Olympic runner Ěýgrew up in a small village in war-torn South Sudan. As one of the , he often found himself chased by armed militia—once running for three straight days. LomongĚýhas since been training andĚýĚýwith an appearance at the 2012 London Olympics in the 1500 meters. Lost Boys from filmmakers and follows his journey.Ěý

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Day one is Thursday, and we roll out of Juba, South Sudan, in the ambassador’s official ride, a Toyota Land Cruiser in spotless white. The driver’s door is showered with gold stars across a familiar sky blue flag and the words L’UNION EUROPÉENNE, the heraldry of someone who matters in this vast, imperiled infant of a nation.

The someone is Sven Kuhn von Burgsdorff, a lean, 55-year-old German, and ambassador, who is not the German ambassador. Sven actually holds an obscure but equivalent title, commissioner, and represents the European Union as a whole. That makes him a kind of supranational diplomat for 27 nations, with a major say in the spending of $395 million in European aid to South Sudan over the next two years. A former commando, he once toughened his feet by running barefoot in the snows of Lower Saxony and jumps out of airplanes to relax. I personally will hear him speak five languages before this trip is over. Also in the Land Cruiser are Italian photographer Marco Di Lauro and Sven’s son David, a bushy-headed 26-year-old surfer and programs officer already hardened by years of rolling around Africa chasing big waves.

The ambassador has a paraglider in the back of the Land Cruiser, crammed in with camping gear, food, and bottled water. We are headed out of the dismal capital, driving south for four hours toward the Imatong Mountains, where we hope to find and summit Mount Kinyeti, at 10,456 feet the highest peak in the country. The ambassador wants to tour the south of South Sudan, get some exercise, and then fling himself off the peak in his paraglider, avoiding a crash landing in the Central African jungles while claiming some fun distinction like First Unpowered Descent from a Place No One Has Heard Of. The only problem as we leave town late Thursday: von Burgsdorff mentions that he has to be back in Juba on Sunday afternoon, which leaves us just Friday and Saturday to make a hike that should take three days.

But what are schedules out here? Only 15 minutes outside Juba we’re held up by a potential land mine, one of untold numbers believed to be scattered around South Sudan after the 22 years of civil war that led to its independence from Sudan. A cluster of cars is pulled to the side, the passengers sitting under a tree, and down the road are a pair of armored bull-dozers operated by remote control.

Ambassador Sven spends the break speed-reading a thick report on a typical messy dilemma in South Sudan: how to join the International Criminal Court without destroying relations with the nation’s neighbor and former overlord, Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, an indicted war criminal who holds the key to negotiating an oil deal. Sven makes neat marks in the margins and then fires up his satellite phone. With the thoughtless ease of a Type A übermensch, he rocks four of his five languages in a couple of minutes: French with a colleague, English when reading back text, German to his son, and then, calling out the window to ask about the land mine, some Juba Arabic, a common dialect among soldiers and policemen here.

The robot bulldozers soon flatten whatever it is they’ve uncovered. There is no explosion. The road opens, and we start crawling forward again.

THE NEWEST country in the world is physically large—240,000 square miles, the size of France—and catastrophically ungoverned. It is a featureless grassland for most of its open, landlocked run. South Sudan is a landscape without clear divisions or functioning borders, touching Sudan and the Arab world to the north and the troubled Democratic Republic of the Congo and Central African Republic to the west, with East Africa pressing up from below. The waters of the Nile and thick seasonal rains drive a wedge of green grass across plains teeming with animals. explorer Mike Fay made global headlines in 2007 when he completed the first aerial survey in 25 years and estimated that there were 1.3 million animals flowing across it, a great migratory river of white-eared kob and other antelope and gazelle dotted with a stash of elephants and a handful of species—including beisa oryx and Nile lechwe antelope—existing nowhere else on earth. Finding this many unknown animals anywhere was like finding El Dorado, Fay said at the time; finding them in war-torn Africa was even better.

Though no one has counted in decades, there might be ten million people, too. South Sudan is quilted internally by some 60 tribes, many of them nomadic herders with long-standing antagonisms. But a year before my visit, on July 9, 2011, the Dinka, Nuer, Bari, Azande, and dozens of others came together to declare independence and raise the tricolor flag—black, red, and green—of a new nation. The president, a Dinka and former military officer named Salva Kiir, favors black cowboy hats and lives in hotels. A disorganized parliament struggles to create a host of new ministries out of empty buildings, and the National Archives are a pile of crumbling documents on the floor of a tent.

Independence has added innumerable corrupt factions, including newly enriched local businessmen from the Tribe of Hummers. South Sudan is not a society in recovery: there never was any real infrastructure, government, civil society, rules, laws, or rule of law here, so there is nothing to recover. Instead it’s a scratch country, invented as a solution to an insoluble problem of semipermanent war and defined by what it lacks. There is no electrical grid, no mail service, almost no roads even of the dirt kind, and perhaps a few hundred miles of asphalt if you count every paved block in Juba. The have-nots have a lot of not: barely a smidgen of schools, almost no health care, a population living on zero dollars per day in a subsistence-farming economy where cattle are traded like currency. There are more guns than people who can read; refugee camps are more common than towns; snow would be easier to find than a road sign.

South Sudan was carved from the much larger, Arab-dominated country of Sudan, the last in a series of remote governments, from ancient Egypt through the Ottoman Empire, which viewed the south chiefly as a source of converts or slaves. In the 19th century, British explorers traced the routes of the Blue and White Niles but left little impression on the land and evacuated in 1956, leaving the northerners—typically pale-skinned Arabs from Sudan’s capital, Khartoum—in charge. The vast open spaces became a kind of formless border between the Middle East and Africa, with Muslims in the north and black Africans, often Christian or animist, in the south.

When people talk about the war here, they have several to choose from. They might mean the anti-British struggle of the 1950s or the coups and countercoups of the 1970s, but they probably mean the south-versus-north war that broke out in 1983 and lasted 22 years. In general, all the wars have pitted central authority in Khartoum against the margins, including the Darfur genocide that began in 2003 in Sudan’s far west. The war in the south featured the same genocidal tactics as in Darfur but ran longer, immobilizing the region for decades.

Unlike Darfur, which still lingers under Sudan’s rule, the southerners actually won. Hiding in the countryside, they wore out the Khartoum regime, which agreed to a peace treaty in 2005. More than five years later, a massive deployment by the UN helped midwife a truly independent South Sudan, and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and current ambassador Susan Page both pushed hard to make the peace deal stick. In 2011, USAID and other agencies spent more than $100 million on everything from schools to refugee camps, including an impressive array of road-building projects. That’s only a quarter of the money promised by the U.S., but this year’s budget calls for $244 million, easily the largest aid package in South Sudan, and Sven’s European Union is also investing heavily in rural development and “capacity building,” the euphemism for helping the South Sudanese construct a government that isn’t corrupt.

