Stone Kingdoms by David Park

Author:David Park
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408859018
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

16

Every hour brought new arrivals to Bakalla. Whatever was happening between the rival clans had scared people enough to make them abandon their homes and seek a safer place. There were no tents left, little we could provide for shelter, and by then everything that could have been scavenged or improvised had been picked clean, and so arriving families simply squatted in the dust and marked out a space with the thin spread of their possessions. Sometimes fights would break out over the ownership of something but they would subside almost as quickly as they started, as negotiation restored calm. Apart from the toll the journey had taken, most of those who arrived were in reasonable health and had left homes in villages where there was probably enough food to get by. In coming to Bakalla they had made themselves reliant on the Agency, but their fear of whatever was out there made it impossible for them to return home. At first we tried to keep a record of these arrivals, names, numbers, family relationships, but after a while it proved too time-consuming and eventually we abandoned it.

More children than we could cope with came to the school and Nadra enlisted help to maintain some semblance of order and purpose. But it felt as if we were being slowly overwhelmed. We needed more staff, more resources, but Charlie was pessimistic about the prospect of any early improvement and increasingly irritable and unpredictable in his manner, answering questions abruptly or simply side-stepping them with flippant replies. For a day we lost radio contact with the capital and he stalked up and down, never going out of the clinic or carrying out any medical work.

‘What’s happening?’ Rollins asked him one evening after the compound gates had been closed.

‘There’s fighting in the capital, areas where it’s not safe to travel. All the agencies have been trying to negotiate safe routes from the docks and warehouses but every time they pay out, someone else has joined the queue with their hand out. There isn’t enough money to pay all these people any more, and a lot of the food is being commandeered and re-sold on the streets. We’ll know for sure in the next forty-eight hours but there’s a possibility that all relief agencies will threaten a pull-out if someone doesn’t take local control and make the right guarantees. In the meantime we need to be ready to leave here at very short notice. What that means is have a personal bag packed and help get drugs and medical supplies into crates. Everything else stays. It mightn’t come to it, because there’s still the real possibility of international intervention, but we have to be ready - and under no circumstances should you discuss with anyone outside Agency staff what we’ve been talking about. Any sort of panic in a situation like this would be absolutely fatal.’

For once Rollins made no comment, seemed to accept what he had heard and made no attempt to ask further questions.

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