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Knowing that she abhors violence, the Nuer, three of whom greet Seaman at right, have honored her with the name Chotnyang, "brown cow without horns" |
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The Nuer are clear on where they stand in the hands-on vs.
hands-off debate. Chief Tongwar, one of the area's most
respected head chiefs, told a recent council meeting, "Jill is
like me. What I think, she knows." Then he added softly, "If you
did not come here, Jill, everyone would have died. We have named
many of our daughters Jill. Now we will also name our sons
Jill." After Chief Tongwar finished speaking, Chief Elizabeth,
representing the women in the village of Nhiadhiu, stood up. "No
other doctor came to us," she said. "Only you."
As long as she is allowed to continue, Seaman, 45, shows no sign of taking a step back in confronting human misery. "We all make choices," she says. "Sometimes you can decide to do one thing, and to do that one thing really well." McHarg has assigned her, along with De Wit and another doctor, to a flying satellite team that roams from village to village treating kala-azar and tuberculosis. TB is a special problem today because kala-azar has so weakened the Nuer's immune system that any subsequent infection is often fatal. In August, McHarg dispatched Seaman to Ethiopia to survey a new outbreak of kala-azar. Seaman is also working on a pilot project to try out a drug for kala-azar that will cost a tenth the price of Pentostam. But it is really the work with patients that captures her. This summer she set up a camp in Manajang, Sudan, where the airstrip was so overgrown that the pilot was terrified of landing. In control once again, she seemed back in her element. There was no one to hold her back from healing the sick. On a recent night at around 10, a loud, flailing sound erupted outside Seaman's tent. A mother was desperately trying to revive her eight-year-old son, who was in a critical stage of cerebral malaria. As he slipped in and out of consciousness, his mother frantically tried to keep him breathing. When Seaman bent down to get closer, a swarm of mosquitoes descended on her ankles and arms in an African feeding frenzy. Ignoring her own discomfort, she prepared an IV, but the boy's blood pressure was so low and his arms so thin that she could not find a vein. With a Nuer nurse holding the boy tightly, Seaman jabbed the IV into his arm and then, dissatisfied, pulled it out. "It's not right," she explained. The boy writhed in agony. Calmly, she inserted the needle four or five times more before she was finally sure that she had it right. At 2 a.m. she ducked back into the boy's hut to give him more medicine. In the morning, astonishingly, he was alive and smiling. The Nuer mother beamed at Seaman, and then she was gone. Seaman sat down at the camp table outside her tent, poured herself a cup of tea and began preparing for her morning patients. The next big epidemic in Sudan will probably be sleeping sickness. The African trypanosome parasite that causes it is a distant cousin of the kala-azar protozoan. Infection rates in some villages in Western Equatoria, just south of the western Upper Nile, are already running at 20%. Experts question whether the disease can be treated without hospitalization--an option that, because of the large numbers infected, is out of the question. It is the kind of impossible field-medical problem that is tailor-made for Jill Seaman, and she has already indicated that she would like to get involved--if the decision makers in Nairobi ask her. As for the Duar area, Johan Hesselink says, "We used to fly over here, and there were no tukuls [huts]. Now there are tukuls everywhere. These people have come back because they see a future. That is what life is about." That is no small achievement for an unassuming American girl from Moscow, Idaho.
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