Good luck with that. President Kiir recently sent a pleading letter to his ministers asking for the return of $4 billion that he said had gone missing. Oil will be as much curse as blessing: some 75 percent of the old Sudan’s oil fields are just inside the southern territory, while the only two pipelines go north, through Khartoum to the Red Sea. Since independence, relations between Sudan and South Sudan have declined rapidly, the north withholding payments for southern oil, the south retaliating by withholding the oil itself. (South Sudan lost 98 percent of its government revenues; the north was hurt almost as badly.) Meanwhile, continuing outbreaks of violence have threatened to ruin everything, and despite a new deal to restart the flow of oil and cash, neither was moving during my visit in late 2012. South Sudan had the desperate, inflated feel of a wartime country dependent on charities and aid, with Chinese contractors waiting in the wings for their turn.

Maybe the fighting will stop. Maybe the oil will start. But no matter what happens, almost anything will be an improvement.

DAY TWO AND THE AIR is wet and warm, the voice of Africa a low rumble of water from a deep cleft. Somewhere down below the flat acacia trees, hidden in thick green bush, is Imatong Falls. South Sudan’s other great resource is water, pouring copiously out of the high southern hills toward the northern deserts. We catch only a brief glimpse of the heavy, rushing cascade along with our first peek at the steep and jagged mountains overlooking the tree-filled valleys. Then we move on without pause. Sven is setting the pace and it is fast. No time for soaking our toes or for anything but walking.

The day before, in the Land Cruiser, the von Burgsdorffs engaged in what diplomats would call a frank discussion about the extent of paved roads in South Sudan.

“One thousand kilometers,” Sven said.

Ěý“No, papa! No!”

“Yes, for sure. Minimum.”

“No, papa. A thousand? You’re crazy. It’s like a hundred.”

Sven began naming towns with a few paved blocks here and there. “He’s counting every sidewalk!” David shouted from the back. They could go at each other like this five times an hour, merciless, relentless, and still laughing. Sven takes pride in his son—even more in walking him into the ground and eating weirder things. If David surfs with great whites in Cape Town, Sven parachutes off a high cliff above Juba into the arms of waiting policemen (actual story). Somewhere between the dismal reality (a hundred kilometers of asphalt) and the diplomatic optimism (a thousand) is the real South Sudan, the one that matters.

It was night by the time we plunged down the final miles of the road south, passing the town of Torit and arriving in a small village called Kitere at the very end of the road ruts. We woke up on the dirt floor of a hut in darkness. “The adventure starts where the road ends,” Sven offered, and nothing was a cliché at 5:40 A.M.

Once we’ve gathered a guide and a few porters from Kitere—a biblically named crew called Daniel, David, Simon, John, and Joseph—we start ascending steeply up through fields of ten-foot-tall sorghum on a muddy path no wider than a single man. Even this begins to fade quickly, and after passing a few final primitive huts and corn fields, we climb an ever narrower track, slippery clay sending us crashing down repeatedly. Sunrise makes it clear that our route to Mount Kinyeti—about 31 miles round-trip, by Sven’s calculation—will be painful. Impenetrable brush closes over the trail, which is soon reduced to a hunters’ trace used by outsiders only about once a year. Daniel says he’s brought five previous groups to the mountain since 2005.

We cross five streams the first morning: the first two are bridged, after a fashion, the logs wet with the spray of tumbling whitewater. The next streams aren’t bridged at all. The guides, sure-footed in sandals or rubber boots, leap from rock to rock; I fall in once and use all three pairs of my socks on the first morning. Marco takes the cautious approach, crossing barefoot while swearing, “I’m never going to work with you again!”

The fact is, we’re out of our league. Sven is a fitness freak and sets a pace that even the hardened Africans have trouble keeping. Back in Juba, I talked with Peter Meredith, a famed South African kayaker who is trying to launch the first commercial rafting trips in South Sudan, to take expats from the capital on floats down the White Nile. Meredith suggested doing the hike to Kinyeti in three or more days, but with Sven’s meeting in Juba, we must travel 31 miles, get up to 10,000 feet, and be back at the road in a little over 48 hours.

Ferns enclose the trail, and the dramatic views of the pale green Imatongs are extinguished by triple-canopy jungle, a chaotic world of switchbacks amid stinging fireweed and stands of mint and wild cannabis. Eight hours pass this way, until we finally collapse at 7,500 feet next to a crude lean-to. We fumble into sleeping bags and tents; the disciples curl up on the ground under their jackets.

“On stone, on water,” Joseph tells me, “we sleep.”

GETTING ANY VIEW of South Sudan as a whole is tough. Juba is located well enough, sitting where the powerful White Nile drops out of the Central African lakes, the mother water rolling northward past the city at running speed before it splits into meanders to form the vast, 11,500-square-mile Sudd wetland, among Africa’s largest. Eventually, the waters regather, joining the Blue Nile in Sudan proper and pushing past Khartoum and on to Egypt.

But Juba is more encampment than city, a sprawling settlement of homely huts and instant apartments whose population has swelled to more than a million as waves of returning exiles and rural people have moved in. Many thousands of foreigners have come here as well, riding around in white Land Cruisers during the twice-a-day traffic jams that are a mark of pride for locals. The most common signage is anything beginning with the letters “UN,” and a trip across town uses reference points like “Go past WHO” and “Turn left at WFP.” Diplomats from the U.S., Europe, Africa, and China have set up shop, as well as hundreds of foreign NGOs, everyone from the and to and—it’s all about cattle here—. In a place where hotel rooms are made from empty shipping containers and everything from gasoline to rice is imported on the back of a truck from Kenya, inflation has skyrocketed: a taxi across Juba costs twice as much as in New York, hastily built apartments are priced as if in central Rome, and locals can afford nothing but asida, or corn mush. Many foreigners are sweating out their lives in the northern refugee camps, healing and organizing, but in Juba the expat tone is that of a lunar colony with pool parties and endless paperwork.

In a two-story white building I meet Cirino Hiteng, one of the young country’s rotating cast of ministers and its most dashing defender of wildlife. He wears a Nairobi-style short-sleeved suit in gray, topped with a narrow-brim trilby and accessorized with a South Sudanese flag pin, a flashy watch, two rings, and a Livestrong-style yellow bracelet reading HOPE FAITH LOVE. Hiteng may look like the minister of hip-hop, but his affection for animals is deep.

“I love nature,” he says plainly. “I have a spiritual connection. Every year I fly five hours up and down looking for animals. Elephants, oryx, ostrich, elands. I spotted a cheetah this year. I always spot the most.”

Hiteng is from a peasant family in Torit, near Mount Kinyeti, and he recalls walking to school (“Nine miles there, nine miles back”) to write his first letters in the sand with a stick. He got to Catholic school and eventually earned a Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Kent, in Canterbury, England. A South Sudanese with an advanced degree is a rare thing, and Hiteng has rotated through an array of posts, serving as chief of staff to the president and now minister of what is called Culture, Youth, and Sports.

