May 4th, 2013 – The steel wheels are spinning along the tracks noisily, the old rocks grow out of the grass around them, as the sheep chew hungrily at the new roots of spring. I have just read an article on R.S.Thomas, and am looking out of the train window at old men sawing on garden benches in the sun, and maybe, just perhaps, I am falling for my home yet again.
The grief of leaving West Wales just when, finally, it looks and feels comfortable and beautiful, and after an impossibly long winter, has almost stopped me from getting on the train back to the American Deep South. At last, we are poised on the edge of the American Beatnik project again. The Snowbird route South, into Hemingway country and beyond, possibly, into the worlds of Castro and Guevara. Three years in the boatyard; two films, and a war-zone later, with books illustrated, and money in the bank, we reckon we can survive for about four months – longer if we find some sustaining occupation. The ancient spanish port of Saint Augustine will be our first destination after leaving the quarter-mile-long condemned piers of Green Cove Springs, with all of its faded naval war-glory, its resident black widow spiders, alligators, otters and manatees. But first, we shall head into the dusty abyss of the workyard, propellers, water and refrigeration systems, one more coat of paint on the decks, and yacht varnish on teak.
I have been here before – 100% humidity, 100 degrees in the shade, local work grinding to a halt, the lone Briton grinding away on his boat in the mid-day sun. But we will soon be on the water, where it will cool, and should be tolerable. And then perhaps we will be living the dream of floating around on our boat in the sun.
July 31st 2013 – I look at our ridiculous choices, hardships, and the total lack of financial return I have to answer to when people ask me questions about fixing up this old, beautifully-built, strong, but unquantifiable ferro-cement boat, and I ask myself the question they are really asking: Why?
Then I read a passage at the end of my current reading-book; a favourite of my father’s, Admiral Evans’ account of the incredible disasters and excruciating near-salvations met by Scott’s last polar expedition.
He writes of the ‘infinite sadness’ with which they cleared up the mess in the antarctic in 1913. As they pulled out of the ice for the last time, leaving the pack ice, he describes it thus:
‘The evening before we finally broke through into open water was beautifully still, and a low cloud settled down in the form of a thick fog. – it was a change from the fine, clear weather – frost rime settled everywhere, and for a time we had to stop.
There was a weird stillness over all, and whenever the ship was moved amongst the ice-floes a curious hiss was heard; this sound is well-known to all ice navigators: it is the sear of the floe against the greenheart sheathing which protects the little ship, and it is, to the ice-master, what the strange smell of the China Seas is to the far Eastern navigator, what the Mediterranean “cheesy odours” and the Eucalyptus scents of Australia are to the P. and O. officers, and what the pungent peat smoke of Ireland is to the North Atlantic seaman.
I suppose the memory of the pack ice hissing around a wooden ship is one of the little voices that call – and they sometimes call as the memory of “a tall ship and a star to steer her by” calls John Masefield’s seamen “down to the seas again”.
I sometimes feel a mute fool at race meetings, society dinner parties, and dances; the lure of the little voices I know then at its strongest.
It is felt by the Polar explorer in peace times and in the hey-day of prosperity, and it is surely that which called Scott away, when he had everything that man wants, and made him write, as he lay nobly dyingout there in the snowy wild:
‘How much better it has been than lounging in too great comfort at home’
Reading this gave me the final resolve to come – no matter what – to the seas with my boat, as good as I could make it, and trust in the ‘voice’ enough to push through squalls and storms, and here I sit, writing ‘in too great comfort’ in the cockpit of the good ship Sandpiper, in Darsena, Northern Cuba. It is to this I owe the fact that WE MADE IT!
Clearing Sombrero Key Light with the dolphins, during our second crossing to Cuba.
‘It’ll be hellish lumpy out there, and as Bill always says, a tired decision is a bad decision, and look at the state of you two ¨You’re exhausted’. I couldn’t get a word in edgeways to mention that the decision had been made days before; that Hurricane Dorian was fading, that there was a weather window which might not open up again for weeks, and we were running out of mooring-fee money to stay. Dawn, our lovely new friend in Marathon, a fellow British citizen, was right: we had missed the bus after the long schlepp around Key West, trying to find the Customs Office to ‘clear out foreign’ with the boat. We now had 48 hours before we had to re-apply, although the whole of the Florida Keys was, it turns out, International Waters. We had missed the bus back, so were two hours behind.
