The Well Read online



  Fine Form Press

  The Well

  ISBN 978-0-921473-05-3

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Copyright ©2013 JT Therrien

  Cover Art by Fine Form Press

  This book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any existing means.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The characters are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously.

  Acknowledgements

  Special thanks to: Donna, Susan, and Alicia for reading early drafts of this story.

  Cover photo courtesy of Dreamstime.com

  Blurb

  December 24th in war-torn and drought-stricken Muhajeria and Sharon convinces her husband to try to fix the broken village well. Jean-Marc is a busy doctor, reluctant to take time away from his patients, but disaster strikes and he must initiate a dramatic rescue. When Jean-Marc’s life hangs in the balance Sharon is filled with regrets. It just might be too late to reveal her Christmas secret.

  The Well

  By JT Therrien

  December 24th

  Sudan

  Muhajeria, Darfur

  A bead of sweat, tickling like a dozen flies, snaked down Dr. Jean-Marc Lalonde’s flank. He lay on the small bed listening to the sounds of life in Muhajeria: far away, the faint squeals of glee in the air as kids played. Closer, trucks rumbled by the tent. He guessed they either belonged to the army or to one of the NGOs. Thankfully, he heard no sirens. From the direction of the nearby refugee camp floated the rhythmic thumps of a djembe drummer accompanying a flutist’s joyful melody. Closer still, he heard the refugees’ quiet chatter as they waited outside his tent. They spoke of leaving, but surrounded by miles of scorched hardpan and war-torn neighboring countries, where could they go?

  The truth was that no one ever actually left this place. Quite the opposite: refugees from other towns and villages either traveled here or to similar base camps all across sub-Sahara Africa to join the ever-growing queue of misery and disease-stricken inhabitants; a steady influx of bodies that overnight ballooned Muhajeria’s population from 10,000 to over 50,000 souls, in the process straining scarce local resources and the international community’s ability to offer proper aid.

  While his colleagues in Toronto played rounds of golf on Wednesdays and locked their office doors promptly at five o’clock the other weeknights, in Darfur Jean-Marc’s office remained open until sheer exhaustion forced him to put down his stethoscope and tongue depressors at the end of the day. Every hour he was reminded of that first Doctors Without Borders orientation meeting, where he had been warned about the high burnout rate among volunteer doctors, especially in stress-filled warring countries like the Sudan.

  He stood up and rummaged through a cardboard box for clean scrubs. Preoccupied with getting dressed, he asked his wife, “What’s on the agenda today, chérie?”

  “Work, work, and more work,” Sharon replied, wrapping a long cotton skirt around her narrow waist in the local fashion.

  “You like?” she asked, modeling a cyan blouse the rich blue of the Red Sea at dawn.

  “Very much,” he replied, looking up from his fruitless search.

  “A gift from Yaya.”

  “Who?”

  “Oh, a woman I helped to get settled last week. I didn’t want to take it, but she insisted. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Jean-Marc shook the wrinkles out of a green hospital scrub as he nodded absentmindedly.

  Sharon continued, “I’m hoping to make some headway into getting startup funds for our school. If I could just set up a meeting with—”

  “Look at these filthy clothes!” he interrupted, pointing to a dark stain the shape of Egypt on the front of his shirt.

  She tousled his hair and he shrank away from her touch. “I know, baby. But we can’t wash anything right now.”

  He sighed. “Yeah, I know. Listen, take it easy and don’t work too hard today. You don’t look so good.” He watched her step into a pair of beaded sandals.

  “Gee, thanks! That’s what a wife wants to hear first thing in the morning.”

  “You know what I mean. You look perfect, as always. Just, not well. Come here.” Jean-Marc pulled her closer and placed a soft kiss on her forehead, his lips lingering for a second longer than necessary.

  “Stop it. I know all your tricks, doctor. I’m fine,” she huffed, pulling away.

  “I’m just saying that if you’re running a fever you shouldn’t—”

  “I know you mean well, but frankly, you’re being a real pain.”

