Off The Beaten Track: The Camino Moment

Dr. Lanice Jones is a Canadian family physician, intrepid world traveler, and adventurer in every sense of the word. Before she embarks on her next big adventure, joining Doctors Without Borders in a remote corner of Pakistan, she shares her last great adventure with us.

The reason why someone begins the ancient Pilgrimage of St. James is not the same reason why a pilgrim finishes it. Often, a pilgrim will recall the moment, the Camino moment of clarity, expansiveness or inner peace that marks the turning point of the inner journey. For me, the Camino moment happened on a cool, foggy morning five kilometres out of Finesterra, the End of the World.

I began the pilgrimage of Santiago de Compostella with two dear friends on August 28, my fifty-sixth birthday. Our plan was to walk about ten days from St. Jean Pied a Port on the French side, across the Pyrennes into Spain, then catch a train from Burgos to Sarria and walk another eight days to Santiago. We’d set the intention that this would be a spiritual journey and had each brought readings to share, along with hours of walking in meditation, prayer, or contemplation.  Our route took us through the tumbling ridges and peaks of the mountains, into rolling rich vineyards and fields of sunflowers. We averaged twenty kilometres a day, with plenty of time to explore the churches that marked the route, a living history spanning a thousand years.

Coming into Santiago was a mixed blessing. We were so happy to have accomplished our goal, to have shared such a rich experience, deepening our friendships and our spiritual practices. But here, we would go our separate ways. My friends were returning to Canada, and I was walking on alone to Finesterra, to complete another two hundred kilometres to the coast and back.

I took four days to reach Finesterra. As I crested the last range of hills, the ocean stretched forth, rimmed by white sand beaches, and I could imagine the Romans believing that they had indeed come to the end of the world. The evening of my arrival, I joined up with four other women to share a bottle of wine, bread, and cheese on the rocks below the lighthouse, where tradition demanded that we build a fire and ritually burn an item of our clothing to signify the burning away of our old lives.

The next day, I started alone in the early dawn under a heavy fog. The route wound up through two small villages into a eucalyptus and pine forest. I was tired and lonely, wondering what I was doing hiking another hundred kilometres to Muxia and back to Santiago. I felt I didn’t belong here, in the damp and the fog, struggling in Spanish to ask directions along the poorly marked trail.

As I passed an old Celtic cross, a small dark face with a pointed nose poked out past a crumbling stone fence. It was a fox! He looked at me, and I looked at him, both of us silent and still. A dog barked in the distance, and the fox glanced at the noise, back at me, then turned and trotted away, his glorious tail waving behind him. A few meters away, a chicken scratched in the dirt, oblivious to the predator, which had just passed by. Beyond the chicken, a dog sniffed the scented air. 

I stood in contemplation, wondering about it all. Who belonged here? The fox? The chicken? The dog? The woman? 

Something tight and hard broke open, like a spring releasing, or a shell cracking apart. All of us belonged here, one no more than the other. All of us were equally part of the glorious whole, and each of us reflected the whole. 

It has been a few weeks since that special moment. Life has returned to “normal” back at home, but something has shifted, something that made that 550-kilometre journey seem like nothing. And yet everything has changed.

Off The Beaten Track: An Arctic Adventure

My nephew Steven, my then-teenagers, Eric and Minetta,
and I in our bug-protective gear preparing to load our canoes.

Dr. Lanice Jones is a Canadian family physician, world traveler, and adventurer in every sense of the word. This week, she shares another one of her many adventures with us.

“What about the Thelon, Mom?” my fifteen year-old daughter and sixteen year-old son questioned. It was mid-May 2006, and we’d been studying maps and reading books about Canada’s Arctic for months. We’d signed up for canoe lessons, bought life jackets and paddles, dry bags, and a new tent in anticipation of a family canoe trip, when suddenly my husband of thirty years ran off with another woman.

“We’re going, kids. I don’t know how, but we’re going to do it together,” I encouraged. “Dad isn’t the only one who can have adventures!”

Caribou crossing the Thelon River. 

I’d fallen in love with the Arctic at seventeen, when I’d worked my first job at a fishing camp in Canada’s North-West Territories. Ever since, I’d dreamed of exploring the Thelon River, Nunavut’s longest river, home to muskox and caribou, barren-ground grizzly and wolves, and I wasn’t going to give up that dream. We’d find a way!