OK, we’ll go get some fuel. We’ve got to go onto anchor anyway. We can’t afford another night on the mooring ball.
So we cast off the ball, and fell back away with the tide. Away to the fuel dock before it closed for the night. Towing the dinghy behind, we picked our way out through the complicated mooring field. Enough speed to keep some steerage or ‘way’. Forward motion pushes water against the rudder, allowing me to steer. But not with so much speed that we get into trouble. It’s a fine balance, considering other Boats, shoals, and a three-knot current unhelpfully behind us.
‘We’ll pull up port-side to’ I reckoned. So Dorry put the fenders out, as I drifted the boat between the narrow, battered pilings of the ruined bascule (draw) bridge of Boot Key Harbour. As we neared the fuel dock, I hoped we had enough space to spin the boat as we careered towards the red shoal marker with the current. I put the helm hard a-starboard. The new engine made the boat behave differently, as I had discovered under the gaze of the dock-master at Fort Pierce Municipal Marina, I was still getting used to her improved turning abilities. She cleared the shoals, and I brought her head back into the current, and what wind there was. Better control this way, and we crept towards the point parallel to the dock which I had imagined for a slow drift sideways to rest us gently on the fenders, wind assisting. Suddenly, we were in the lee of the Mangrove trees, and the boat felt as if she would sit off the key, just out of reach of a rope-throw. Dorry threw the bow line at my command. There is nothing for it in these situations, as they were about to close. I had no steerage with the boat not moving forward, and we would have to start the approach all over again. The third time, the increasingly surly dockmaster caught the now-sodden line. I could tell he was impatient when he yanked the boat towards the pilings as hard as he could. I ran up forward to stop the expensive stainless bow-rail from getting crumpled by ten tons of boat against an unmoving greenheart piling.
So when the boat took ages to accept the seventeen gallons we put in (a paltry amount as compared with the huge gas-guzzling tuna boats which dominate the space here), I stolidly refused to adopt the stress of keeping him an extra half-hour after closing. I didn’t tip his bad attitude, supposing a tip to be connected with good service, and that really annoyed him.
I had decided already that we would pull off the dock and make for the outside of the inlet, just to see how the swell was, under the predictions we had been receiving from NOAA (North American Weather), but his attitude cemented in my mind a growing reluctance to stay much longer in the USA. It is a very shoally and winding inlet, and I spent the time making sure not to overshoot shoal markers, and accommodate incoming day-fishers in their small craft. Keep right. Keep right, squeeze between the channel buoys…
Once clear, I turned the boat toward Sombrero Light, which would be our last outbound marker before Cuba when we decided to make the voyage. We had meant to go today, three hours ago, but I had all-but decided it was too late. If the East winds persisted, this course should constitute a beam-reach, a good point of sail for our boat.
‘180-due South’, I said to Dorry who was busy stowing away the fenders and warps for mooring. We wouldn’t need them on anchor that night. But what about tomorrow? No winds or too much for the next week, and what if the storm re-gathered? Dorry came back to the cockpit with a fender. ‘This sea is OK, isn’t it? Perfect’. It was then that my mind was made-up. If she was happy, most of my problems were solved. The big question after that was my stamina. I was exhausted.
The Iconic Sombrero Key Light, Hawk Channel, Florida Keys
‘Yup. If it’s like this when we go, I’ll be happy. I wonder how much more swell there would be outside the reef in the Straits.’ We were still inside Hawk Channel until we cleared Sombrero. It stood there, a far-off pyramid, but getting closer. It has a rating of 12 mile visibility. I looked down at the chart. The reef was deep out there. The swell we had should be pretty much the same. Tolerable. Not comfortable, throwing our boat sideways all the time, as it came from the beam, but tolerable. And once the sails were up, we’d have heeling stability.
‘I reckon this is about the swell we’ll get’, I said. Dorry nodded… ‘We could just do it!? Just carry-on. Cuba is just over there.’ I pointed ahead. ‘That’s the thing about cruising. We have our home with us. The weather is right.’