He tolls off the positives in South Sudan. There are, in theory, 12 game reserves and six national parks, and the annual antelope migration through the most famous, Boma National Park, is probably the second largest on the planet. There are dramatic rapids on the Nile and long stretches appropriate for the whitewater rafting that has become popular in Uganda. He thinks the Imatong Mountains will develop as a tourist destination and helicoptered to Kinyeti’s summit with a UN team. “I planted the flag of South Sudan,” he says. “I tell the local people, Don’t cut down the forest, it will bring the mzunga, the foreigner. Did you see Imatong Falls? Imagine if you put some cottages there. You have breathed the air of God.”

Still, Hiteng is well aware of South Sudan’s problems. The parks, many of them dating back to British rule, have almost no staff funding, training, equipment, or infrastructure, and animals are constantly poached for meat. Giraffes—slow moving and hard to miss—are shot first, and there are organized raids by horsemen from Sudan, who massacre elephants and carry the tusks hundreds of miles back to Omdurman, where artisans carve them and export them to China. The Chinese themselves are also here, building roads and hoping to invest, like Europeans and Americans, in the oil industry. The common denominator in all this, Hiteng concludes, is lack of infrastructure. “Roads!” he cries. “South Sudan is a huge land. It is almost impossible to travel across it.” Better roads will bring medical care and tourist dollars to the isolated tribal cultures that define both the glory and problems of South Sudan. They’ll also open up more areas to poaching and illegal logging.

That afternoon I visit another minister, Gabriel Changson, the head of Wildlife Conservation and Tourism, crossing Juba on the back of a boda boda, the euphonious name for a motorcycle taxi. Changson is not as flamboyant as Hiteng—he sits calmly behind a desk the size of a lifeboat, wearing a pressed dress shirt. But, like Hiteng, he is well educated. A Nuer from near the border with Ethiopia, he has a background in banking and a master’s in economics from Duke (“Go Blue Devils!” he says).

Changson doesn’t know his own age (“About 60,” he guesses), but he knows tourism will protect the animals of South Sudan. Like Hiteng, he talks about Kenyan-style eco-lodges, tent safaris, bird-watchers in the Sudd swamp, and the need to train South Sudan’s 14,000 wildlife rangers, army conscripts without equipment or skills. The country’s paper parks are roadless and so large—Boma is 8,800 square miles, and the Zefah Game Reserve, in the Sudd, is 3,700—that they can’t be patrolled.

“A hungry man will not listen to our rules,” Changson says, “but if we offer an alternative livelihood, they will pick it up.” His conservation agenda starts with humans: tribes-people need bore holes for clean drinking water, health centers, basic schools, and model villages. Then they will consider ecotourism. Until there is security, Changson candidly admits, “nobody will come.”

Right now nobody is coming. In two weeks I meet one tourist: a Japanese woman literally checking off a list of African countries. There is currently nothing for a tourist to do. I sign up for a safari to Boma, but it’s cancelled amid late-season rains and shifting paperwork. Meredith, the kayaker, says his hopes for a rafting business were curtailed when NGOs and embassies, out of security concerns, banned their Juba staffs from leaving the city on weekends.

The country has perhaps five years to transform itself into a conservation nation, American biologist Paul Elkan, country director for the (WCS), says. “What’s important in South Sudan is intact ecosystems. Big blocks of wilderness. Some of the last great wilderness in Africa. The largest intact savanna in East Africa.”

There are many bright spots—more than a million if you count those migrating antelope. And the WCS has been able to count thousands of elephants in South Sudan, collaring 34 with satellite transmitters and tracking them daily. But the country’s situation is changing rapidly, and for animals and ecosystems, Elkan says, “the pressures are higher,” as peace allows people to start moving around, exploiting resources. Several of those WCS-tagged elephants, in fact, have already been poached.

Keeping the animals alive will depend on law and order in the countryside, schools and bore holes, tourism of the right kind, legal and regulatory advances, training for rangers, and an infrastructure of roads, lodges, and spotting planes, all within five years. Without that seismic shift, the elephants will be wiped out, the hartebeest turned into bushmeat.

“It’s a fixer-upper,” Elkan says.

DAY THREE turns out to be surprisingly easy, for the simple reason that Marco and I never make it up the mountain. By the end of day two, we had reached the flanks of Kinyeti, the barren summit visible just once through the thicket of vegetation. But the slopes are steep and the journalists weak.

We huddle around a campfire well before first light, chilled and wet after a night on the ground. Daniel calculates that it will take the Germans four hours to ascend the last few miles, on a switchbacking trail that climbs 2,500 feet in thick forest before bursting into the clear. But Marco and I—Daniel calls us la marwani, the old men—will need five hours to summit, and that’s before the hike back out to the road. All in all, we’re looking at a 12-hour haul.

While we sulk in our tents, Sven and David storm the peak. They make it up in less than four hours, Sven hauling the 30-pound paraglider himself. On the misty top, they hold out South Sudan and European Union flags in a snapping, cold wind. Too much wind: the glider stays in its pack. The von Burgsdorffs march back down and collect the shame-faced journalists for the hike out. Elapsed time: seven hours.

So my cowardly day three is only this: a half-dozen miles crashing down wet trails in dense brush, leaping rock to rock, pounding up and down spurs of mountain in a frantic effort to keep Sven in sight. Patient, merciful Daniel paces me for a while at the back of the column, pointing out the dangerous fireweed, whose hairy edges sting like coals, and a vine that coagulates wounds. When we’re attacked by safari ants—stubborn black biters that crawl up inside our pant legs—he shows me how to find and kill them under the fabric. The disciples pause to scrape “honey” from a dark hole in a eucalyptus tree, actually a sweet sap loaded with crunchy insects. The forest gives up its secrets.

In the late afternoon we encounter two hunters, giddy young men running in circles, frantically searching for a slim, straight tree. Using machetes, they chop down something the thickness of an arm, cut it to ten feet, and jog off into the bush, inviting us to follow.

Not far away, they’ve caught a boar. The pig is in a wire snare and has raged against the jungle for hours, clawing a circle of black dirt in the exact radius of its leash. Daniel warns me to climb up onto something: “If he comes for you, he will kill you.” Indeed, I can see the animal’s three-inch incisors when it snarls.

The Imatong are remote and untroubled, so this is one of the only places in South Sudan where no one carries a gun. The hunters have already fired an arrow into the pig’s throat, with no effect. Now they set about beating it to death with their ten-foot pole. The men then swiftly bleed the carcass, truss it on the same pole, and lead us up and over a forest and down into a swamp where they’ve built a smoky fire. They devour a big pot of asida as the pork cooks. Later I hear that these men are poachers, but there are no rangers, no signs, no evidence of laws and rules, only hungry men of the bush crawling forward.

