Tuesday, Dec. 19

It’s my first day at International Medical Corps’ South Sudan office, based in Nairobi, Kenya. The country director, Simon, gives me a security briefing. He tells the terrifying account of how he and four other IMC staff ran for their lives when the Lord’s Resistance Army from Uganda attacked the IMC compound in Yambio in March. My heart rate quickens and I wonder if I am making an incredibly stupid decision. Of course I do not offer this up to Simon. Unsolicited, he says that I can be taken from the field at my choosing should I feel unsafe.

At 12:30 p.m. I leave for the airport only just having receiving my travel pass from an agency of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, which rules South Sudan. The plane is a 22-seat propeller model. We touch down in a small airport in Lokichoggio, northwest Kenya. White foreigners and black nationals are piling luggage into pickup trucks for transport between the airplanes and the simple and crudely fashioned outbuildings that comprise the terminal. Wilson, an IMC logistician, is waiting for me. The parking lot is populated mostly by INGO vehicles and the World Food Programme flag flies next to the Kenyan flag. While we wait for my luggage to be delivered to the parking lot in a pickup truck, Wilson tells me that he is Kenyan. “The Africans will never be able to be alone,” he says, meaning that his people are incapable of caring for themselves.

I am taken to the nearby United Nations compound, where IMC has a small office and sleeping accommodations. “That way is Kenya and that way is Uganda,” says Wilson, pointing toward a ring of small mountains. Dusty children play alongside the road near a shantytown of rusting tin roofs, women carry items on their heads, men crouch underneath a tree. The roads are pockmarked with potholes. The UN compound is a cornucopia of humanitarian relief agencies. Nightfall brings a sky of rhinestones glittering on a field of inky black African velvet.