Should we just go to Sombrero to have a look? But by then, it’d be nightfall, there would be no going back. We fell silent, and, as we neared the light, which was just starting to visibly flash, I realised the decision had been made already.
‘We went for fuel, and ended-up in Cuba.’ If we went wrong, there would be little help as we got near Cuba. We were covered by TowBoat US, but they would not come anywhere near Cuban waters. However, the boat was as ready as she ever would be, and we were, apart from the fatigue, and we had seen enough summer weather to know that these weather windows were to be taken when they were there.
‘I’d better get the dinghy stowed then.’, Dorry said, and as we went up forward to lift it aboard, the Autopilot keep the boat heading out into the Caribbean Sea, past Sombrero light, and southbound one last desperate time. Eight accidental years it had taken to restore the boat and bring her to this point – ready to leave the USA, and to start going to places we really wanted to see.
We were soon to find out that the Autopilot could not handle the beam seas, that the depth sounder and compass were too dim to be seen at night, and that these beam seas were to get the better of both of our stomachs. I stayed on the helm for virtually all of the night, with better night vision than Dorry, and was treated to a beautiful moonlit beam-reach in the swells of the gulf stream. Before this, at about 11.30pm, Dorry said: ‘Look at that’, and pointed to the port bow, eastwards. There in the sky were what I can only describe as three northbound fireballs, accompanied by six or seven smaller comets. But they were not these things. They did not burn out, but stayed in the sky for three or four minutes at least. It was eery and conspiratorial. I reckoned they might be on a direct course between Guantanamo and Miami, but what were they?
OK, I think we are all agreed here: the dry season is starting. For fun, we got the thermometer out today. 110 in the shade. Nevertheless, we are still cut-off from supply by – incredibly – water! Most of my time now is taken-up with water management. Whether it be trying to get my guards to stop marauding villagers running the hospital borehole dry, or lobbying and supporting the Local Commissioner to take responsibility for the town borehole, we are the only organisation in this part of the ‘New South Sudan’ with expertise and tools to create and maintain water supply. It is deeply ironic, then, that on the one hand water is our holy grail, and in the story that follows, is our enemy.
When Laraine, the other Logistician here in Lankien was on leave, and I was in charge of all the Logistics here, I ended up requiring several Cargo plane flights. There was one day, when a truck had been sent over-optimistically from Loki with Cargo for us. In desperation, we ended-up using a bush Cargo Plane to shuttle it from the other side of the swamp to here in episodes. This is an account of it which I wrote at the time:
Cargo plane at Lankien International
…There are now four cars (Four Wheel Drive) in the village, and it feels like an invasion. We are still cut-off by truck, but I am told that supply is only a matter of weeks away. It is too risky to travel and assess the impassable part of the road ourselves, so all information is composed from local sources. Meanwhile, Aeroplanes remain our lifeline. When a plane comes, and after it has been meticulously packed with all the supplies, which first have to be ordered four months in advance, then picked from a stock across the border, then loaded according to urgency versus weight, we receive a ‘Flight Schedule’, ‘Flight Manifest’, and ‘Packing Lists’. These should correspond with what we have requested, give or take. Then, at dawn, I have to check the Airstrip, and report to our Flight Co-ordinator in Loki, who will then allow the plane to take-off. We then have to keep the airstrip clear of dogs, donkeys, cattle, random NGO equipment, and rubbish. The plane lands, we offload, check-of all the cargo, and the plane can go. In theory.
Miraculously, the dog survived.
On the first day of Dornier flights, there was a flight from an MSF plane from another project, to refuel from our stocks here. This used-up the fuel we had left – two drums of ‘JetA1’. This flight took off. Minutes later, the Dornier arrived with four new drums of fuel. These were the beginning of the stock from the stranded truck.
On the next Dornier load-up, another MSF plane had already turned-up – the scheduled regular rotation. As the Cargo unloaded, the MSF one taxied through the human faeces, shreds of old mosquito nets, piles of plastic waste, tumbleweed and dust, and over the dried-out mud, turned at the end, and started to build-up speed for take-off . It was at about 50 knots, I suppose, when my eye was caught by Riek running after one of the many wild dogs that haunt that end of the runway where they slaughter animals. The dog ran out, straight for the plane, and I have two fantastic photos of the plane, cloud of dust behind, with a dog running literally for its undercarriage.
