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FROM SUDAN Kate Mort is the new Field Coordinator in Médecins Sans Frontières’ Sleeping Sickness project in Ibba/Kotobi, South Sudan. Kate is from Armidale, New South Wales and this is her first mission after working for two years as Human Resource Administrator in the Médecins Sans Frontières Australia office in Sydney. So we are now in Sudan. At the moment I am sitting at a laptop computer in my office in Kotobi. The office is a small tukul (a kind of mud hut with a grass roof, this one has the added luxury of a plastic ceiling to keep out the rain a little more). So, what have I been doing until now? Well, after my briefing in Paris I flew to Nairobi on 9th of April, arriving at about 9pm. From there I went straight to the guest-house in Nairobi, had my last hot shower for three months. The next day I took a very small plane to ‘Loki’ in the north of Kenya to start the final stage of my briefing. Arrived there during the biggest rains they’ve had in over a year so was greeted by a lot of mud but also a smiling Aussie face who is finishing a report in Loki. ‘Loki’ is a really strange place. Basically, it was set up by the
United Nations and a number of international NGOs who needed a base for their
South Sudan projects. [Sudan was too volatile to base humanitarian operations
from during the late 1980s so Lokichokkio was set up as part of Operation Lifeline
Sudan by UNICEF, WFP and 35 NGOs in 1989]. There is nothing here now except for
a small village belonging to the local Turkana tribe, a few compounds with great
big fences and a lot of sand. Our compound was suitably Spartan although it's
not that bad, a few ‘tukuls’ and they have electricity and the food
is not so bad. Kotobi is a small village and there is really not a lot here, I went to the market on Sunday but all there was were a few second-hand clothes, some African fabrics, a few plastic items and the odd onion. Our hospital here has 60 beds and we are set up to deal with Sleeping Sickness patients only. Every now and then there is an emergency case but most of the time it is just the poor sleepers. The wards are three tents, with 20 beds for each tent. It is pretty basic but the whole thing works well and everyone seems happy. Each patient has an attendant who comes to help keep them clean and fed and
generally help with the nursing care. We supply food for the patient and attendant
twice a day and the rest of the time they just hang out, so there are always people
around. Once people have been screened (we set up a lab at the AS place in a small tent) we take the sick people back to our hospital for treatment, one week for stage one patients and two weeks for stage two. Those with stage two require constant care and the treatment is given through a drip four times a day. The stage ones can be treated as out-patients, and only require a daily injection for one week. We have just been in a mad rush to screen as many people as possible on the
other side of the river because as soon as the rains come it gets very hard to
cross. The bridge was destroyed during the fighting to limit the number of troops
crossing into the area. During the dry season it is possible to drive across but
it is only a very short period of time that we can do this. In fact, we had to
make the decision on the weekend to stop crossing this way this weekend, I went
across and the level was already getting close to coming in through the door.
From now on we will not be able to screen on the other side and all patients will
have to be transported across by boat. There is another way to drive around but
it takes two whole days and if we can go straight across the river it takes less
than half a day to reach Lui, the town on the other side.
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