Word: seaman
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When she finally reached Sudan, even Seaman was not sure what she had signed on for. "My legs swelled up to twice their size with mosquito bites," she says, "and I was ready to cut my one-year contract short by 11 months." But she was clearly captivated by the place and stunned by the enormity of the human catastrophe around the town of Duar, the center of the epidemic. "If you witness a tragedy like that, how can you not be moved?" she explains. "Where else in the world could 50% of a population die without anyone knowing...
...first step was to find out exactly what the disease was doing. The team had set up operations in a village called Ler, which was several days' walk from Duar. Seaman and a handful of Nuer staff members began to scout on foot toward Duar. What they found was chilling. In some villages, cows wandered unattended; the entire human population had died. Many of the survivors looked like walking skeletons. Sick children carried starving babies after their parents had died on the road. The level of infection in blood tests from villagers in the region was so high that...
With the infection rate increasing, Seaman asked for an entomologist to pin down the vector, or carrier, of the disease and its habitat. MSF sent Canadian Judith Schorscher from her base in Paris. She spent six months using fans to suck insects into traps, where they could be dissected and analyzed...
...While Seaman and De Wit were spending two weeks climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in 1994, the long period of strain suddenly caught up with Seaman: she realized she could no longer sleep in a room alone. She took a four-month leave in the U.S. but afterward returned to Africa. Her biggest problem was a sense of helplessness. "I remember someone saying, 'Don't worry. Jill is here,'" she says. "But I still couldn't do anything." In fact, she was trying to do just about everything. "She didn't just treat patients," says Marilyn McHarg, the current country manager...
Kala-azar itself was not the only problem. One day a patient who had gone mad threw a spear through another man's chest. Seaman operated and saved the man's life. Then she and De Wit operated on a man so riddled with tropical ulcers that his bones were exposed...