Volume 16
December 6, 2004
Hello, everyone.
I apologize for the long delay between editions of "The Ally Report." It's been two weeks now since I returned from Africa, so I know I should have published a new one earlier. But the first week was taken up with two things: recovering from the horrendous jet lag and Thanksgiving. And the second week was taken up with just one: catching up with all the work that did not get done while I was away.
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| Chuck and Allyson "camping" in the Maasai Mara |
Quite a few of you have called me since I got back, but if we haven't talked, suffice it to say Allyson and I had a wonderful two weeks together - four days in the Maasai Mara Game Reserve, living in a quite luxurious tent (see photo at right) seeing lions and elephants and baboons (oh my), then an entire week on the island of Manda, off the coast of Kenya, fishing, snorkeling and generally doing nothing, plus a day in Nairobi on either end of the trip. Allyson really loved our time on the island, where the owners of the resort had a large supply of Western magazines - Vogue, Vanity Fair and the like, which allowed Allyson to catch up on pop culture a bit. If I had a dollar for every magazine she read while we were there, I could damn near pay for the entire trip. The only bad part of our holiday was leaving her behind again.
Allyson made it back to Garsila about three days after we parted in Nairobi. She was stuck for an extra day in Nyala, during which she joined one of the medical teams there for an outreach mission to a nearby village, only to come upon a gun battle between the Janjaweed and the Sudanese Liberation Army. She was never in any real danger, because her convoy promptly turned around and headed back to Nyala, and the next day, she flew out for Garsila. The morning after this battle, The New York Times had a story about it, and knowing that she was in Nyala, I wondered - worried is a more accurate term - that she might have been in danger, but then I thought to myself, "Well, she probably wasn't near that village and was probably just sitting in MSF's house in Nyala, bored."
Of course, I was wrong. Turns out that because she was faced with the prospect of a day in the house, bored, she decided to go out with the medical team, which happened onto the fighting. Nothing boring about a gunfight ....
Since returning to Garsila, she has fallen back into the routine, doing outreach missions into the villages surrounding Garsila (not much Janjaweed activity there, thank God). Last week brought yet another sad occurrence. I'll let her tell the story:
"Took a small baby back from Deleig yesterday who was having severe tonic clonic seizures (or 'fitting,' as everyone from Europe calls it) from meningitis. I didn't think the baby was going to make it by the look of it, and sure enough he died about an hour after we got him to the hospital. The poor mother had to spend the whole night alone here in Garsila with no family to comfort her. We picked her up this morning to take her back to Deleig, and she was crying of course. And it was pitiful to see the little skinny lady get back in the car with no baby and only her little metal can for water and food."
I don't toss these stories into the Report casually. The death of a child is not something Allyson sees every day, but it does visit the people of Darfur with terrible regularity. And I want to encourage you, in this season of celebration and plenty in our country, where our definition of "plenty" is so extreme as to seem dreamlike to the people Allyson is caring for, to think about slicing into the gift budget a little to contribute to MSF or one of the other organizations dealing with this crisis directly. Links to a few of these organizations are at the bottom of this page. Or you can click here to go directly to the page where you can contribute to MSF.
I hope none of you thinks, "Geez, Chuck, don't be such a downer at Christmastime." It just seems to me that it is in keeping with the spirit of this season to give at least of portion of the riches we generally reserve for our own families, who have so much, to people like that mother in Darfur, who has, as Allyson put it, "only her little metal can for water and food."
The best gift I'll get for Christmas is Allyson's return. I'll have to wait until mid-January for it, but I can do that.
Until next time,
Chuck