John Kankwisi

September 30, 2004

There is an unwritten rule in humanitarian work that aid workers don’t advertise themselves. In most cases, I suppose, it’s just as well. To work in the world’s disaster areas is to live constantly amidst suffering that is larger than the sacrifices made by some to help. At the end of the day, aid workers can choose to leave – those they are trying to help cannot.

But there must be room, at times, to bend the rules – to cast a light on those whose choices, time and again, serve to benefit others. Despite what the nightly news may suggest, the world is full of such people. In places of disaster they are just more noticeable.

One such person is John Kankwisi. I met him in El Geneina – a tiny mud-walled town in Darfur, western Sudan – scene of what the United Nations is calling the worst humanitarian disaster in the world today. As a logistician, John was there to help pave the way for the massive influx of supplies arriving in Darfur, where an estimated two million people have been displaced by fighting.

Days are long in emergency zones. Each evening John, myself, and the other CRS staff members would gather on the dimly lit front porch of our small rented house to unwind. Between us – an American, a Pakistani, a Somali-Kenyan, and John, a Ugandan – stories passed with easy comfort. Over successive evenings, each of our lives emerged over the hum of the generator outside.

John is a veteran aid worker. For 12 years he has worked in Sudan, a country embroiled in civil war for more than two decades. In that time, he has been bombed by Sudanese government planes more times than he can count, and left shoeless on a lonely road in northern Uganda by bandit guerillas who stole his vehicle at gunpoint. Just a few months ago he was nearly killed when the same guerillas ambushed his convoy, killing a Ugandan soldier in the truck ahead and wounding two passengers in his own vehicle. In telling the story, he slaps the back of his hand into his palm to mimic the sound of AK-47 bullets passing through his Landcruiser – 16 in all. He was back at work the next day, ferrying construction materials to a road rehabilitation project on the Sudanese border.

In southern Sudan there are scorpions, poisonous spiders, and snakes so deadly that medical evacuation would not even be an option for a bite victim. It is one of the least developed areas in Africa, and John has been stuck for weeks in desolate areas because rains made landing on muddy airstrips impossible. Temperatures can reach 130 degrees in some places. Parasites thrive.

And there is the war. Several of John’s colleagues have detonated mines with their vehicles, and every CRS compound has bomb shelters for use when Government planes drone by, looking for targets below. A fifty-something father of three, John can tell you what a 250 pound bomb sounds like falling from the sky, and what the earth feels like when it hits yards away.

Those are the obvious risks John and thousands of other aid workers around the world face each day. But there are quieter sacrifices. John spends up to three months at a time away from his family in Uganda, returning home for only ten days of rest before heading back out again. His children – aged 15, 10, and 18 months – must surely miss him, I ask.

“Yes,” he answers, “But an African father is measured by how he provides for his family, not on how much time he is able to spend with them.”

Back on the porch, conversation sways between talk of family and mutual friends to the frustrations and successes of each day’s work. There is no drama in it. You can forget that, despite the chaos and inefficiency that sometimes marks large scale emergency work, there are tens of thousands of people who have a shelter to sleep under and food to eat because of the work that John and others like him do each day in places like this. Though you don’t hear often of them, it’s enough to know that they are there.