Unforgettable

SOUTHERN SUDAN, APRIL, 1973

I was traveling overland from Cairo to Tanzania, now heading down to Sudan, finally “black Africa.” I used every means of transport available, on a boat across Lake Nasser, often on trains that died for hours each afternoon in the hot Saharan sun, or on overloaded lorries, standing in the rear with thirty Africans. Or, sitting atop overloaded cargo, some possibly boxes of weapons, empty beer bottles or whatever people needed to move. 

It was over a year and a half since I’d left the US, and at times I had wondered whether I would ever get to Tanzania. I was amazed to find how much I was forced to learn about myself, my own culture, having put myself into so many foreign ones. I had just spent a week in the southern town of Wau (wow!). The train I was on had arrived in Wau on Monday, an hour after the weekly lorry left for my next destination, Juba. So I spent a wonderful week in Wau, but that’s another story. 

The following Monday morning we started off on a trip which would take four days and three nights. I was traveling on a lorry with about 50 other men, women and young boys through a region which had recently ended an almost ten-year civil war with the Northern Sudan. I had splurged, and bought a seat inside the cab of the lorry, instead of riding with everyone else in the bed behind the cab, so that I could protect my pale skin from the piercing sun. We traveled on a nearly non-existent road, fording rivers where no bridges existed, grinding over rocks, sloshing through mud and sand. The trip was only 650 miles, but it took at least 40 driving hours, through a most beautiful, thick jungle of mainly mango trees. Now and then several baboons would appear, shouting in objection to our disruptive presence. Colobus monkeys would regard us from tree branches, their black bodies covered with long white fringe. Occasionally we rumbled past tiny villages, some still deserted because of the war, and others with only a few people and no stores.

I was the only non-African on the lorry. Most of the others were young boys on their way home from school in Wau. From where they were standing in the back, when the boys saw a mango tree they would shout “Manga, manga, manga!”; the driver would stop, the boys would get out and, wielding huge, long sticks, mangoes would rain down from the tree into the truck bed. Then they would pass them out to all the people, including me. With no stores, and only my small supply of bread and Vache Qui Rit processed cheese, mangoes were about the only thing I ate those four days. At night, we stopped at missions, where I slept on my grass mat beside the truck, with the others huddled all together in the bed of the truck or on mats of their own. 

With the truce between Northern Sudan and the Southern Sudanese rebels recently signed, it was once again safe, at least for a while, for those who had fled to Zaire to return to Sudan. All along the way, we saw refugees, building new mud-and-wattle, thatched-roof homes, clearing the land and planting crops; until their crops were harvested they were living basically on mangoes, or packages of food from relief organizations. They were poorer than any people I’d yet seen in Africa, not an easy comparison to make, where so many were so poor. Many of the people had no clothes, or wore very little. Bare breasts were certainly common.

On one occasion we stopped at an opening in the mango forest to let some young boys off the back of the lorry, and several people came to watch our arrival. They were lined up, looking at the lorry and its contents, probably hoping it was a relief truck, bringing them food. I got out to stretch my legs and stood beside the truck before we started up again. 

It was then that I noticed one of the young women watching us; she must have been about 17, or 20 at the most. She was almost totally naked, clad only in a shabby gray loincloth, which had probably been white at one time, wrapped around her hips, reaching not much farther than the bottom of her buttocks. Her hair was beautiful, cropped very short. It fit her head perfectly--very different than the corn row braids that most of the northern Sudanese women wore. Her skin was a deep mahogany, simultaneously luminous and velvety, and her eyes were like two black jets. I looked at her face, and for some reason was so struck by her simple beauty that I couldn’t look away. She, also, seemed to be struck by something about me. Maybe she was wondering why a white woman would be traveling alone in a lorry, in the depths of Southern Sudan. 

Our eyes locked. We stared at each other, smiling, for what seemed ages. I wanted to walk over to her and hug her, but I knew it wasn’t my place to go towards her. Soon, however, she came over to me and we hugged. For a moment, I felt our hearts touch. Then we stood there, holding hands, still staring and smiling at each other, saying nothing, for a timeless moment. It was as if the entire surroundings, the huts half-built, the tiny gardens, the red lorry beside me, disappeared, and only this young woman and I existed. Minutes later the lorry was ready to leave, and we bid each other goodbye with our eyes.

In the days following, that moment haunted me, until finally I realized what the whole trip was about for me. Although I’d met dozens of people along the way from different cultures with whom I’d formed friendships, for this young woman I had felt an instant love, and we had been able to wordlessly communicate. It was as if I had to pick the most foreign, unlike-anything-I’d-ever-known situation in which to find the commonality of all humans, that which is alike in us, a connection of the heart. 

Years after that, when I’ve wondered if dropping out and traveling as I did at the beginning of my professional life might have been a terrible mistake, the memory of that young woman’s face and what she meant to me convinced me that it was absolutely the best thing I could have done.