It was a heart-stopping moment. There were MSFers on board, too, but the plane was able to stop, turn, and have another go.
Plane narrowly avoids dog-mangling on Lankien Airstrip
It is now one month since that time, and guess what: we are STILL waiting for the road. The area between us and the supply route is cut-off by swamps, and, although usually dry by now, it was ruined by some ill-advised civil engineering over rainy season, which seems to have done more harm than good. An MSF truck and trailer waits the other side of the swamp, with essential supplies – pipes to plumb the ever-growing Out-Patients Department, propane to run the Laboratory Fridge and cook, Cement to keep-up with the Latrines construction in the fight against cholera outbreaks, and Plumpynut (nutritional food supplements) for the malnourished and recovering Kala-Azar and Tuberculosis victims. This is cargo which our supply centre are reluctant to put on the planes all the way, because of its weight. It has taken two weeks to travel up from our ‘remote’ HQ at the Kenyan border.
It is always a battle of the budgets. There is a price applicable to every Kilo in weight that is brought to our project, and this ‘Transport Surcharge’ is massive. It took me a long time to be convinced to work with MSF. I had seen how Aid worked in countries like Liberia where I worked during the build-up to that infamous civil war for a different Relief Project, and it was only the fact that MSF is guaranteed to commit at least 75% of funding to field operations that made me, after 20 years of consideration, apply. But that commitment shows. There is no wastage here on the ground.
So on Tuesday, when we walked into the market in search of a place to have tea, and a huge six-wheel drive Russian Ural lorry appeared out of the dust like some kind of Out –of-Place, tattered Cold War Juggernaut, it took a moment to register first, that there was a vehicle in the market, and second, that this was the first moment of a huge opportunity.. Absent-minded for a moment, I lapsed back into traffic mode immediately and for a second carried on walking. Then it struck me. Today, this big commercial ‘Mad Max’ style truck, coming, it turned-out, with news of our MSF truck stuck in the swamps, was not to be missed, our biggest chance of supply. We are days away from running out of Diesel for the generator, and are out of propane for cooking food. Latrines will overflow before long, and it may be weeks and big bucks before we can get the stranded load ferried by cargo plane. I started running through the dust after the disappearing ragged hulk.
The driver, ‘Franco’ was friendly, and the first thing I said to myself, with unconcealed glee, was ‘He speaks English!’. I knew I had to try to make arrangements with this driver to retrieve our cargo, bit by bit, across the muddy swamps of Central Africa. But Communication across borders and deserts is painstakingly slow, and there is a list of challenges. Different accents, hell, different languages – Swahili, Arabic, Nuer and English; bad Sat-Phone reception and long-distance HF ‘Bush’ Radio. It is frustrating to know, from our supply and ordering system, that Unimogs are approved MSF standard (huge Mercedes-built ‘Go-Anywhere’ machines). I have used these Unimogs in the ‘swamps’ of West Wales, and if any project ever needed one of these, it was us.
But it is what it is. By the next evening I had managed to co-ordinate between the key players: Field HQ in Loki (Kenya/Sudan border); our Contracted Truck Company in Nairobi (Kenya); their driver at the flooded bridge over the swampland at Pathai; the 6×6 Truck owner in Bor (Sudan), and his driver here in Lankien. Payments between two transport companies across two countries had been co-ordinated, with me in the middle, and the MSF system was working like clockwork.
There is a long queue of NGO vehicles lined-up there in Pathai, waiting to come back in to South Sudan now the Referendum is over, but I persuaded him – with a bit of backslapping/handshaking, some major ‘Truck Admiration’, and a cup of tea – to do a deal with me! MSF remains the only organisation with any active presence in Lankien, so maybe this also helped to persuade all the right people to have all the right conversations with each-other. The biggest struggle was getting hold of his boss in Bor. We had to call a taxi-driver friend of his on Sat-Phone, who drove to the yard and found him. There is much more mobile phone technology than water here (although not in Lankien), but there is no electricity infrastructure in place to charge them. Landlines, of course, don’t really feature.