We move uphill onto dry ground in the last moments of light and pitch our tents under magnificent, ash-white eucalyptus, which climb 200 feet or more into the air. You don’t normally see tall trees like these in South Sudan, but here is more evidence of what war has preserved. The trees grow in perfect rows—the area was a British plantation at the time of Sudan’s independence in 1956 but has been neglected ever since.

Sven is looking everywhere for the future. Around the fire he outlines development ideas. There’s potential for an eco-lodge at Imatong Falls. And down in Daniel’s village, Kitere, they could form a cooperative and harvest some of these trees to pay for schools or farming equipment. Eventually they might start a sawmill, like in the old days, and have a small, sustainable business. All it will take is clearing the old British logging road, which is blocked with dead trees but otherwise in fine shape.

“Why don’t you clear the road?” he asks Daniel.

“The problem is the government,” Daniel answers.

Maybe Daniel is right—nothing happens until a big man gives his blessing. But Sven is frustrated by this kind of routine passivity. “Always,” he says bitterly, a rare crack in his diplomatic reserve. “It’s always the government’s fault.”

The wind sweeps the high branches back and forth, flakes of papery bark raining down on us like snow.

We make it out in the morning, hopping all the streams again at double speed, busting our humps to make it back to Juba on time. But then the Land Cruiser breaks down. After all that, Sven has to miss his meeting. He takes it well, sitting in the hot shade of Torit all afternoon, drinking tea, finally at rest.

LIKE THE GREAT migrations and towering eucalyptus, South Sudan’s human cultures have endured because war immobilized the country decade after decade, paralyzing progress. Questions about the survival of animals and habitat are not separate from the survival of man himself, and tribes here have persisted to a surprising degree, especially in the country’s cattle camps. These laagers, island-like villages that appear like beaten-down brown circles in the immense green of the savanna, form wherever seminomadic groups settle to let their cows graze.

In Juba, Marco and I hire a car and driver ($500 a day) and head north before dawn, hoping to find such a camp. After only an hour of bad-road driving, we spot a herd of Watusi cows, white beasts with great curved horns, scattered in the bush. A few hundred yards of walking brings us to a cattle camp, a dozen half-naked men and women gathered beside a smoldering dung fire. They’re Mundari, native to this region and known by the ash smeared on their bodies and the three V’s of ritual scarring across their foreheads.

They greet us with indifference (mostly) and wild threats (the largest man). A towering, ash-covered warrior wearing only a blanket, he immediately challenges me to a fight, but then calms down and allows us to settle in around the fire. The Mundari have blankets, a few plastic sheets for sheltering infants against the rain, and wooden goads, the short prods used to move cows. There are two cell phones in the camp, neither working. A couple of immensely tall women sit on blankets, steadily shaking gourds back and forth, churning the milk of the cows into a fermented, alcohol-like drink.

Cattle are bank account and social status—a hedge against hunger, an investment, and the key to getting married. (With some tribes, paying a dowry in cattle has become a human-rights concern, as girls as young as 12 are traded as child brides.) Cattle raids—organized stealing expeditions—are endorsed by both culture and economics here. In 2011, more than 1,000 people were killed during a cattle war between the Nuer and Murle, on the outskirts of Boma National Park. A hundred thousand cows were stolen, along with hundreds of women and children.

The men paint my face with dung ash, roaring with laughter at the result. Then Marco and I head off, passing a town—a few roadside kiosks selling gasoline in soda bottles alongside an empty refugee camp—before moving deeper into nothing. During a pee break, I’m zipping up by the roadside when three naked men walk out of the tall grass.

They aren’t here to herd cattle. Their scarring is Mundari, but they carry burnished cow-leather shields and carved fighting sticks, not normal goads. Their skinny, hard bodies are naked and oiled, as if for a wrestling match, but they’re in a good mood. We stare at each other for a while until we are interrupted by a tense hiss. They fall quiet, squinting. I follow their gaze back down the road. Another file of men, also naked, also prepared for fighting, has appeared in the distance.

Our guys wave a pennant in the air, a colorful homemade flag, and their guys break into song, jogging quickly forward. Moments later, all the men embrace and laugh. In the middle of the dirt road—it’s not like there’s any traffic—they break into new songs and put on a display of stick fighting, blows rattling the shields, their shiny bodies staging scenes straight from an Attic vase. The driver—a Ugandan—cowers in the car, saying, “I have never seen anything like this in my whole life!” If you want a romantic encounter with ancient Africa and don’t mind land mines, South Sudan is the place.

ON THE LAST DAY of my trip, rising for another East African dawn, I meet Paul Elkan at the WCS’s little compound near the airport. In the past seven years, Elkan has logged more than 1,000 hours flying over the plains of South Sudan, many of them with National Geographic’s Mike Fay, and has seen a genocidal civil war turn into a cold peace. Like many NGOs, the WCS is trying to build something from nothing, scraping together training programs and keeping two airplanes aloft. After some puttering around with the Cessna, the motor finally catches, and we’re off to see the biggest secret in South Sudan.

First, however, a charity traffic jam. In an almost roadless country, air transport is king, and there are more than 60 planes parked at the airport, mostly small grasshoppers from the UN, NGOs, and missionary groups. We taxi toward the runway but are edged out by an Ilyushin 76, a container ship to our rowboat. Elkan has to hold back the throttle as the cargo plane—marked WORLD FOOD PROGRAM—idles on the runway. “Juba Tango Charley,” Elkan calls, hoping to nip in ahead of the jet, “holding short and ready.” But there’s no answer from the tower, and after five minutes the Ilyushin finally lumbers into the sky with a reek of jet fuel and a searing roar that could jump-start a migration.

We pop up quickly, sailing over the tiny precincts of Juba at 1,000 feet, and then, still climbing, across the meandering Nile, leaving behind the charcoal smoke, the glitter of round tin roofs, the chaotic yards containing donkeys. Right there, we enter 3,900-square-mile Bandingilo National Park, which hosts huge migrations of antelope twice a year but is otherwise empty, without even the trace of red dirt that marks a walking trail. The plane buzzes along at 2,000 feet, rattling like a ’68 Beetle with wings, but Elkan is affectionate, praising the Cessna. (“All good planes come from one place,” he says. “Wichita.”)

