Reading it is rather like sitting through an episode of ER. You marvel at the responsibility placed on these brave volunteers, summoned from their tukuls in the early hours to deal with the victims of a marketplace shooting. You shudder vicariously at the pus and the gore, delivered with a just manageable dose of medical jargon. You share Maskalyk’s sense of defeat as he calls time over the body of yet another emaciated Sudanese mother who has failed to survive childbirth, and his sense of release as he unwinds with his equally exhausted peers, gazing at the stars.

That there was something Sisyphean about the task goes without saying. Day after day, the grind continued, broken only by gruesome episodes and rare moments of joy. .Just as he was determined to provide for his patients’ needs, never aggrandizing his role or hinting at heroism, he presents the reader with an unvarnished reality. Austere as the Sudanese landscape, plangent as a ballad, this book has poetry in it along with pain.

“…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.”

Honest and fluently written, Maskalyk’s book traces his rapport with his colleagues, his growing affection for his adopted town of Abyei and the readjustment he faces on returning home to Canada. It is an absorbing insight into international medicine.

Six Months in Sudan does not try to be anything more than it is — a moment in time, a distinctly human story full of laughter and tears, hope and sadness, anger and resiliency. Maskalyk paints a richly detailed picture of what it is actually like to be in Sudan and gives voice to those trapped in its disaster.

This is a rare memoir, blending compelling scenes of Abyei with the thoughts and feelings of a volunteer doctor, all done with genuinely brilliant writing. I’m sure Maskalyk is a fine doctor, but he’s an even better writer. Just as in the field blog that preceded this book (see Sixmonthsinsudan.com), his aim is to pull readers into his experience, to make them as much witnesses to the truth there as he was. It is all about intimacy.

The prose in his messages is carefully crafted, often poetic, always deliberate – self-conscious, sometimes. It gained a following far beyond his inner circle. What matters here is what he does with it – making it the core of a bigger story, a moving reflection written back home after an experience he always knew would be life-changing.

As medical literature this book excels; as an insight to that exhilarating, life changing step into chaos—walking towards death, Maskalyk calls it—his account can hardly be bettered.

This is the kind of book that makes sense of the senseless and builds important connections between those who have seen and felt what he has, those who aspire to do this kind of work, those who want to support the dedicated humanitarian service of others and those who just want to understand.