“a commanding new memoir….wrenching…vivid…at times, even funny….” – Rachel Giese

I read part of a long excerpt from his blog (sections of which are spaced throughout the book) that helps us understand his sense-making process, and have to put the book down to cry.

Sometimes you start writing one book and end up writing another. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Six Months in Sudan: a Young Doctor in a War-Torn Village, James Maskalyk’s painfully honest account of his six months as an emergency physician in a remote area of Sudan. Answering the call for Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), Maskalyk served as a doctor in a town called Abyei, trapped—one might say—at the crossroads of the warring factions within the country. His account of his duties is often disturbing, particularly in the details of the horrors he encountered virtually every day. But the real story is the transformative nature of the experience itself, which exposed him to the depths of his self, and packed such an emotional wallop that he will probably never be the same.

With [writing] that is poetic, descriptive, evocative and stark, Maskalyk bears witness to what he calls the “impossible decisions” of humanitarian work

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.

Throughout, the months of writing, Maskalyk’s blog embodied the meaning of temoignage. He forces us to breathe the faint breaths of the helpless, brushes their skin up against our own, and draws our gaze into the soft eyes of those who smile as we smile, cry as we cry. Victories are one heartbeat at a time. Deaths, the same. Maskalyk’s temoignage teaches us to give in, to let go and simply be – with the two year old abandoned by a tree by its family, with the young woman suffering from TB who walked for days to get to the clinic to deliver a premature baby, “no bigger than a bird”, with the waiting, the laughing, the silent – the children we were and are, the truth that was Abyei. Many read his blog – professionals, students, thinkers, family. They all got it. They understood. As one reader put it, “I am grateful for your images and words but sometimes they twist inside my heart.” That is temoignage.