We’ve put in an hour like this, pleasant and cool, the only easy travel in South Sudan, when Elkan points to patterns in the grass below. The vast plain—a flat horizon in every direction—is now touched with a few dark lines where antelope have moved northward. Animals follow the grass, which follows the rain; at the end of the dry season, that means migrating north, toward the retreating edge of the Sudd wetland. Elkan flings the plane over onto a wing tip, circling down on the first antelope. These are white-eared kob, the most common and the easiest to spot, thanks to white flashes on the males’ necks and ears. There are dozens, then hundreds, but it isn’t the time of year for dense gatherings, and we aren’t flying to see antelope. Elkan levels out the plane, climbs back to 2,000 feet, and heads…
Well, I can’t say where he heads. For another hour he follows a GPS signal toward a part of South Sudan that is seldom seen, one more vast wilderness in this land of empty spaces. The location is secret because of what is there: one of the last great elephant stands in East Africa. To poachers, every elephant herd is simply a collection of millions of dollars of ivory waiting to be shipped to China.

Two hours out from Juba, we drop back down to 300 feet. The grass shows patterns again, not the tiny depressions left by passing antelope but dark, wet zigs and zags, diamond patterns gathering tighter, trails crossing trails.

We probably could have found this herd just by looking for those shapes in the grass, but Elkan is running down the satellite trackers and knows they were, yesterday at least, just ahead of us. The grass turns to a beaten black mat, crushed flat in the bright sun, and then, against a splash of water, there are elephants. Ten. Then 20. Then 50. Then hundreds.

“Four hundred,” Elkan estimates.

That’s just one particular herd. There are thousands of elephants out here, beyond the reach of poachers, another secret of this hidden-in-plain-sight land. Here’s hoping some things are never found.ĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚý

Contributing editor is the author of and .

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BAIDOA, SOMALIA

“SALAT! SALAT!”

The call to prayer came at 4:30 a.m.

“Pray! Pray! It's better to pray than to sleep!”

I was staying in a house across the street from one of Baidoa's mosques, so there was no chance of dozing. As the echoes from the loudspeaker faded into the darkness, I could hear the neighborhood stirring as people rose to wash their hands and feet and kneel in prayer toward Mecca.

There was a knock at the bedroom door. “You awake?” John Miskell called out.

Miskell and I were leaving Baidoa before dawn on a journey to a town named Tieglo, deep in the Somali hinterland a few miles south of nowhere. Miskell, who oversees CARE International's relief programs in southern Somalia, was planning to rendezvous there with a convoy of 12 trucks bringing 254 tons of food from Mogadishu. Between Baidoa and Tieglo lay 13 hours of Somali bush, dirt-and-boulder roads offering little more than lungfuls of dust and lobe-deadening headaches and the bleak scenery of a country pounded by civil war and famine. It was Miskell's job to make sure the food got to Tieglo safely.

It's been nearly a decade since jeering mobs dragged the body of U.S. Army Ranger Bill Cleveland through the streets of Mogadishu, and in that time little has improved. When the United Nations armed forces departed in 1995, the implicit message was simple: You people want to kill? Go ahead, kill yourselves. Call us when you get tired of it. Since then, northern Somalia has stabilized somewhat, but southern Somalia, with Mogadishu at its heart, remains a nightmarish, Hobbesian realm that once again hovers on the cusp of famine.

Our Toyota Land Cruiser was parked in the house's courtyard behind a steel gate topped with barbed wire and guarded by a couple of teenagers toting AK-47s. Loaded in the rear were 80 liters of gas in plastic containers. We would be traveling in a four-wheel drive, all-terrain bomb. Miskell would have liked to put the gas on the rooftop luggage rack, but that space was reserved for two other militiamen bearing AK-47s, who were to keep an eye out for trouble—of which, unlike food or water or peace or schools or law and order, there is plenty in Somalia.

“Where's the driver?” I asked when we got to the courtyard.

Miskell nodded at a prostrate form on the ground.

“Apparently our driver is praying,” he said.

The prayers seemed unusually devout. When he finished, we drove into the center of town and met up with several more Somalis who worked for CARE. They would travel with us in two other Land Cruisers—one in front of our vehicle, the other behind— equipped with the requisite duos of rooftop gunslingers. As dawn broke, our convoy headed into the bush, only to stop after a few miles. We were surrounded by stunted trees covered in dust. Camels plodded past, herders in tow. Finally Cobra, one of the Somalis—everybody has a nickname in Somalia, and his was Cobra—walked back from the lead vehicle to tell us what was happening.

“There is an ambush ahead,” he said.

MANGAR ANGUI, SUDAN

JUST AS SUDAN has the unfortunate distinction of possessing Africa's longest-running civil war, the food drops Loftus helps oversee are part of Africa's longest-running, and most controversial, aid project. The war itself began in 1956, when Sudan gained independence from British rule; went into remission in 1972; and returned worse than ever in 1983, after the Muslim government in Khartoum imposed Islamic law on the country, including the largely Christian and animist southern half. (The U.S. government supports the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army.)In the last 17 years the war has cost some two million lives—many from war-induced famines—and turned several million more people into refugees.

Loftus's work is part of Operation Lifeline Sudan, an 11-year-old joint project of the United Nations and some 40 NGOs, including CARE. The operation has run up an estimated $2 billion tab so far through its food and medicine drops, and critics have charged that such projects allow bloody conflicts to continue indefinitely since aid groups strike devil's bargains with warring factions, which inevitably get a cut of the food in exchange for safe passage of their convoys. Refugees get fed, but so do murderers.

Out in the field, Loftus has more important things to worry about than lofty policy debates—things like not dying. Born the year John Miskell joined the Peace Corps, she is relatively new to the game. She came to Sudan via Great Falls, Montana, a place, she says in a mock serious voice, “where a handshake is still the law.” Always athletic, she became an expert rock climber in her teens, and after high school moved to Boston and worked as a nanny, an emergency medical technician, a vegetarian chef, and an orderly in a mental institution before getting an anthropology degree from the University of Massachusetts. After college she drifted to Kenya and worked as a guide for luxury safaris, but there was an emptiness to the work—baby-sitting rich white people in Africa is not terribly meaningful. So two years ago she applied for a job with the World Food Program in Sudan and, thanks to some persistence, got it.

Every six weeks Loftus boards a bush plane at the UN base in Lokichokio, Kenya, and is dropped off several hours later in rebel-held territory in southern Sudan. This is assuming the UN plane does not nose-dive into the landing strip and flip over (as one did while I was in Sudan) or that its passengers are not taken hostage by gunmen (as happened to another UN plane shortly after I left). If all goes well Loftus and a partner stay at each drop-off point for a few days to a week. Then another plane takes them to another site. Loftus sleeps in a Kelty tent, cooks over a kerosene burner, and does her best to avoid snakes, scorpions, hyenas, soldiers, and wild dogs. The WFP requires its field-workers to keep a survival bag handy with food, water, first-aid supplies, flashlight, and compass in case they have to flee. In Mangar Angui, I asked Loftus's field partner, John Kamemia, where he keeps his “fast-run kit.” He laughed and pointed to his ample belly. “This is my fast-run kit,” he said.

