She was being made to reflect that while places like Kwadere existed in Zimlia, far too many of them, perhaps her experiences had been as narrow in their way as those of people who would not have believed that villages like St Luke's Mission could exist. After all, there were schools that actually taught their pupils, which had at least some exercise books and textbooks, hospitals that had equipment and surgeons and even research laboratories. It was her nature that had seen to it that she was in as poor a place as possible: she understood that as clearly as she did that fretting over her degrees of faith or lack of it was absurd.
On a level far from the embassies or the lounges of Butler's Hotel, or the trade fairs, or the corrupt bosses at the top (referred to by Sister Molly as ' chocolate cake' ) were people who ran organisations with small budgets, sometimes funded by single individuals, who accomplished more with their money than Caring International or Global Money could dream of, and who laboured in difficult places to achieve a library, a shelter for abused women, provision for a small business, or provided small loans of a size that ordinary banks must despise. They were black and they were white, Zimlian citizens or ex-pats, forming a layer of energetic optimism which spread up to embrace minor officials and lower civil servants, for there has never been a country that relied so much on its minor officials, who are competent, not corrupt, and hard-working. Unsung they are, and mostly unnoticed. But anyone who understood, would go for help to some comparatively lowly office run by a man or a woman who, if there were any justice, would be openly running the country, and who in fact were what everything depends on. Sister Molly's house and a dozen like it formed a layer or web of sane people. Politics were not discussed, not because of principle but because of the nature of the people involved: in some countries politics are the enemy of commonsense. If the Comrade Leader was mentioned at all, or his corrupt cronies, it was as one talks about the weather -something that had to be put up with. A great disappointment, the Comrade President, but what's new?
Sylvia was being presented with a dozen possibilities for her future. She was a doctor, people knew she had created a hospital in the bush where none had existed. She had fallen foul of the government, too bad, but Zimlia was not the only country in Africa.
A sentence in our textbooks goes something like this: 'In the latter part of the nineteenth century, and until the First World War, the Great Powers fought over Africa like dogs over a bone. ‘What we read less often is that Africa, considered as a bone, was not less fought over for the rest of the twentieth century, though the dog packs were not the same.
A youngish doctor, a native of Zimlia (white), had returned recently from the wars in Somalia. He sat on the hard upright chair in Sylvia's room and listened while she talked compulsively (Sister Molly said this was a self-cure) of the fate of the people at St Luke's Mission, dying of AIDS, and apparently invisible to the government. She talked for hours and he listened. And then he talked, as compulsively, and she listened.
Somalia had been part of the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union, which set up its usual apparatus of prisons, torture chambers and death squads. Then by a smart little piece of international legerdemain, Somalia became American, swapped for another bit of Africa. Naive citizens hoped and expected that the Americans would dismantle the apparatus for Security and set them free, but they had not learned that lesson, so essential for our times, that there is nothing more stable than this apparatus. Marxists and communists of various persuasions who had flourished under the Russians, torturing and imprisoning and killing their enemies, now found themselves being tortured and imprisoned and killed. The once reasonable enough State of Somalia, was as if boiling water had been poured into an ants' nest. The structure of decent living was destroyed. Warlords and bandits, tribal chiefs and family bosses, criminals and thieves, now ruled. The international aid organisations, stretched to their limits, could not cope, particularly because large parts of the country were barred to them by war.
The doctor sat for hours on his hard chair and talked, because he had been watching people kill each other for months. Just before he left he had stood on the side of a track through a landscape dried to dust, watching refugees from famine file past. It is one thing to see it on television, as he said (trying to excuse his garrulousness), while he stared at her, but not seeing her, seeing only what he was describing, and it was another thing to be there. Perhaps Sylvia was as equipped as most to visualise what he was telling her, because she had only to set in her mind along that dusty track two thousand miles to the north people from the dying village in Kwadere. But he had watched, too, refugees fleeing from the killing troops of Mengistu, some of them hacked and bleeding, some dying, some carrying murdered children: he had watched that for days, and Sylvia's experience did not match with it and so it was hard to see it. And besides there was no television in Father McGuire's house.
He was a doctor, and he had watched, helpless, people in need of medicines, a refuge, surgery, and all he had had to aid them had been a few cartons of antibiotics which had disappeared in a few minutes.
The world is now full of people who have survived wars, genocide, drought, floods, and none of them will forget what they have experienced, but there are, too, the people who have watched: to stand for days seeing a people stream past in thousands, hundreds of thousands, a million, with nothing in your hands, well, this doctor had been there and done that, and his eyes were haunted and his face was stricken, and he could not stop talking.
A woman doctor from the States wanted Sylvia for Zaire, but asked was Sylvia up to it – it was pretty tough up there, and Sylvia said she was fine, she was very strong. She also said that she had performed an operation without being a surgeon but both doctors were amused: in the field, doctors not surgeons did what they could. 'Short of transplant operations, and I wouldn't actually go in for a by-pass.'
In the end she agreed to go to Somalia, as part of a team financed by France. Meanwhile she had to go back to the Mission to see Zebedee and Clever, whose voices when she spoke to them over the telephone sounded like the cries of birds caught in a storm. She did not know what to do. She described these two boys, now no longer children, but adolescents, to Sister Molly and to the doctors, and knew that one, who saw children like these every day of her working life, thought that both were destined for future unemployment (but she would keep a look out, perhaps they could be found work as servants?), and the others, with their minds full of starving thousands, endless lines of poor victims, could only with difficulty bend their imaginations to think of two unfortunates who had dreamed of being doctors but now... So what's new?
Sister Molly had to drive out fifty miles beyond Kwadere to resume work interrupted by Sylvia's illness. She had arranged that Aaron would collect Sylvia from the turn-off. Her complaints about the Pope and the churchly male hierarchy were interrupted by the sight of six great grain silos along the road whose contents – last season's maize – had been sold off by a senior Minister to another drought-ridden African country, the proceeds pocketed by himself. They were driving through hungry country; for miles in every direction stretched bush dry and starved because of the overdue rainy season.
'I wouldn't like to have his conscience,' said Sylvia, and Sister Molly said that it seemed some people had not yet understood that there were people born without consciences. This set Sylvia off on her monologue about the village at the Mission, and Sister Molly listened, saying, ‘Yes, that is so, ' and, ‘You are in the right of it there.' At the turn-off Aaron was waiting in the Mission car. Sister Molly said to Sylvia, ‘Well, that's it, then. I expect I'll see you around.’And Sylvia said, 'Fine. And I'll never forget what you've done for me.' 'Forget it.’And off she drove with a wave of the hand that was like a door shutting.