Sr. Marilyn Lacey, founder and executive director of Mercy Beyond Borders, has written a book about her almost 30 years working with refugees.

A review of Sr Marilyn Lacey's talk at Kepler’s bookstore in Menlo Park by a Kepler’s staff member is available here. Alternatively, visit her page at Amazon.com for some independent reviews. 

Finally, please find some excerpts from This Flowing Toward Me, by Marilyn Lacey below.

BACKGROUND on SUDAN’s NORTH-SOUTH CIVIL WAR

For hundreds of years, there has been tension between Sudan’s north and south, fueled by northerners who raid the south for slaves and cattle. Over the past few generations, those confrontations have flared into all-out war, pitting a heavily armed northern army with its aging fleet of Antonov bombers against loosely organized but tenacious rebel movements fighting against the army (when they aren’t fighting against one another) for control of their own land. Outsiders have over-simplified the war as Muslim versus Christian, especially after the north vowed to impose Muslim sharia law throughout the south. Much more is involved, of course, including egos willing to obliterate their fellow countrymen and women and children in exchange for the wealth that oil brings. The senior George Bush, while serving as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, flew to Khartoum after the 1973 oil crisis to inform the Sudanese government that high-tech satellite imagery indicated the presence of oil in southeastern Sudan. He then arranged a deal for Chevron to conduct ground exploration, and this eventually led to the oil pipeline whose profits fueled the war.

But as the North-South war dragged on for decades, it became increasingly clear that it could not be won militarily by either side. The land is too vast and rugged, too impassable during the seven-month rainy season. I had heard that there was little infrastructure in the south—that roads and bridges had been destroyed. I expected to see some devastation from the years of aerial bombing, the pillaging and burning of villages, and the intentional displacement of whole populations to make way for the pipeline that now sucked oil from the Bentiu region of the south and delivered it to the north. This much I had read about in advance of my trip, but still I was utterly unprepared for what my own eyes would see inside southern Sudan.

This Flowing Toward Me, pp.88-89

MY FIRST TRIP INTO SUDAN in 1992 DURING THE WAR

Shortly after dawn we climbed back into the Land Rovers and resumed our journey toward Torit. Several times I begged the driver to stop along the road so that I could photograph the termite mounds--columns towering an impressive ten to fifteen feet in the air. But each time the driver told me we could not stop; we needed to press on. He, of course, already knew what I at that time did not know: that nearly every week at least one vehicle making this trek was attacked by bandits, stripped of its parts, its occupants relieved of their clothing and possessions and sometimes killed in the bargain.

In my ignorance I enjoyed the ride, even though the track was so rugged that I literally had to brace myself with one hand on the roof and another on the back of the seat, to prevent being ricocheted around and slamming my head into the roof or the side door. More than once we had to negotiate dicey detours across wadis whose bridges had been washed away by flash floods originating in the mountains. After seven hours of rough driving, most of it at roughly ten miles per hour, we pulled into the town of Torit, the center of Torit Diocese and the home to which Bishop Taban had invited me.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this. Maybe I had imagined we would round a final bend and see an oasis, as in the movies where, after crawling painfully across an arid wasteland, the heroes suddenly come upon a thriving community clustered around springs of sweet water shaded by date palms. This was not that.

No, the drivers had parked our Land Rovers near a few sun-baked, rundown brick buildings and thatched huts. Huge bomb craters pitted the earth. Groups of painfully-thin, dazed-looking Sudanese stood motionless in the day’s heat, many wearing nothing but a threadbare blanket slung over one shoulder. It had taken us eleven hours of driving to go 150 miles--barely one quarter of an inch on a map of Sudan--only to find ourselves in a place nearly as desolate as what we had been passing through.

This Flowing Toward Me, pp 93-94

ON FACING MY FEAR OF SPIDERS

On several occasions I have spent time at Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, just south of the Sudan border. A more desolate, windswept place would be hard to imagine. 82,000 persons displaced by war make their lodging in that barren landscape—a place with insufficient water, food or facilities, blasted by searing desert heat and sandstorms fierce enough to choke living things.

Whenever I enter a new refugee camp I inquire as to what dangers I should try to avoid. In some camps it’s contaminated water, in others it’s poisonous snakes or encroachments by armed rebels. In Kakuma it was camel spiders. Kakuma was precisely the type of place where only a desert-hardened spider would choose to live.

“How will I know which spiders are camel spiders?” I asked, picturing in my mind’s eye a shaggy, double-hunchbacked bug with knobby kneecaps.

“Oh, you will know,” came the reply from an experienced camp worker, “by their size and their speed. All you’ll see is the blur going by.” Then she added, as if to comfort me, “They don’t have humps. They’re named for their color.”

I have since discovered that camel spiders--also known as wind scorpions because of their speed--are technically not spiders at all, but rather solifugids, a biological classification approximating a frightful cross between a spider and a scorpion. Camel spiders have been described as looking like blond tarantulas, but twice the size. They have a claw-like mouth in front and the ability to move so fast that the human eye cannot follow them. A National Geographic article summed up their attributes: “Quickness, aggressiveness, and body-crunching jaws make the wind scorpion a triple threat.”

Camel spiders grow to nearly six inches in length and can dash ten miles per hour. Humans cannot outrun them. They prefer shade to sunlight. They tend to become fiercely aggressive when cornered. These are facts I wish I had known while staying in Kakuma camp.

While teaching classes to the refugees in that dusty corner of Africa I regularly scanned the sandy, camel-colored ground for hefty, camel-colored blurs. By night I used a tiny flashlight to see where I was stepping. Days passed without my encountering anything worse than malarial mosquitoes and a few regular scorpions (unless, of course, you count the murder of a refugee one night by the neighboring Turkana tribe, or the subsequent riot in the camp protesting the overall lack of security, or the near-stoning of a refugee accused of stealing someone’s bicycle). On Sunday morning, however, when I was preparing to open the ill-fitting wood plank door of my borrowed hut to go out into the bright sunshine to the camp church, I noticed a four-inch solid “wedge” blocking out the light between the door and the door frame, just above the knob. Upon closer inspection, the wedge showed itself to have legs. Camel-colored legs. Oh, bleep. My heart plunged down to my toes. I was face-to-face with a camel spider who just happened to be between me and my only exit.

There was no one within hailing distance (where was my steady sistah-ah-be-uh-huntah friend when I needed him?). Fighting back panic while keeping one eye on the wedge--because I knew if it sprang into the room, I wouldn’t be able to find it and then I wouldn’t be able to live there any more--I backed up into the room to search for a suitable weapon. First, I inched out of my sandals and pulled on my running shoes, with a view toward that hoped-for-moment when running would be possible. Then I cautiously approached the door, my trusty semi-automatic sandal in hand. It would be a fight to the death. On the Sabbath….

This Flowing Toward Me, pp.128-130

Next in this chapter: Stories / Background Reading