If Loftus needs to investigate food conditions in a village ten miles from her camp, she must walk. Paved roads do not, for the most part, exist in southern Sudan, nor do vehicles to drive on them—just the occasional NGO Land Rover or military truck being pounded to death by the baked earth in the dry season or swallowed up by that same earth in the rainy season. Some monitors are sent out with bicycles (one-speed bikes made in China have proven more durable here than American-made mountain bikes), but the terrain tends to be too rutted or too swampy for travel on anything but your own two feet, which will be cracked or infected, depending on the season.

Mosquitoes can be so dense that you inhale them. Sudan also boasts 80 percent of the world's cases of infestation by guinea worm, whose larva enters the human body via unclean drinking water and grows in the bloodstream into a three-foot-long white worm before chewing its way through the skin, usually at the foot, and emerging in its entirety in an agonizing and horribly disgusting process that takes weeks at a minimum, and usually months.

“Sudan,” said one WFP field worker, a woman who'd endured cerebral malaria and a mysterious grapefruit-size growth on her neck, “tries to destroy people.”

TIEGLO, SOMALIA

DESPITE WHITE HAIR and a white beard, John Miskell looks absurdly vigorous for a man who has spent his adult life in the punishing bush. The mystery of his youthful appearance deepened as we drove to Tieglo. In places the road wasn't even dirt, just rocks, and the Land Cruiser jolted up and down as though perched atop a giant jackhammer. Red dust invaded the cabin in clumps; the 100-degree air tasted of gasoline. I placed a bandanna over my mouth; our driver jammed the end of his scarf into his mouth and gnawed on it. Occasionally we passed small towns nearly wiped out in the last decade of war, a Dresden-like vista of ruin. Small groups of underfed people sat in what shade they could find beside mud huts. They stared as we passed, our Land Cruisers strange apparitions from the land of plenty.

Miskell sat up front, seemingly unfazed. Nothing covered his nose or mouth. He patiently scanned the bush for birds; when he saw one, he would jot its name in his notebook. I tried to stump him, asking the names of birds that flew past in a millisecond, but he was miles ahead of me. “Red-billed hornbill,” he said as one zoomed by, and then he delivered an ornithological trump card: “Female.” On occasion he would tell the driver to stop, and he would leave the car, binoculars in hand, and shuffle toward a creature perched in a tree. The rooftop guards seemed baffled by this white guy chasing after birds.

Long-term exposure to other people's suffering can harm aid workers in a process known euphemistically as “vicarious traumatization.” The mind and body have ways of coping: alcohol abuse, withdrawal. This has not happened to Miskell. His defense mechanism is unique—he retreats into an alternative universe of wildlife. For him, the bush isn't full of misery, but of mysteries unsolved. He has coauthored a book on Somali birds and is updating it for a second edition. He has discovered three new species of beetles, and two admiring colleagues named beetles they discovered after him. “Every time a botanist comes to this country, they find a new species of plant,” he enthused. “It's just amazing.”

Miskell has become a man of Africa rather than a visitor to Africa. He drinks camel milk by the gallon, and almost everywhere he goes, he carries a six-by-eight-inch picture of his family, a posed studio shot where he stands proudly with his Somali wife and his half-Somali, half-American children. It is, in a way, a passport that tells everyone Miskell is African, that he is not just another white guy with the power to provide free food, that he is more at home in the chaos of Somalia than in the comfort of America.

Well after sunset, and nearly 14 hours after leaving Baidoa, we pulled into Tieglo reeking of gasoline and sweat and dust. The food trucks, which had set out from Mogadishu, were scheduled to arrive the next day. But as we were to find out, things had not gone according to plan. Miskell was about to get another dose of chaos.
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MANGAR ANGUI, SUDAN

AT SIX IN THE evening, Loftus fired up her WFP solar-powered radio and shouted out, “Lima Two, Mike Golf India!” No response. She shouted again, and this time summoned a voice from the ether.

“Sienna?”

“Yes!” she yelled back. “John? How are you doing?”

John Burns, another WFP field-worker, is Loftus's boyfriend. Like lovers meeting on the same bench in a park, they talk on the radio at the same time every evening.

“Great,” Burns replied.

“Are you still smoking?” Loftus asked.

“No, but I really crave it.”

“That's a good copy. When will you get to the field?”Burns, who was at the UN base in northern Kenya, was waiting to be sent into southern Sudan.

“I don't know. There's nothing for me to do there yet.”

“OK,” Loftus yelled. “Well, keep on not smoking.”

“Right, talk to you tomorrow.”

Loftus turned to me. “Now everyone in the SPLA, SRAA, and WFP knows John is trying to quit smoking,” she said, laughing. “You'd like to say, 'I love you, I love you, I miss you, I miss you,' but you can't.”

Two-way radios are the Internet of the aid world. Virtually every aid worker in southern Sudan—there are hundreds in the field at any time—uses a shortwave radio to stay in touch with headquarters and, if the need arises, as it frequently does, to arrange emergency evacuations for medical or security reasons. At night the airwaves become a vast chat room in which people swap gossip like teenagers burning the phone lines after lights-out. If you flip between channels—and aside from talking with your colleagues, the best form of entertainment is eavesdropping on them—you will hear WFP staffers talking about sports, bitching about the weather, trying to sell each other used cars.

The foreigners work alongside Sudanese whose grasp of English seems to derive, in part, from radio chatter. In Mangar Angui, one of Loftus's colleagues was a 26-year-old local named John Garang (not to be confused with the head of the SPLA, who has the same name). If Garang wanted to know whether Loftus understood something, he would ask, with a hint of BBC in his accent, “Do you copy?” If he wanted to indicate that things were fine, he might say “Oscar Kilo,” radio-ese for “OK.”

One day, after a grueling six-hour walkabout to check food conditions, Garang hung around our tents, which we had set up inside mud huts, and leafed through a copy of Yachting that Loftus had brought into the field along with a recent copy of Newsweek and one of Shape, its cover advertising “8 New Moves for a Knockout Tush.” Putting his finger on a color picture of a 45-foot sloop, Garang—a man who had likely never seen open water in his life, nor a vessel larger than a canoe—announced enthusiastically, “I want this boat.”

Loftus and I were slumped in the shade of a tree, swallowing oral-rehydration salts.

“Aren't you tired?” I asked.

“Negative,” Garang said. “Small walk.”

The Dinka are known for being exceptionally tall and long-legged. The most famous Dinka in the world is seven-foot, seven-inch retired NBA center Manute Bol.

“How long can you walk?”

“Twenty-four hours,” Garang said.

“Twenty-four hours?”

“Affirmative.”

TIEGLO, SOMALIA

THE TOWN HAS several hundred mud huts, but no hotels, so Miskell and I stayed in a local merchant's home that had a roof made of tin rather than plastic sheeting, making it deluxe accommodations. In the morning, the CARE team gathered for a breakfast of sweet tea, camel milk, goat meat, and anjera, the local bread. Miskell didn't bother saying good morning.

