You don’t know my life.”

“You’re right,” I said, “I don’t.  And you don’t know mine.  But I do know that the past is not here now, but you are.  And I know where the road to something better starts.  Right there.”  I pointed at his feet.  “It’s always right there.”

We talked some more, discussed his relationship with booze, and identified loosening it might be a good first step.  A few hours later, after he had eaten breakfast, he left the hospital to go to detox.  I never saw him again, which for an emergency doctor, is sometimes all he gets as a marker of his success.

So maybe the road starts here.  Time will tell.  It is an exciting time for me, with the book coming out, this website going up.  I hope that with both things, I can make the story of Abyei and Sudan alive for people.  I hope that with SMiS.com, those who read the book can deepen their understanding of the story, and find routes for involving themselves in it. I hope that people who haven’t read the book might come to it through their computers.   Most of all, I hope that at a time when people are so interested in connection, this might serve as a conduit, a thread, to bring us into contact with each other, and perhaps through that, the world.

As was true of my Suddenly….Sudan blog, it was kept alive by those who read it.  I hope the same is true of  this.  Thank you for reading.  Thank you for being part of this.