James Maskalyk's Blog, page 2

happy birthday.

happy birthday.
to south sudan, the world's newest country.  would that i could be there to feel the jubilation, the lightness as the yoke of war is lifted, perhaps for good.  people's feet must be scarcely making marks in the dust, so lifted the feel.
except, in abyei.  again, the weight of the country's division crosses [...]

hong kong fever.

i got it.  it's like lotto fever, but less lucky.
fevers are delicious things to fall into, dreamless and dark.  the uncomfortable part is the beginning, the shakes and chattering, but even this, if you are in a hong kong hotel, has an easy cure:
"hi.  this is room 1206.  please send up another blanket.  two." as [...]

witness the fitness.

a priest leads me through a church, and he is so tall and his voice so soft, i have to lean my ear up to follow his words, and he tells me that 500 priests and nuns live here or near this holy place, and that in its walls, the lame have walked, the sick made well, that people come from miles for its blessings, and i think to myself how the home of miracles is changing, has changed, that people walk less towards these walls of stained glass, and towards ones with curtained rooms and antiseptic floors, hoping for transformation, or salvation, their faith as strong as any acolyte's.

day one.

it started early enough.  in fact, day one was more a continuation of a day zero that never quite ended.  not for me, not for the large sounding dog that barked 5 floors below my window. he hushed only with the roar of an approaching, but as it faded, his courage rose, and he resumed.  in those seconds before he did, i would bait sleep to slip softly behind my eyes, to start to coat their insides with dreams, and as i fell into one, bark-bark-bark-bark-bark-bark-bark-bark -bark-bark-bark-bark-bark-bark.  i would wake, and instead of a technicolor landscape, i would imagine what type of person i would declare myself if i walked down the stairs, knelt beside the wagging offender, loosed his collar, said "there you go, fella" and listened to the doppler effect drag his barks into the night.  i know, in part, what kind of person i would be: a rested one.  which i am not.

it is what it is.

it is what it is, and i am where i am. in goddamn turbulence. on my way to DC, then from there, to Addis Ababa, the buzzing capital of Ethiopia. it is the first official enunciation of two years of preparations, two years of promises that we will support Addis Ababa University's attempt to start a training program in emergency medicine, ethiopia's first, at its largest public hospital. we will do our best to teach young doctors principles of caring for the urgently ill, and with that, not only improve the care of addis' sickest, but also create a community of impassioned advocates who can continue to spread such attention throught the country, and the continent. as to now, there are no similar training programs, but by distributing knowledge, you free it to find its best use, its truest purchase. in capable hands, it can form some new machinery of emancipation. from sickness, from poverty, towards strength and, perhaps, freedom. and best of all, once loosed, it will have a life of its own.

vintage.

"Hmm," he said.  "Lookie, Ma. I been all day an' all night hidin' alone.  Guess who I been thinkin' about? Casy!  He talked a lot.  Used ta bother me. But now I been thinkin' about what he said, an' I can remember – all of it.
Says one time he went out in the wilderness to [...]

Shaugnessy-Cohen Prize Speech (I never got to give).

what tools have we made? are we capturing their best use? is there a duty to share them so that they might reach their full potential? or does our responsibility to pursue parity, or peace, diminish the further we are from a fallow field or a rifle's report? if not, to whom do these tasks fall? our government? or to your sons and daughters? and in these questions, perhaps, the most interesting one to me: who are we, really, beneath our fancy clothes.

news.

aweil is alive. she is the girl for whom i wrote my book, the one with tuberculosis who arrived to the hospital early in my mission, and stayed with me throughout it. i visited her every day, got to watch her change from a dwindling infant to a strong, smiling, laughing, grasping girl with bright eyes. the war came, after i'd left, and i lost her. she's been found. or at least word has been. she is in a town in southern sudan, with her father. that news has made for the brightest February.

everything does everything and is produced everywhere.

after Leeuwenhoek, we realized that things were much smaller than we imagined, and we've busied ourselves ever since detailing the infinite number of tiny moving parts that make up our world and ourselves. we've become so fascinated at our ability to reduce, that we have almost been able to convince ourselves that love is a flush of seretonin and oxytocin and dopamine, or a broken heart, their nadir. perhaps the truth is that when someone's heart starts beating pat-pat-pat at the first rings of her telephone, that these hormones are not love's explanation, but rather the residue it leaves as it passes through her, to him.

break.

circling back to itacare, brazil, high in the air. the last time i was there, between sessions of being tumbled by the ocean's wash, surfboard tangled somewhere deep below (above?), i was checking my email madly to see if a mission had come through. this time i will be doing it to see if i get to travel to London to accept the John Llewyn Rhys prize for the book i wrote about the one that eventually did. it might be the only compelling reason in the world to leave brazil early. in the hold below me, in my backpack underneath pairs of shorts and sunglasses and different flavors of Frisbees is an overcoat, a scarf, galoshes, a shirt, and a tie.