The Dissent Channel by Elizabeth Shackelford

Author:Elizabeth Shackelford [SHACKELFORD, ELIZABETH]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2020-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

WE PULLED INTO the residential compound and were greeted like victors returning from battle. We’d left our poor colleagues in Nairobi a proper mess to sort out on their end, including undocumented children and a few people they couldn’t confirm to be Americans after all. Somehow, they got them all out of the airport eventually, but I assured Suzanne, who was helming the operation there, that we’d try to make the next round a cleaner bunch. That would be tomorrow, though. For now, we’d try to enjoy a job mostly well done.

I walked directly into the evening emergency action committee meeting that’d just begun and was met with a round of high fives and smiles. I knew not everyone in our leadership thought it was a good idea to leave me in charge of the evacuations, but maybe now I’d earned my stripes. I was still shaken by some of the decisions of the day, but on balance it was a good moment.

Only now, with the pressure starting to lift, did I realize that my broken foot was throbbing and swollen. Not surprising, as I’d been on it for over twelve hours and it simply hadn’t healed yet. All day, wiser colleagues had implored me to sit down, take a break, but time seemed too precious, and I felt responsible for every piece of our mission. I was determined not to be a weak link.

I propped my now very sore foot up on a chair and gave a quick briefing of the day’s events, most of which the entire team had followed by radio in real time. We discussed other developments. Ambassador Page had met with President Kiir that afternoon. Special Envoy Booth was considering a visit. Juba had been largely calm and quiet, but fighting in Bor, about two hundred kilometers north of Juba, was heating up. Today’s evacuations weren’t the end, I realized. They were just the beginning.

Someone suggested I go shower and put the boot back on my foot, and I complied. Limping back to my little metal cottage, I realized just how much had changed in our compound since I had left that morning. Our community had largely been dominated by a USAID crowd of humanitarians and development professionals; they outnumbered State Department officials three-to-one, at least. But now almost all of them were gone, and soldiers had taken their place—a stark contrast. Our new army neighbors had made themselves known quickly. As part of their security protocols, the East African Response Force created an internal security perimeter of large rolls of barbed wire and other obstacles. Metal stars littered sidewalks near the laundry facility. Dining tables had been piled up in walkways between units to block exit routes. Upturned chairs littered open spaces between buildings. Sandbagged shooting positions were set up in the gazebo. Heavily armed gentlemen in military fatigues paced up and down the interior wall by the pool, part of our new twenty-four-hour patrol.

Unfortunately, my unit was located outside the new internal perimeter. Not terribly reassuring.

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