Road to Hell

By Hisham Abbas

translated by Ali Osman, MD

October 15, 2009 — It is said the road to hell is always furnished with good intentions, and since our intentions were good then, our road to hell was straightforward.

During a day long conscripts graduation ceremony, we stood hours and hours under the sweltering sun listening to loaded propaganda from individuals whom voices unaided afflicted nauseousness not to mention the content of their speeches.

We returned to Kasora camp grounds to gather our belongings with smiles on our faces. Finally, the journey of abuse and ill-treatment was over, except it seemed we had plenty more good intentions.

We found waiting for us more than fifty heavy trucks that transport goods to and from Khartoum; Nissan, ZWKY and others. We traded looks with thousands of questions on everyone’s eyes, with the most important being why?

They told us they have divided us into groups and we have been assigned to the general military headquarters, the airport and other buildings and we were ordered to board to Khartoum immediately!. What about our families we have not seen in three months, the exhaustion of this long day?, and with what, those dilapidated trucks that are ill-equipped even to transport onions?. All questions vanished with dust impregnated winds of the Kasora camp.

Most of my group was from Karma, a village two hours east of the Kasora training camp and in spite of the worries and paranoia, there was one thing that lessened our nightmares of being shipped to the civil war in Southern Sudan, and that was visiting Khartoum!. Yes, don’t be astonished; most in my group, myself included until then had not visited what was called the nation’s capital. Lucky contemporaries, we called them the “comfortables”, who visited Khartoum regaled us with stranger than fiction stories, or at least at time they seemed fictions to us. We did not believe that every house had electricity without the humming of a water pump, or howling of a generator and what was even stranger, they told us, if you push a button of the wall electricity turns on, and other push it goes out. That was magic trick we could not comprehend. What drew me the most personally were those tall buildings, how they did not flatten with floors on top of others and then, the Zoo and the Friendship Hall. A friend, who visited Khartoum swore on his mother’s head, told me that in Khartoum girls drove cars!. All of this instigated the dream of visiting Khartoum, and made us temporary forget our worries.

A group of officers and soldiers stood behind us clinching sticks and whips because some refused to climb in to the trucks. They started wielding them causing chaos, and all hurried climbing to avoid smacks that might cause permanent damage. It was my luck to climb a Nissan truck, which I did hastily to avoid a strike. I flung myself in to its belly from the top, did notice expect for someone’s voice cursing the faith and my mother. I didn’t bother the religion curse for he has a god he is accountable to, but responded to insult directed toward my mother’s to suddenly realize I was at fault. I fell on a top of group that beat me there, and took their spot.

We took our places stalked on top of each other in a belly of empty truck that they did not bother to furnish even with empty sacks, if not for any respect for us but at least for consideration of the length of the trip. They did not care about the capacity of the truck and the comfort of its passengers thus they loaded it with as many of us as they could, and hence we sat of top of each other.

Back then, there weren’t paved roads, and so the road to Khartoum was intolerable hell even if one traveled in a private car on a luxurious seat, so imagine our condition in that predicament. The truck began to move, and with it the clock handles of the worst hours of my life started ticking. The driver as if he carried a load of trash, his feet never met the brakes on climbing a hill or coming down a valley. The speed remained the same, at maximum. Don’t ask about our condition in the back. Have you seen how sardines and tuna are caught? We were alike.

We left kasora campgrounds after sunset headed south toward Khartoum 400 miles away. All night, we packed as sardines, you could no hear but the painful moaning, and if your eyes tried to shut a little, you won’t let them for someone might fall on you with all his full weight. Daybreak came and we were remained in the same circumstance. The day progressed to become more hot, sweaty, and stinky. The trucks insisted on not stopping, may be they were warned to fear some might flee. They announced it was breakfast time, the truck still moving, they chucked at us a container of Tahini, and two jugs of water. There was a truck in the convoy that was loaded with tin Tahini containers, and water jugs. Imagine you are suffering from the heat and the sun, so were the tin containers of Tahini, and the water jugs. We started eating and drinking, the floor of the truck beneath us was on fire, the water boiling, and the Tahini as if barbequed with charcoal. An hour passed, roughly, and then diarrheal projectiles, uncontrollable, owed to the violent jerking of the truck besieged us. Few minutes passed, and it was as if we spent the afternoon in cesspool. Of course they did not pay attention to any of our wailing and they did not care.

Late afternoon we arrived at desert camp in the outskirt of Khartoum, they said it called Fatasha, the inspectors.

Hisham Abbas, a Sudanese human rights activist, lives in Egypt. His collection of essays titled “Memoirs in Southern Sudan; when killing becomes a doctrine” documents his experience as teenage conscript in Sudan’s popular defense force are compiled in Arabic on http://www.kermaonline.com.

Ali Osman is an emergency physician in Texas.