Above all, midnight Mass: on Christmas Eve we tried to enter the large Comboni church near our compound. There were dense crowds of people in the park around the church and many more congregating inside, everyone packed together in the heat like fans at a pop concert. We followed part of the Christmas Mass from the window, enjoying the slight coolness of the African night with the starry sky for a roof.
On Christmas Day, being Italian we tried our best to prepare a decent meal: pasta al forno with Yirolese béchamel sauce. It was almost impossible to find any real milk (only dried milk was available!), but we finally succeeded through the efforts of Marina, our paediatrician. In the afternoon it was the turn of our Kenyan and Ugandan colleagues to prepare roast pork and chapatti for dinner. We have to say that it made a welcome change from our usual diet of rice and beans!
New Year is also celebrated here in South Sudan. We dined on South Sudanese pizza, which was excellent, and celebrated at around midnight with a panettone sent out from Italy and a bottle of red wine that someone had saved for a special occasion. Everything was subject to the generator‘s strict timetable, of course… but we managed to keep the lights on until half past one.
On the morning of 1st January things returned to normal. We had already scheduled an operation on a 4-day old baby boy to correct an intestinal malformation that prevented him from being fed. We couldn’t keep him waiting.
The operation lasted all morning. It was performed by Elias, a CUAMM surgeon from Uganda, with Marina administering the anaesthetic and providing supportive care, while Flavio, the Medical Director, organised staff to start the generator and ensure that all the operating theatre equipment was in perfect working order.
The operation was successful, and now, 4 days later, the baby is feeding normally at his mother’s breast.
Doctors performing an operation on a 4-day-old baby