This is the kind of work I thrive on in the film world – making difficult things happen on film locations, finding the man who can, getting amongst the community – but I do not usually have to do it ‘blind’. All of the places I talk to are imagined to me. I have never visited them. In three months since arriving, I have not gone more than 500 metres from this compound for security reasons. So I have to guess at what is – and what isn’t – possible in these ‘Outside World’ locations around me. As I write, the truck is on its way through the bush to do what it does best. Its tyres are ragged and hissing with air, the front wheels splay apart jauntily, but it is the essence of Red Army ruggedness, and is well-capable of wrenching our MSF truck and its vital load through the mud. Spirits are high.
In my blog, I have seldom yet taken the opportunity to actually talk about, or describe, the medical work we do here. I am slightly sceptical of emotive ‘aid images’, so have maybe shied away from too many ‘MSF t-shirts on doctors’ photographs. And in this sense, it has been good that images are so hard to email over the Satellite Phone Link here. For some reason with text there seems less chance for misinterpretation or misrepresentation. Call me old-fashioned, but I think the camera often lies. And I should know, having spent a career in Film and TV, creating these illusions which the viewers often do not realize are ‘posed’.
Morning is always the busiest time of day, when I have to organise my team, my daily workers, and the guards, as well as trying to get onto the shared computer to pick up any emails from the outside world. Today, though, Dr. Hanna offered to take me on her daily ward-round, and I decided to make some time. It was really grounding to be part of such an everyday routine, rather than the helter-skelter variety of Logistics.
Dr Hannah and IPD patient
So when you walk in, there is a smell which I can only describe as ‘Nuer’. It is something between the smell of a horse stable and good, clean tropical sweat. It is now a long time since I have really smelt it, as one becomes acclimatized quickly to the smells here. But I remember it hitting me well when I first arrived. The first person we meet is a woman with suspected Kala-Azar. Kala-Azar is a disease which only appears in developing countries. It has no value to western pharmaceutical companies, so comparatively little research has been done. I am not a medic, but from what I remember, it eats the body up from the inside-out. It attacks the immune/glandular system in the same way that HIV does, from what I can tell. I often see the results of it in its late stages as I am fussing around the oxygen machine, where the most boney living corpses you can imagine, lie on mats on the floor, hooked to the oxygen generator for survival.
Visually, these victims could put some of the hardest famine photography to shame, but remarkably many recover on the treatments of Ambisome and other drugs here. We are just coming to the end of an outbreak here in Lankien. I believe we may be the project with the biggest numbers left, here in Africa.
The next patient we see is one of the most dramatic in the hospital at the moment. She looks like a terrible leper, but in fact is the victim of a massive burn to her face. Although she looks ghastly, Hanna assures me that she is nearly healed, and has made a really good recovery. I get called away at this point, as somebody has asked me to fix the lights in IPD2 while I’m at it. I get my electrical hands, Malo onto it, show him how to test, how to use the multi-meter, and leave him to replace the necessary socket. When I catch up with Hanna, she is in the interim wards, a stained (but sanitary) trigano tent. This tent is one of my tents set-aside for ‘Sudden Influx of Wounded’ scenario, but is being used as a ward, not because we don’t have space – Kala Azar numbers are on the decline – but because people prefer to sleep in a tent, on the floor, rather than in formal hospital beds.
In this tent, from what I can see, are two patients and their families. I immediately spot one of the really fun children of IPD, who is always to be seen carrying her little brother around, and, with a friendly smile, introducing herself to ‘Kawais’ like me. We have a lot of fun, and I greet her. It turns out she is the daughter of the daughter of the patient, and old woman with a gangrenous leg. As we are visiting her, I get to touch her lower leg, which, just like those wax models you dare to touch as a kid in the London Dungeon, is just like wood. Or at least, the skin is just like cardboard. I heard and read a lot about the smell of gangrene when studying the history of medicine at school, and had smelt some new smell when I came through the flaps of the tent. She will be ‘greenlit’ out of here (flown on the plane), as we do not have an Operating Room in which to do the amputation. Despite the tent being old and stained, I have evaluated it closely, and have supervised chlorination, and the ‘ward’, with its mud floor covered in a plastic sheet, is actually a pleasant, clean, and relaxed area. I can see why some Nuer prefer it to the big ward. At least it’s not trying to be something it isn’t…
We see one other patient, and then Hanna walks over to a scrunched-up blanket on a mat in the corner. There is the most tiny, skinny, frail old woman under there! I had had no idea that she was there, and was relieved I hadn’t stomped over what I thought was the empty bed. At that point, I got called out again, to find that two of the three walls of a new Oxygen Room I am building were leaning and twisted like a snake.
