Penetrating the fog

By Stan Stalla

One of my favorite activities, when on vacation from my humanitarian work in Sudan, is just sitting on my back porch overlooking the Penobscot Bay.

If you stop and think about it, the natural world is full of symbolism. Sunrises and sunsets remind me of life’s cycles. A hummingbird represents the complexities of aerodynamics that man is still unraveling. Ants symbolize industriousness, the pounding surf eternity, and oak trees in our yard sturdiness and dependability.

I love to watch the mist as it gathers on the horizon. Sometimes, it develops into a fog bank that obliterates the entire view. Lost are the dark green of the island three miles off shore, the masts of the sailboats in the nearby harbor, even the ducks paddling along the coast in search of prey.

Until the fog lifts, you can pretend anything you want about what lies on the other side. The fog symbolizes a separation of the familiar world from the mysterious, invisible, incomprehensible one.

It makes me itch to get off my comfortable chair and see what’s out there waiting for me.

Traveling thousands of miles and crossing seven time zones in a short time span is like paddling a kayak into the fog, not knowing what the opposite shoreline is going to look like. You can watch the pink and purple streaks of the setting sun as you leave Washington, DC and, less than five hours later, watch the first rays light up the west coast of Ireland.

You can order take-out pepperoni pizza for Wednesday dinner in Northport and wake up Friday morning to a breakfast of flatbread and broad beans in Khartoum, Sudan.

Less than two weeks ago, I spent a wonderful afternoon with friends at their summer camp. We had a great time kayaking and swimming, watching a family of loons, eating a sumptuous picnic of salads and grilled meats and homemade pies.

Two days ago, I shared some bread with my Sudanese colleague as we drove to a meeting to talk about nutrition in the refugee camps that are temporary shelters for almost two million displaced people in Darfur. He comes from a town in southern Sudan, near the border with Uganda. He was happily chatting about his plans to bring his 69-year-old mother to Khartoum, now that the 21-year-old civil war is over and people can start to travel between the North and the South again. It will be the first time ever, for her to see her five grandchildren.

While we drove through the streets of Khartoum, I watched some teenage boys playing a game called “rocks.” They draw squares in the sand that blows in on afternoon winds and covers the streets of Khartoum. One fellow tosses his rocks into the squares. Then, the others throw theirs at his, in an effort to knock them out and replace them with their own. There’s a lot of noise, as these dark-skinned, dusty Arab and African boys leap and shout and laugh. My mind flickered back to afternoons tossing the Frisbee with my son on our grassy lawn in Northport.

It’s this foggy world of contrasts that holds my attention these days. I don’t ever expect the average Darfurian to order take-out pizza, at least in my lifetime.

However, I do hope for the day when those refugees will be able to walk out of their camps and trudge back through the desert sands to their villages, when men and women can reconstruct their houses of mud brick and straw and sticks gathered from the surrounding fields, when they can cultivate their fields of sorghum and millet and herd their animals and draw water from the well without fears of violence, when children can go to a real school for the first time in their lives, and maybe even have a few minutes toward the evening to play “rocks” in the dusty streets of their villages.

In the coming months, I’ll be writing about my travels in Darfur and eastern Chad. Even though I’ve penetrated the fog that separates me from the Maine coast, I’ll continue to enjoy the same sun, rising and setting over the desert of central Africa.