Machine gun fire doesn’t deter Rogersville nurse on trip to Sudan
Registered nurse Amy Smith of Rogersville, bottom left, shares a moment with fellow members of the volunteer medical team she worked with in Pibor County, South Sudan.
Nurse Amy Smith with her late patient and friend, Adosh, in Pibor County, South Sudan, two years ago.
An infant boy afflicted with HIV receives a fluid bolus from a member of a volunteer medical team in South Sudan.
Former youth soldiers under Murle leader David Yau Yau wait in line for help from UNICEF volunteers in Pibor County, South Sudan.
ROGERSVILLE – The half-dozen humanitarian medical volunteers dove face-first onto the cracked earth beneath an acacia tree in Pibor County, South Sudan. Night had fallen. But for a small battery-powered reading light, flashes from machine gun fire were all that could be seen. As angry voices in a foreign tongue drew near, registered nurse Amy Smith believed this would be the last day of her life.
”I heard one of my male teammates whisper, ‘Amy, cut the light,'” Smith said. She hoped to survive but prayed for death to come swiftly. “I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I really believed we were going to die. It went on for 20 to 30 minutes.”
Moments earlier, Smith, of Rogersville, Greene County, and her five companions shared devotions at the end of a long day rendering medical treatment in Pibor. She read aloud the devotional story, “Crowding Out Violence.” Its message of preventing violence by extending love to all people is especially poignant in retrospect, Smith said.
When the firing ceased, Smith and her fellow team members were unharmed. A team member learned from a villager the shooting was one man’s attempt to settle a dispute with another over cattle. Despite knowing it had nothing to do with them, the event was unsettling. Only a year prior, Smith and her traveling companions were scheduled to be in Pibor but had to cancel the trip because of safety concerns. The civil unrest in the country was at a climax.
On the day after the incident under the tree, Smith expressed her thoughts in a well-worn journal, “My hope is that if God allows me to get out of here alive, I will not let what happened last night cripple me emotionally, but will help me to glorify God and continue to help the people of the South Sudan.”
This was her fourth journey to the village where ethnic fighting prompted boys, some possibly as young as 6, to take up arms. Smith, a nurse at Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown, W.Va., travels with an informal group of people from around the country who want to provide help to the area.
With a peace agreement in place, Smith bore witness to dozens of these same children turning in their weapons to members of UNICEF in exchange for a better way of life.
”Many of them saw their parents murdered in front of them. They were forced into the military or be killed. UNICEF is giving them civilian clothes and five goats apiece,” Smith said. “Goats can be used as both currency and for food and milk. UNICEF is doing a lot of good stuff.”
The children will receive help for post-traumatic stress disorder, aid in reunification with any remaining family members and an education.
From her trip in 2013 to the one this February, Smith saw a Pibor that is “a lot more vibrant, more hopeful.
”In 2013, most of the villagers were hiding in the bush, afraid,” Smith said. “Doctors Without Borders has a much larger presence this year, and their facilities are pretty decent for what it is.”
For her own part in providing medical care to Pibor, Smith stockpiles donated medical supplies for months prior to traveling. It isn’t unusual for upward of 200 people daily to seek medical attention in a makeshift triage area run by the group.
”It is such a hard life there. To keep going back, you have to have a different mindset and make yourself understand that if you help one person, even just one person, it is worth it. I think we did that,” Smith said.
One of those people was a woman named Adosh, whom Smith met on one of her earlier trips.
”She had suffered a birthing injury that left her incontinent. She was shunned by the people in her village,” Smith said. “We paid for her to get to Ethiopia for surgery. The following year (2013) her self-esteem soared. She was a different person.”
Sadly, a few months before the 2015 trip, Smith learned Adosh had died.
”At least she had a year or two of improved quality of life. There was hope in her eye the last time we saw her,” Smith said. “Her son wants to be a doctor.”
Smith said she knows her group is “not going to cure anything. The important thing is helping people, and if we take a few aches away for even just a night …”
Diseases eradicated in the United States years ago still plague South Sudan. Watching a woman walk on all fours with her hands in flip-flops and dragging behind partial limbs wrapped in socks stuffed with paper, Smith surmised she’d had polio earlier in life. She gave the woman a pair of prosthetic socks, donated by a friend for Smith’s trip. At least these would give her better protection from the dry, hard ground, Smith said.
Vitamins, fluids and over-the-counter-strength pain medications are among the offerings of the small medical team. Villagers come to them with severe arthritis, malaria and worse. The more serious cases are taken in the back of a pickup truck to Doctors Without Borders.
”We had a baby that was in respiratory distress. I had a hunch he was HIV-positive,” Smith said, noting a test proved her right. “He was just a few months old. One of our team, Jan, is a flight nurse. She has mad IV skills. She can get an IV into anyone, and she gave him a fluid bolus.” Smith said it was primarily for comfort. There are no retroviral drugs in South Sudan, meaning his HIV would eventually turn into AIDS.
Despite the losses that are part of daily life in Pibor and the hardships there, Smith said she “felt and saw hope this time around. The unrest is easing. It was good to see the village bustling again.”
”God willing, I will be going back next year. I love it there. I love the people,” Smith said over breakfast at the Greene County Airport Restaurant. “I know we made it home safely because of all of the people who were back here praying. I really believe that people prayed us home.”