  “It’s just that if you get sick, I can’t do much to help you.”

  “Says The People’s Doctor,” she replied, grinning.

  Their joke: a grateful Ethiopian refugee family had given him the nickname after he’d cured their ailing infant. A few days later everyone in the camp was calling him The People’s Doctor. “I’m just saying, if you’re sick, we’ll need to get you out of here, that’s all.”

  Sharon rolled her eyes as she twisted her black hair into a long braid and tucked it under a cerulean scarf. She ate another spoonful of porridge and pushed the bowl away. “Okay, you can finish my cold asseeda. I gotta go! Love ya!” She pecked his cheek and made a face. “Ugh. You need a shave, mister!”

  Jean-Marc listened to the line stir when Sharon darted out of the tent. Through an air flap, he watched his wife cross the bustling compound, her confident gait drawing good-morning smiles from her friends. She stopped, exchanged a few words with a group of women gathered near the broken water well, and then ducked into her quarters, another worn tent with its own restless lineup.

  Enough dawdling. Time to get to work.

  * * *

  Tahoor tossed a yellow gourd to his best friend. The tall boy caught it and with a war cry lobbed the oval vegetable back.

  “Yeah!” Tahoor shouted. He jumped into the air and dunked the gourd into a wicker basket, crashing to the ground after landing awkwardly and losing his balance.

  From the corner of the hut his baby sister startled awake. Her teary wail filled the cramped space.

  Tahoor met the other boy’s eyes. Trouble for sure.

  Tahoor’s mother hurried into the hut. Yep, definitely trouble. His friend sensed it and left before the door closed.

  His mother swatted him on the head as he rocked the makeshift bassinette, hushing the crying baby. “All I asked was for you to look after your sister for two minutes. Now you’ve woken her up! Get out. Go play. I saw two of your other friends running and jumping around the compound like a couple of monkeys. If you won’t help me in here, then go. It’s too hot and this place is too crowded to have you making a nuisance of yourself. Get out!”

  She swatted at him again and Tahoor easily ducked beneath the half-hearted swing.

  “Yes, Mama. I’m sorry I woke up the baby.”

  His mother shook her head. “That’s okay. You’re too young to do anything else. Just go play before the sun gets too hot. Come tell me if you hear any good news about the well,” she added as she picked up and cradled the crying infant.

  Tahoor, reassured by the sound of his mother singing a lullaby, left the stifling hut to go play with his friends.

  * * *

  Jean-Marc peered through the mosquito netting that passed for his front door and surveyed the line of living skeletons waiting for medical attention. Since signing on with Doctors Without Borders almost a year ago he’d seen it all: the horrific effects on the human body of dehydration and starvation, outbreaks of tuberculosis, hepatitis C, polio, cholera, and malaria. Not to mention the constant threat of unchecked AIDS and HIV. This December, the flavor of the month was visceral leishmaniasis. He’d already documented t
hree cases of bleeding gums and tongues in the past week alone, diligently filing the reports with his superiors. He doubted they read them, for who had time for paperwork when war and rebel attacks threatened?

  On the other hand, he thanked God that at least some Sudanese managed to navigate the gauntlet of drought, famine, and disease to even reach his tent.

  He opened the canvas flap. “Come in,” he welcomed the first patient.

  A tiny girl with large eyes guided a gray-haired man into the examination area. He walked stooped over, tapping the ground in front of him with a crooked stick. They must have been locals, Jean-Marc thought. Their clothes, although well worn, did not show the usual accumulation of dirt and grime that came with the refugees’ lengthy trek on the road.

  “Sit here, please.” Jean-Marc slid a wooden stool toward the man.

  “Thank you,” the patient replied in broken English. He felt for the edges of the seat and sat down, relinquishing the stick to the youngster.

  Jean-Marc unrolled a straw mat for the young girl. She gracefully knelt down, maneuvering in such a way that she never lost contact with the elderly man’s bony hand.

  With a grunt, Jean-Marc sat down on his own canvas-backed chair and picked up a clipboard. He began to fill out a Patient Information Sheet, the questions coming out in a mixture of Arabic, English, and French.

