“…a moving book, a vivid picture of camaraderie in an inferno…” – The New York Times

In 2007 James Maskalyk told Médicins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) that he would go anywhere it posted him, no complaints. Stints in Cambodia, Bolivia and southern Africa, practicing and researching what he calls “the medicine of poverty,” had not cured his restlessness. He was happy to leave behind a career and a girlfriend in Toronto in order to find out what would happen “when all the insulation between the world and me was removed.”

The six months he worked in the middle of Sudan, in a village named Abyei that from the air was little more than “a smudge in the sand,” severely tested his traveler’s optimism as well as his mettle as a doctor. His experience of caring for noncombatants trapped in a civil war, recorded first in a popular blog and now in this moving book, are particular to this time and place. But much of the routine misery he describes is the lot of the rural poor in countries everywhere.

Dr. Maskalyk and his team operate a primitive clinic where patients are sometimes “thrown like matchsticks” from the back of a truck. He had hoped being “so far from somewhere” would at least allow him nights “full of quiet stars.” But the high volume of the Abyei “jazz band” (he uses the term loosely) exceeds the damper of his ear plugs, and the unyielding pace of his job doesn’t allow much time for a doctor to learn about tribal life (mainly Dinka and Misseriya).

His account doesn’t avoid the inevitable pitfalls of the memoirist. The picture of the changes he traces within himself (“no matter how much I try, I will never go back to being the person I was before I left”) at times crowds out the background of faces in the village. But his honest doubts about an adventure few of us could handle, much less ask for, is commendable. His reports on the internal workings of Doctors Without Borders, a noble organization that depends more than it wants to admit on the United Nations, add another dimension to his vivid picture of camaraderie in an inferno.

Abyei is a place where everyone endures searing heat, choking dust, rampant disease and the threat of war. For those who call it home and have nowhere else to go, the place pulls and repels. Dr. Maskalyk, too, finds himself torn between his mission and an urge to flee. “I have been in Sudan for three months, but I have yet to fully arrive.”

As can be imagined, this story does not have a happy ending. The question the author asks — what is his responsibility for the lives of others? — is one that every visitor to an underdeveloped country has pondered, and it doesn’t have an answer.