I called my nephew Steve, begging him to be our fourth paddler. Meanwhile, I spent two months drying food, packing dry bags, and a food barrel. The work was therapeutic as I triple-checked meals and gear, too focused to dwell on the great rift in my heart. There would be time for grieving during the weeks on the water, where we’d be entirely alone for weeks at a time.

Our float plane taking off after leaving us
alone in the Arctic wilderness....

We were dropped off by float plane, just east of Warden’s Grove. Black flies and mosquitoes swarmed against our bug shirts, protecting us from being eaten alive as we pushed our way through thick bush to pay homage to the place where John Hornby and his young nephew died of starvation “overwintering” on the Thelon in 1927.

Our time on the water was idyllic as we paddled with the current, searching for a glimpse of muskox or caribou, or trailing a fishing line to supplement our dried food. But land was another matter. I’d spent five summers of my youth in the Arctic, and while I didn’t like the bugs, I viewed them as a necessary evil.

My vegetarian daughter caught
the biggest jackfish!

However, Steve and my kids hated the constant swarm. We’d prepare to land by tugging on our gloves, tightening down our pant legs, and zipping up our bug shirts. We’d have races to see who could get their tents up quickest, then two would prepare the dinner while two would make a cook fire. When dinner was ready, three would enter the dining tent and undertake “the kill,” swiping as many bugs as possible with a handkerchief while the last person would pass through the food and dash inside.

By early August, the wind was kicking up, blowing away the swarm but making paddling difficult. As we approached our pick-up spot, where the Thelon entered Beverly Lake, thunder clouds piled up from the North, and a howling wind tore at the canoes. My son, Eric, and I hugged the lee shore, digging in our paddles, to pull forward a few feet while the wind clawed us backward. We could see where we needed to be, but it took us an hour to paddle a few hundred feet. Meanwhile, Steven and my daughter, Minetta, had taken a different tack and ended up on the windward side of the river, fighting against breaking whitecaps as they strove to close the gap between us. I prayed silently for Steven’s strength to hold as he dug his paddle deeply against the savage water that threatened to drive him and Minetta back to the far shore. It seemed to take forever for them to cross the river, and Eric and I waded into the water to help beach their canoe against the wind.

Eric and I use a tent fly to set a sail on a downwind day.

We were holed up by the wind for four days. We explored empty wolf dens dug into the eskers, long low hills of sand left behind by the retreating glaciers. We scrambled up a pingo, a hill of frost pushed up out of the muskeg and covered with vegetation, gaining a view of the endless tundra stretching in all directions. We even built a hot rock sauna in a sheltered cove using willow branches and our tent flies, warming ourselves after a brisk dip in the river.

Finally, the wind dropped, and in the evening, two motor boats churned up the river, their wakes glistening like silver. Our canoes were tied down safe for pickup at a later date, while we tossed our gear in the fishing boats, eager to get a few miles in before the full dark. A day later, we pulled up to the shores of Baker Lake, our new Inuit friends welcoming us to their community for our last night in the Arctic.

Eric compares his hand to a huge grizzly bear print left on the shore
where we had a swim, made dinner, and quickly left again!

As we shared a simple meal, we talked about the life on the land. Our hosts listened and nodded as my kids described how they’d cooked a meal on a beach covered with grizzly paw prints larger than the prints of our own feet then left the area spotlessly clean as we packed up and canoed downstream for five kilometers to avoid any nocturnal visitors. They described how they’d learned to cook a fish using spruce bows as nature’s grill, and how Steve had taught them to use a map and compass first, before being allowed to check their position with a GPS.

I looked at my sun-burnished crew, glowing with health and the joy of living so close to the earth, and while my heart would feel bruised for years to come, I was also filled with the love and pride of my family and what we’d accomplished on our Arctic Adventure. 

Off the Beaten Track: Inside South Sudan

Dr. Lanice Jones is a Canadian family physician, world traveler, and adventurer in every sense of the word. She recently spent two months as a medical volunteer in South Sudan, and on the eve of that country’s historic vote, she shares her experience with us.
 

