one saturday night, in dadaab, we stood in a puddle around stacked soda crates, a goat sizzling over coals beside us, when the three, buzzed-out speakers in the canteen started to play this song and the same dozen cast of characters that i share my hospital days and compound nights with drifted to the tent, and danced, grinning, mud between their bare toes.

soon, it was only me and one of the departing three for whom the party was held leaning on the red cubes of coca-cola, and we agreed that there was no club in new york city that was better than this one, none where you could dance so sincerely, freed completely from the fear that there might be another, better way to spend your time.

i returned yesterday, after two days of driving. as we drew closer, i saw green fade to brown, women’s faces framed behind bright beautiful scarves and soon, we were swerving on sloping sand, fishtailing in the dust. camels loped behind burnt trees, and between these, miles from each other, houses of rounded sticks. an impala stepped from the brush, sleek as glass. a young boy, six, waved an empty plastic bottle at us, and we stopped to give him all the full ones he could carry. they fell from underneath his arms as he tried to juggle more, and landed in the dust at his feet. he grinned, his tongue bright between missing front teeth.

i’m posting actively on the msf website, on mission again, this time in dagahaley, the world’s largest refugee camp.  hit me there if you’re interested. **** so little water.  it hasn’t rained here for two years.  we get ours from boreholes dug deep in the dirt, metres down where hidden lakes hover between layers of [...]

i’m told, that an hour after the first rain, the night is so loud with the jubilation of their croaked calls that you can’t sleep. these days, it’s silent. no rain, none for months. some mornings, there are clouds, but by noon, they are burned off by the sun’s blaze, harmless things.

i wake up at 2 am every night, as the power cuts out and my fan grinds down. sweat starts to bead, and i push through the mosquito net. dust falls onto the sheets. i grope for my headlamp, click it and step outside. the compound, usually full of the activity and noise of the 70people who share it, is quiet and dark. the wind, violent earlier, has calmed. stones crunch as i walk towards a chair in the centre of the yard. i sit down, click off my light, stretch my neck back. above, stars are scattered in the blackness, thousands of distant jewels. somewhere, in dadaab, someone is looking at the same ones, staring at the open space above, hoping that if you can free your mind, even for a moment, with it, goes your soul.

happy birthday. to south sudan, the world’s newest country.  would that i could be there to feel the jubilation, the lightness as the yoke of war is lifted, perhaps for good.  people’s feet must be scarcely making marks in the dust, so lifted the feel. except, in abyei.  again, the weight of the country’s division [...]

i got it.  it’s like lotto fever, but less lucky. fevers are delicious things to fall into, dreamless and dark.  the uncomfortable part is the beginning, the shakes and chattering, but even this, if you are in a hong kong hotel, has an easy cure: “hi.  this is room 1206.  please send up another blanket.  [...]

a priest leads me through a church, and he is so tall and his voice so soft, i have to lean my ear up to follow his words, and he tells me that 500 priests and nuns live here or near this holy place, and that in its walls, the lame have walked, the sick made well, that people come from miles for its blessings, and i think to myself how the home of miracles is changing, has changed, that people walk less towards these walls of stained glass, and towards ones with curtained rooms and antiseptic floors, hoping for transformation, or salvation, their faith as strong as any acolyte’s.