A Story for the Day

Last night I watched the beginning of the news at 10 o'clock. The lead story was Gordon Brown's press statement with his support for the UN to send 19,000 troops to Sudan. The pictures accompanying the story were harrowing and I have no doubt that the situation in and around the Darfur region is horrific. It's painful to watch people reduced to skeletal ghosts, feeling quite helpless to do anything for them...I can only cross my fingers that 19,000 troops will begin to restore the region to some semblance of order and humanity.

I used to work in mental health on the southeast coast of England. One of the psychiatrists in the office was originally from Sudan. I never got his full story but I do know that he said he could never go back, and not because he didn't want to. He kept his story out of my office, so I had to rely upon hearsay. I imagine that most of the world's diaspora would like to visit home, at least occasionally, and that he was kept from doing this must have been painful.

One day this psychiatrist came into my office to ask me to prepare a report. I had had an argument with my SO that morning and I was feeling menstrual moodiness, to top it all off. I started to get a bit teary after he asked me to type up the report - it was nothing in the delivery of his request that set me off, I was just feeling uncharacteristically blue. He noticed that I began to cry and I could see he was clearly uncomfortable. It wasn't that he wasn't used to tears or sadness, after all he was a psychiatrist! It was all he ever dealt with: tears, depression, paranoia, anxiety and trauma. He left my office and I took a few deep breaths, regained my composure and started typing. Moments later, this psychiatrist from Sudan returned with a stress pencil and a smile.

"Aitch," he said, "whistle. You cannot cry if you whistle." He plopped the fuzzy stress pencil down on my desk and I smiled at him. It was a smile that was returned with a sweet and gracious smile of his own. His words got me through the day and, indeed, they keep me going if I'm feeling a bit sorry for myself.

Africa has a lot to teach the world, but the world mainly focuses on its pain. The Sudanese psychiatrist may not ever get back to Sudan. His pain was private and the pictures on my television set inform me of how bad things are in Darfur in an oh-so-public way. I am privy to the spectacle that is created out of someone else's tragedy, all in the journalistic pursuit to draw attention to this crisis. How do I feel about this? I cannot say. It's a toss-up between wanting to cry and wanting to whistle.