A small hospital in Sudan
In the Nuba Mountains, a small hospital holds more than one story. Hunger arrives there as a child’s body. War arrives as a bullet to the head. Local conflicts arrive on blood-soaked stretchers. And still, between exhaustion and loss, doctors keep working and children are born.
THE BACKSTORY
How one small place can tell the story of a country at war
ISSUE 25
One of the first places Samuel Misteli, the NZZ Correspondent based in Nairobi, and I went was the hospital in Lwere.
I was happy to be in a new place again. Away from Europe and the Middle East for a moment. I had spent so much time in Sudan and South Sudan before and after independence between 2010 and 2015, and I had not realized how much I missed it.
First, I walked around the hospital. I wanted to feel the place first. I talked to people, looked into rooms, followed the light. The colours were amazing. It was hard and beautiful at the same time.
The hospital gave me so much to work with. Walls, beds, shadows, doorways, dust, plastic chairs, people waiting. I could play with composition, even though the reason for being there was heavy.
We went there to meet Baballa Hassan, a 33-year-old farmer and father of three. He had survived a drone strike while working in a field with his brother and friends.
When we met Baballa, he was sitting in the entrance area. I did not want to pose him for a portrait. I did not want to put him against a wall and make him into a subject. I wanted him as he was.
While Samuel talked to him, I watched. His body, his shoulders, the way he moved, the space where his arm was missing. It was quiet, but not really quiet. His body told so much before he even spoke.
The hospital in Lwere sits in the Nuba Mountains, far from paved roads and phone signal. It has around 100 beds, about 100 staff, and a dozen simple brick buildings with tin roofs, built between hills to make it harder to bomb.
We also met Gisma Kamal, who had arrived with her children. Her baby girl, Saida, was badly malnourished and already very weak. At first, they were one case among many. A mother beside her sick child.
I did not know then that we would keep coming back to them. Or that Saida and her mother would stay with me long after we left the Nuba Mountains.
We had come here to cover the Nuba Mountains, the SPLM-North fighters, and their new and strange alliance with the RSF, the Darfurian paramilitary force they had fought against in other times.
But then local fighting in the Nuba Mountains broke out between two villages over land. For days it blocked us from getting proper access to the military. The fighters were busy. The hospital was busy. Everything was moving at once.
On the road toward South Sudan we could see smoke rising. Villages were burning. It felt close, but also hard to understand. Like the war was not one thing, but many small fires at the same time.
Then a military truck arrived at the hospital with wounded men. It was so tense I barely dared to lift my camera. I shot a few frames from the hip and did not even look down at the screen.
The driver saw what I was doing. When the truck stopped, he looked at me with big bloodshot eyes. He did not say anything, but his face screamed at me. I was scared.
After that, wounded men kept arriving. Soldiers, civilians, bodies, blood-soaked stretchers. It did not feel like a hospital story anymore. It felt like the whole war had found this one place, seeking help.
A soldier in civilian clothes lay on a hospital bed after being shot. Everyone was just a body in pain.
All this was happening while Saida was getting worse. Sometimes it looked like she might be a little better. Then we would come back and it looked bad again. Her mother was always there.
At some point they put up a blue cloth around the bed, to give Gisma and Saida some privacy. It also made the room feel heavier. Like everyone already knew what might happen.
There was a lot of waiting. Samuel from NZZ, Murial from Spiegel and I kept moving in and out. Sometimes we just had to step outside. Not because nothing was happening, but because too much was.
In the operating room, Dr. Joseph Yacoub and his Sudanese team worked for hours. One wounded man after the next. Quiet, focused, tired. The kind of work where stopping is not really an option.
I took pictures there that I could not really show here, or in print. Dr. Joseph opened a man’s stomach, took out his intestines, checked them, then covered them with a wet towel on his groin. He just kept looking for bullets and shrapnel.
One soldier had been shot in the head. He was in very bad shape. They tried to move him to another hospital over the rough roads, but he did not make it.
In the morgue, an old civilian man lay dead. He had nothing to do with the fighting. He had been shot in the stomach and bled out. That kind of death felt especially pointless.
And somewhere inside all this chaos, between the urgent cases, Saida died. The baby girl who had been there the whole time, getting weaker while the hospital tried to deal with everything else.
On the last evening I sat outside the hospital. I just sat there. Motorbikes passed, smoke rose from a fire, and I was happy the sun was gone. The night felt like a small break.
Then a girl came up to me with a chicken. I took her picture. It was one of those strange little moments that suddenly feels important for no clear reason.
A little later someone from the hospital called me. A baby was about to be born. I ran toward the maternity ward and got there just as the child came into the world.
Somehow that helped balance the heartbreak a little. Not fix it. Not make it okay. But the sound of a newborn crying in that place meant something.
The baby was called Kuku (like all first sons). His mother, Kaka Abeer, was very young. She finally held him in a blanket, with the painted Nuba Mountains on the wall behind her.
This is a sample of my weekly personal newsletter UNEDITED. If you would like to see more of this, please head over to become a Member. Thank you.
Comments
No comments yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!
Brillant and heart breaking work Dominic...
Great work, many thanks !!
Augenblicke wahrgenommen als ob man selber teil davon ist. Künstlerisch grossartig.
Sehr mutig, lieber Dominic. Authentische Bilder von elenden Zuständen. Und mit Respekt vor diesen Menschen.
Thank you all for the kind words. Sudan was a difficult place to work, but also exactly the kind of place where I feel this work matters. Very few journalists make it there, and so much of what is happening remains unseen. It is also an intensely beautiful place. Thank you for looking and sharing thoughts. Lg, Dominic