“You haven't heard yet,” he told me. “The convoy was attacked.”

The news had come over the two-way radio. No one was sure where the convoy was or whether anyone had been injured. After breakfast Miskell visited the local radio operator, in a lean-to crammed with Somalis waiting in line to talk with friends in other towns, and got through to someone in CARE's office in Merca.

“When do you expect him to reach this location?” Miskell shouted.

“I don't know,” came the reply. “There was fighting. Over.” The connection broke off abruptly.

“Can you use channel 8044?” Miskell shouted. “Channel 8044! Over.” They briefly re-established contact. Miskell left the hut in disgust. Four guards had been killed, three wounded, and a technical destroyed in the ambush, at a checkpoint about 100 miles from Tieglo. “Why are they doing it?” Miskell fumed. “It's insane.”

The rest of the day consisted of quick updates with CARE employees in Merca and Mogadishu. On one occasion, Ahmed Abdulle, the CARE convoy leader, was patched through. Because anyone could listen to the shortwave conversation, including the gunmen who attacked the convoy, little was said about where the convoy was holed up or how it was going to get here intact.

“Are you safe where you are?”

“Yes,” Ahmed replied. “I am safe. The convoy is intact and safe.”

“Will you be able to leave?”

Static.

Before dinner we listened to the BBC World Service, which reported that the office of a British aid group, ACCORD, had been attacked in a town near Merca. Two people were dead. A militia tracked the gunmen down and killed their leader, but two bystanders were wounded in that shootout. There was silence in the compound.

The next morning, when I wandered into the courtyard for breakfast, Miskell again skipped the pleasantries. “You haven't heard?” he asked.

“What now?” I said.

“A civilian truck that was on the road the convoy was on hit a land mine. We don't know how many were killed.” The mine, he explained, was meant for our food convoy.

The ambush appeared to be a business dispute. The trucking firm that CARE hired to transport the food was being attacked by a rival company that wanted CARE's business, we learned. Allies of the victimized firm had already struck back by kidnapping one of the owners of the firm that launched the ambush.

There was more. We soon heard that the CARE convoy had been attacked a second time the previous evening, as many as ten more guards killed and another technical destroyed by rocket-propelled grenades. On top of that, militias linked to the warring trucking firms had begun fighting in Beledweyn, a town near the ambush sites; shops in the town had been looted.

“Food is dangerous,” Miskell remarked. “If we're not careful, this convoy is going to start a war, a big war.”

There was nothing he could do except return to Merca the next day and instruct Ahmed to give the food to local charities and go back to Mogadishu. When he returned from the radio shack, Miskell sat in the courtyard, ignoring dozens of children who stared at him through the wooden fence, and began reading a novel by Tony Hillerman. I drew his attention to a beetle climbing a wall behind him.

“Longhorned wood bore,” he said.

MANGAR ANGUI, SUDAN

BEFORE THE SUN had risen much above the horizon, Loftus and I put on running shoes and headed for the dirt airstrip. We jogged back and forth for a half-hour, past women lugging jugs of water on their heads, past thin hunters with spears, past naked, giggling children.

“They think it's the most bizarre thing,” Loftus said. And it is. But in Sudan, where serious illness is a scratch or a sneeze or a dirty fork away, staying fit (or at least unsick) is important. Loftus travels with an arsenal of health- and sanity-preserving weapons. She eschews the beans-and-rice strategy of bush survival, opting instead for jars of garlic and olives, packets of cumin and coriander, powdered coconut milk, cans of tikka marsala, and bags of bulgar and lentils. She carries $60 tubes of LancĂ´me skin cleanser, toenail polish, and a solar-powered cassette player. “I have one week off for every six weeks in the field,” she explains. “If I didn't feel at home, I couldn't work here.”

Sadly, these self-protective strategies can widen the gulf between aid workers and the people they help. It's not a white-versus-black issue; Kamemia was almost as much of an alien in Mangar Angui as Loftus, although his knowledge of Arabic, which some educated southern Sudanese speak, brought him closer to a few. Aid workers learn to be insular: The hands extended toward you—and everyone wants to shake your hand—can transmit any number of gastrointestinal diseases. Loftus has already perfected a method of waving in such a friendly way that people don't realize she hasn't shaken their hands.

for another village, we were watched closely by two women who had been employed, during our visit, to wash our dishes and bring water from a well a half-mile away, carrying the 20-liter containers on their heads. They had been paid with a sack of maize, which would fulfill perhaps a quarter of a family's needs for a month, after the women pounded it into powder and cooked it into a sludgy porridge. But they wanted more, and they held out their hands to Loftus as she stowed her food in her trunk. The women wore torn, soiled bits of clothing and, like all but the luckiest of local villagers, had no shoes.

“Don't beg,” Loftus said sharply to one, in English. “It doesn't make you look good.”

It sounded harsh, and it was. But her words reflected the sort of hard-heartedness aid workers must adopt to keep from being driven into utter depression by the insurmountable misery around them. It also reflected an effort to stay sane by following the rules even when doing so seems callous or futile. You can't save everyone, nor can you protect them from vultures in their midst. Sometimes you have little choice but to walk away. During the food distribution, as women left with entire 50-kilo bags, Loftus spoke with local officials who told her the food would be kept nearby and redistributed the next day. By that time, as they well knew, she would be gone. And the chiefs would divide the food however they wished.
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TIEGLO, SOMALIA

THE ELDERS OF Tieglo gathered in the village's television hut, where you pay the equivalent of five cents for an evening of satellite TV, and listened to Miskell explain that the convoy had been attacked twice and dozens killed. Their people—a scattered 10,000 in all—would not be getting any food, not now. The quartet of elders, carrying finely carved wooden staffs and wearing elegant sarongs, sat in plastic lawn chairs and stroked their beards.

“Hunger is increasing,” one of them said, as a Somali translated for me. “We didn't get any food in December or January. People are selling their livestock for food.” This is true. The WFP was about to appeal for a massive infusion of food aid for countries in the Horn of Africa: According to the UN, roughly eight million people are at risk of starvation in Ethiopia alone, as well as in parts of Kenya and Sudan. Pockets of malnutrition were already developing around Tieglo—indicators of big trouble ahead.

“We have to go,” Miskell replied. “We'll come back as soon as we can.”

The elder shrugged in the resigned manner of men who have come to expect the worst in a country that has experienced the worst. “It is Allah's will,” he said.

It was hard to keep track of all the thievery and corruption. There was the provincial official seeking free food for his orphanage, an empty house filled with kids only when aid workers visited. There was the Baidoa warehouse set on fire to cover up the pilfering of UN supplies by its managers. There was the 370-ton food convoy stolen by a provincial governor's gunmen and used, the rumor goes, to acquire new Land Cruisers. And the WFP official who was so corrupt that, according to a joke making the rounds, WFP stood for “Warlord Food Program.”