  “Name?”

  “Dahab,” the man said through a gap-toothed smile.

  “Age?”

  “Fifty-eight?” he asked the girl. She nodded, keeping her eyes on Jean-Marc.

  Twice my age. On any North American street Dahab would have passed for seventy. His bones stretched the dark skin at his elbows and knees, and like everyone else forced to live on the parched land, no muscle tone could be found anywhere on his body.

  Jean-Marc put the clipboard aside and snapped blue gloves on heat-swollen hands before starting a methodical examination. “Let’s remove that,” he said, helping the man get out of the loose-fitting Indianapolis Colts Super Bowl Champions T-shirt that he’d picked up in his travels.

  “Thank you,” Dahab mumbled. He ran a hand through his hair before returning it to the girl who made a point of discretely looking away.

  Jean-Marc measured the weak pulse, felt the man’s throat and neck glands, and then he mimed for Dahab to open his mouth. Most of the patient’s teeth had fallen out, except for two yellow incisors in the top front.

  He continued his search for other obvious signs of illness in addition to the one that swelled Dahab’s left eye to a slit. Ten rounds with Mike Tyson wouldn’t have done any more damage than the infection already blinding the man, he thought.

  Dahab squirmed against the probing latex-coated fingers.

  “Hold still, please.” Jean-Marc worked quickly to finish the limited examination. He pulled down the loose skin beneath Dahab’s eyes and noted the yellow color of the sclera. He scribbled another note, this one about possible bilirubin buildup, and added blood and liver toxicology tests, on the Patient Information Sheet. Of course, he couldn’t order any of those things. Still, he’d made a note of them. Then he applied an antibiotic salve to that swollen eye.

  No sooner had he finished spreading the sticky ointment on the tight skin when Dahab spoke softly to the young girl. She smiled, even though her face wore a grownup’s mask of worry. Dahab laughed at his own words and casually wiped at the injured eye, in the process removing some of the ointment.

  “Life goes on, doesn’t it, my friend?” Jean-Marc sighed as he reapplied more ointment. He twisted the cap back on the tube and stifled the impulse to throw the ointment against the wall. Instead, he returned it to a partially stocked shelf in the tiny supply cabinet that also served as a table. The shelves inside the cabinet were either mostly bare or they held the wrong kind of medicine. In some cases, Jean-marc had to use new, experimental drugs like this antibiotic cream, always wondering what the side effects might be for the unsuspecting patients.

  A medical board would surely reprimand any doctor caught using such unethical practices.

  “Now, Dahab, you have to come back tomorrow,” Jean-Marc instructed, looking at both the injured man and the solemn young girl he decided was Dahab’s granddaughter. “I have to put some more medication on your eye,” he mimed applying the ointment to Dahab’s eye. “I may have to start you on stronger antibiotics if this doesn’t help, understand?”

  The girl whispered something to Dahab and he grinned.

  Jean-Marc taped a square of gauze over the infected eye to keep blowing sand, dirt and careless probing hands out, all the while knowing the futility of his request since he’d probably never see this patient again. In his experience, refugees were not known for keeping follow-up appointments. “Tomorrow” appeared to be a concept as foreign as “next year” or “clean drinking water.”

  “Well, we’re done,” Jean-Marc announced, standing up.

  Dahab slowly pulled himself to his feet and grimaced. The bandage, a bright white square, seemed to float on his sepia skin. He mumbled another thank-you, brought his hands together, and bowed.

  Jean-Marc returned the bow.

  “Now, you understand I want to see you tomorrow? We want this infection to get better.” He pointed to the bandaged eye. “Tomorrow. Here. Important,” he repeated in rudimentary Arabic.

  Dahab nodded. “Yes. Thank you, Dr. Jean. It will heal. Insha’Allah!”