That was my first experience of a regular ward-round. At night in most wards, the beds will be empty, with the patients who can move, going either under their beds (they fear the height from the floor!), or outside to sleep. Every morning, order is restored and the beds are re-occupied, but I remember the first time at night heading into IPD to check some light, and the place resembling a little festival – bodies lying around in the moonlight, low murmurings of patient and caretaker.
Evening found me sitting in the back of our expat compound with an African tribesman pressing a razor-blade against my jugular vein. This was not an abduction, or outbreak of clan violence which so often happens with spear, club, or AK47 in this part of Africa. Thomas Chuol Wiector, one of my finest carpenters, fabricators and, it has to be said, dandies, was giving me a ‘Nuer’. A haircut. At the start, I was thinking: ‘Hang on a minute, it feels like you’re just cutting along my head with the pair of paper scissors I just got for you from the office. Then I felt the back of my head, and found that to be exactly what her was doing. I had asked for a ‘trim’. I quickly resigned my self to the local buzz-cut, and am now actually really pleased with it. Like all things that are done well here, this was done extremely well.
It was just funny, looking forward, tilting your head, all the things you normally do at the barber except for the ‘Going anywhere nice on holiday this year?’ conversation. I chuckled silently as he walked round me, sizing-up what he had done, like the pro he is. A lizard scuttled across the mud wall of the Tukul in front of me. I looked at the chunks of hair on my lap that had been butchered from my scalp, and wondered for the umpteenth time at the bizzarreness of the evening, as he came at me one more time with the razorblade-on-the-back-of-the-comb, to finish off what transpired as a really good (really short!) short back and sides.
One of the abiding memories of Christmas for me, from amongst the chaos of Cargo, Air-Traffic Control, and Security Management, was my first delivery. Ever since being once denied the chance, I have always wanted to witness a birth, and when I first came, Sheila was very keen that I come and be there one time, in the delivery room. One night, between Christmas and New Year, I was roused from bed by a guard, needing me to supply water and 230v light to the anti-natal clinic or ANC (12v light-bulbs still on the way from Amsterdam…). This request came into my sleep through the African night:
‘Rufa, Come-On: Miss Shielie, Piu, Light Kalas. ANC.’ Sheila had a Mama birthing in the ANC. I had to come, to turn on the Water Tower, and something was wrong with the lighting of the Delivery Room. It was urgent.
After I’d seen to the necessary, I went to check-up on Shiela, and hung-around, shy and bleary-eyed, by the door, whilst the Mum, with no screaming or swearing, went into the final mechanisms of giving-birth. It being the first time I had seen this miracle, I was amazed by how it happened as it was meant to. I wondered at how the baby boy could come from such a slim frame, and, sizing him up afterwards, could swear he was bigger across than the mother who had carried him. But it happened, as I say, with a neatness and order which dumfounded me. Obviously, it was not ‘easy’, but walking back to the Tukul under the vivid blanket of stars, I had that sense of ‘Species’, that fatalistic, inevitable perspective on the human condition which provokes so much thought and philosophy.
Good friends in Spain emailed me today some photos of themselves holding, with barely-concealed glee, their newborn baby girl. Sheila the midwife and me looked at the lovely pink bundle of sterile, clean baby, no dirt, dust, flies anywhere to be seen and wondered. I haven’t been here that long, but already whiter-than-white, cleaner-than-clean images like this seem a part of some different world.
Today, another massive change happened to Lankien. The UN turned up. There are now four cars (Four Wheel Drive) in the village, and it feels like an invasion. We are still cut-off by truck, but I am told that supply is only a matter of weeks away. It is too risky to travel and assess the impassable part of the road ourselves, so all information is composed from local sources.