When the meeting ended, everyone filed away quietly, as though leaving a funeral. Miskell returned to our tin-roofed room, which was stiflingly hot. şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř, a stiff breeze stirred up clouds of dust.

“Most people in this country would like to see the warlords evaporate,” he told me. “If you cut the food out, who is going to starve? Not the gunmen. They have guns and they will find ways to get food. The other people will starve. If we pulled out there might be some sort of conclusion reached faster than otherwise, but the number of people who would die would be pretty incredible.”

This dilemma is at the heart of the debate over food aid. Perhaps pulling out would be, in the long run, the right thing to do, but doing so would take the ruthlessness of a Machiavellian and the heartlessness of a Malthusian. “Sometimes you feel like packing it in,” Miskell admitted. “Some people would tell you I'm crazy, and maybe they're right.” But he stays.

“My family keeps telling me to come back to America, that I can find a job, I don't need to do this,” he said. “But every time I go to the States I go for about four weeks, and after about a month I know it's time to leave again. Maybe it's because everything is too perfect. I find it boring.”

Miskell is no adrenaline junkie. He may be an unpredictability junkie, however—a guy who wants to be surprised by what unfolds in front of him or what flies over his head. And he wants to feel that he is really doing something. As I discovered, he is pathetically out of touch with the rest of the media-saturated First World, out of touch with IPO fever and the latest box-office sensation. He still cares about starvation, the poor bastard, even after 30 years in the field.

We returned to Baidoa the next day and then flew to Merca. After a 30-minute stopover to load some fuel, the plane headed to Nairobi, with me on it. I watched as Miskell climbed into his Land Cruiser and started home with his quartet of bodyguards. His first order of business was to find a trucking company that could get a convoy of food to Tieglo. He will likely be doing that sort of thing for the rest of his working life. He does not plan to return to live in America, ever. When he retires, he wants to build a house on a plot of land that he owns with his wife. The land is in Mogadishu..

LOKICHOKIO, KENYA

IT HAPPENED QUICKLY, the switch from blighted war zone to bush-camp luxury. Loftus, Kamemia, and I waited at Mangar Angui's airstrip with our gear for the single-engine plane that would take us to the next village. The nine-seater landed with a bump, and the pilot stepped out and told us we wouldn't be going to the other village after all, because the dirt airstrip there, which the villagers had just scratched out of the bush, and over which he had just flown, was too short. We radioed Lokichokio for instructions and were told to return to Kenya.

Loki is a cross between a military camp and a summer camp. The roar of cargo planes is constant, and an army of four-wheel-drive vehicles shuttles between the airstrip and the aid workers' residential compounds a few miles away. The jeeps pass through town, a parched collection of dilapidated storefronts and dome-shaped huts of branches and plastic sheeting inhabited mostly by members of the Turkana tribe.

The main compound has some incongruous Club Med touches: Attractive thatch roofs cover outdoor picnic tables; a disco ball hangs in an open-air bar offering everything from Russian vodka to American cigarettes. There is a volleyball court a few paces away. At night, aid workers unwind over beers kept ice-cold in a refrigerator hooked up to a generator. Later still they might head off in pairs to each others' tents and huts.

Early one evening, Loftus and I sat down for a quiet beer. The bar was crowded with Afrikaner UN pilots bossing around the Kenyan bartender. Friends of Loftus's said hello. A few yards away a swimming pool was surrounded by bougainvilleas in bloom. şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř the perimeter, delineated by a barbed-wire fence patrolled by men with rifles, sat the baked red desolation of northern Kenya.

I asked Loftus to tell me what she was learning, living this life.

“When you see war,” she told me, “when you see a culture that has changed into a war culture, you become grateful. People in the States do not know what it's like to not be free. They have no clue. All the issues that I would scream and march and yell about in college—I didn't know shit. You don't know what loss of freedom is until you see people who have no freedom, until you see people whose children are stolen into slavery.”

On my last day at Loki, the security guards went on strike and held a protest outside the main gate. The local police were called in, and they fired at the crowd, and after the crowd dove for cover, shots were fired at the police and into the compound. Loftus and her colleagues hardly flinched. They finally retreated into a courtyard after several volleys were fired and after the head of security began yelling, “I suggest you get somewhere safe! Anything can happen!” As sporadic gunfire continued for an hour or two, the aid workers slouched on the ground, so casual they could have fallen asleep.

Earlier, when we talked at the bar, Loftus said, “You know you can be shot, you know it, but you really feel like you're not gonna. Somehow, because you're here trying to help, somehow you've got this protective armor. Which is bullshit. You almost have to feel that way to go into it, because if you're constantly thinking, 'Oh, God, I could get shot,' then it doesn't work.” She laughed. “I think it's not going to happen to me, which is crap.”

Loftus has already been evacuated from the field twice—once for malaria, once because her village was about to be attacked by militiamen. One night in Mangar Angui, when the BBC World Service reported the deaths of the eight aid workers near the Ugandan border only about two hundred miles from us, I went to Loftus's hut and told her; she was less interested than I expected. She didn't know them. I told Kamemia. “Oh, yeah?” he said, and returned to his book.

Loftus did know Richard Powell, a WFP worker from Australia who died last year in a plane crash. Powell's ashes were buried in January at a Sudanese village where he had worked, and Loftus cried at his funeral. The African ceremony involved the slaughter of a half-dozen cows, the burial of a live sheep, and at the end of it all, the playing, on a portable stereo, of Pink Floyd's “The Wall.”

It is a form of cognitive dissonance: I could be killed; I can't be killed. John Miskell has this capacity, too. He doesn't scare easily, and he doesn't have a death wish, but he has paid for extra insurance that will provide his family, in the event of his death in the field, with a year of his salary in addition to the three years' salary CARE would chip in. Like Loftus, he knows the risks, and he carries on. There is a difference between risking your life and thinking you will lose it. All aid workers do the former; few do the latter.

Loftus's insurance is a four-leaf clover worn on a pendant around her neck. She doesn't know how much longer she will last in Sudan. A year, maybe two. After that, she's not sure. She wants to sail around the world with her boyfriend and return to aid work, somewhere, somehow. Perhaps not in a war zone, but in a country with development work, the sunnier side of the humanitarian world. I asked whether she might return to America and live a life that would fit within the parameters of “normalcy.” If she wanted to help people, she could work in a soup kitchen; for thrills, she could go climbing, the sort of thing she used to do before heading to Africa. But Loftus told me that when she visits home and sees her old climbing buddies, her attention fades as they talk about mountains they have summited; theirs fades as she talks about Sudan.

My question lingered in the air. Finally, Loftus shook her head from side to side. Ěý

Peter Maass is the author of Love Thy Neighbor, a memoir of covering the war in Bosnia.
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