  God willing. Jean-Marc wiped sweat from his neck. He believed it had been a very long time since any deity had set foot in Darfur to lend a hand, let alone assist with surgery or dress a wound. Like all the other doctors, he didn’t even have the luxury of being assisted by a nurse. Even when they showed up, they managed to stay no longer than a couple of weeks before succumbing to either homesickness or disease. Sighing, he picked up Dahab’s cane and gently handed it to him.

  The girl bowed to Jean-Marc and he bowed back.

  Dahab gripped the wooden stick in one hand and the girl’s hand in the other as he exited the tent and shuffled out into the bright sunshine, sweeping the ground in front of him with the stick, his sandals sliding in the dirt.

  Jean-Marc scrawled details of Dahab’s treatment in a notebook, and then took a few more precious moments to fill out the requisite SharGro-Pharm trial medication forms to document the experimental ointment he’d used on the infected eye. He sat down and contemplated the sea of suffering awaiting him outside his tent: babies wailed, children and adults moaned.

  Only the elderly remained stoically silent as the warming day gave way to intolerable heat.

  * * *

  Tahoor and his three friends ran around the compound, kicking and tossing the battered gourd back and forth. The winded boys stopped scampering long enough to catch their breath.

  “What’s wrong, Tahoor?” one of them asked.

  “My mom thinks I’m just another baby she has to look after,” he sulked.

  “Don’t worry about that. She’s only mad because you woke your sister.”

  “At least you still have a mother,” his Eritrean friend chimed in, stealing the gourd away from one of the other boys.

  “But she’s right! I’m almost twelve, and I’m supposed to be the man of the house now. I should be helping her instead of being a nuisance.”

  His friends exchanged worried looks before one asked, “What do you want to do?”

  Tahoor thought for a second. “I don’t know. We need water.”

  “We all need water, but you can’t get any. The crank is broken.”

  “Maybe we can fix it!”

  The other boys exploded into laughter and continued to toss the gourd back and forth to each other. “Let’s play Gorbat-in-the-middle,” exclaimed Perzo, lobbing the gourd over Tahoor’s head. The boy caught it and handed the gourd over to Perzo. “No, you guys go play. I’ll join you later.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To the well.” Tahoor turned to leave, thinking how immature his friends were.

&n
bsp; “You know you’re not supposed to play around there,” Perzo warned.

  “No, children aren’t supposed to play around there. I’m no longer a child,” he said, straightening his back to stand an inch taller than his friends.

  * * *

  Jean-Marc saw another dozen patients after Dahab. Soaked with sweat, his scrubs stuck to his armpits, shoulders and back. In this canvas oven his body smelled too rank for even his own nostrils. Unfortunately for him and everyone else, he’d run out of deodorant and the next supply truck was two days late. Sharon would surely divorce him before it showed up, he mused.

  Only a fool would go out there. But Jean-Marc had been working for hours without taking a break. When he pulled back the mesh netting people stood up and quickly gathered their meager belongings as they prepared to move ahead one more spot.

  The sunlight drove needles into Jean-Marc’s eyes. His Ray Bans had mysteriously disappeared months ago. He’d ordered another pair, but they were in transit, somewhere between the company’s South African depot and Khartoum, the closest airport to Muhajeria. He pushed on in the oppressive heat, the doctor almost as blind as the day’s first patient. When people left their spots in line to follow him, Jean-Marc held up both hands. “Stay there, comprennez-vous?” He repeated, switching from English to French to Arabic, gesturing the patients back.

  Grumbling, confused, they returned to form a ragged line. However, they kept their dark, suspicious eyes on him.

  “You leave!” accused a young woman holding a lethargic infant in her arms.

  “No. I’ll be right back,” he reassured her and the others suddenly crowding around. Flies crawled on the baby’s face, yet he didn’t twitch. Jean-Marc wondered when the mother had last been able to feed her infant.

  Twenty paces away from the line of patients, his shirt began to dry in the blazing heat and constant breeze. As if it were possible, the air felt even hotter outside than inside the tent. A rainbow of colorful hijab and abayas, worn by the Muslim women gathered around the village well, caught his eye. Restless children tugged on their mothers’ hems while others playfully tossed pebbles and sticks at each other.