While I have had the privilege of working and studying medicine on several continents, my last two months volunteering in South Sudan have been a life-changing experience. South Sudan is the poorest country with the highest maternal and pediatric mortality that I’ve worked in. It is isolated by lack of roads and infrastructure, lack of supplies, and lack of skilled staff. Yet the culture is vibrant, passionate, and filled with hope that the vote on January 9th will result in independence and a better future.

South and North Sudan suffered a 17-year civil war that ended five years ago with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. The civil war was complex, as North and South Sudan have different ethnic groups, different religions, different languages, and in the middle of the conflict, oil fields that span the border. With the signing of the CPA, South Sudan was supposed to have more autonomy, better resource allocation and a greater political voice, but most South Sudanese would state that their hopes with the CPA have not been realized.

At the heart of the separation conflict lie the border communities that contain the oil reserves. The oil from South Sudan is sent by pipeline to refineries on the coast of North Sudan, and from there, the bulk of the oil is shipped to China. China has been trading oil from South Sudan for weapons for North Sudan for over a decade. The president of North Sudan, Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, has been indicted for war crimes against Darfur. He has a long history of military aggression. Meanwhile, South Sudan has military support and training from America, although this is a more covert operation. 

Lanice assisting Dr. Benjamin with a
gunshot wound to the foot

The doctors I was working with are some of the Lost Boys and Girls who fled South Sudan during the war, seeking refugee status. Cuba had accepted many of these child refugees, educating them in preparation for returning to help rebuild South Sudan. Unfortunately, when their education was completed, Sudan was still at war and these young adults came to Canada and America. In Canada, they worked in menial jobs as our government doesn’t recognize their medical education as being valid.

When North and South Sudan signed the CPA in 2006, a group of Cuban-educated physicians approached the University of Calgary, asking for help to return back to South Sudan. My university created an education program in Canada and Nairobi to upgrade their medical knowledge and skills, and I’d been one of their teachers. Now it was my turn to be the student.

I spent two months in South Sudan working alongside my colleagues in three different hospitals, and I was part of a one-week educational camp with specialists from Sudan and Canada focusing on obstetrics, pediatrics, and anaesthesia.

Patients and family members with

their makeshift tent at the

Marial Lou hospital compound

On a daily basis, I was humbled by the skills of my colleagues, as they ran hospitals with minimal laboratory support, no x-ray facilities, limited supplies, and minimal staff. Yet they saved lives each and every day. One day in particular, a 13-day old baby arrived with a fever of 102 degrees, comatose with infection from a difficult birth in a mud hut. In an American hospital, that infant would have been in intensive Care, with round-the-clock, expert nursing staff, an infectious disease and neonataology specialist, and continuous oxygen and monitoring. We had no nursing staff, and I and my colleague Dr. Ajak took turns every six hours to check on the infant and administer intravenous antibiotics. This may not sound so difficult, but imagine getting up in the dark, with no electricity, pulling on gum-boots to avoid snakes and scorpions, creeping by flashlight along a flooded pathway to the hospital, beating off swarms of malaria-infested mosquitoes to attend to the infant curled up under a mosquito net with his mother, and no one speaking English! Within three days, the little one was alert and nursing well and was discharged a week later with no obvious ill effects.

Another afternoon, I was called to see a woman in labour, and was told that a doctor who was not part of our education program had indicated that she had a huge abdomen from extra fluid in the uterus. As it was her sixth delivery, which is another risk for bleeding, I was teaching the community health worker how to prevent bleeding after delivery. We turned our backs to get the medication ready, and out shot a tiny baby, clearly not at term. I grabbed the infant and rushed to a rickety table with a dirty ventilation bag, mask, and re-usable suction bottle. The infant was blue, not breathing, and had a very low pulse. I ran through a resuscitation protocol while the “nurses” watched in amazement. Most didn’t know anything about resuscitating sick newborns. I peeked back at the woman on the broken old delivery table, and her abdomen was still huge – clearly not just from extra fluid!

I rushed back, put on a clean glove, and examined her, confirming that she had a second twin waiting its turn to be born. I requested that they call in the other doctor, as I was still attending the first sick infant. He returned, re-examined the woman, announced that she had a twin, that the mother was not contracting, and walked out of the room! There I was, having never delivered twins before, with one unskilled community health worker, one sick twin, a second one on the way, and the other doctor simply walked out. In our hospital, any twin delivery would be attended by a team of doctors and nurses for each twin and the mother.

Once I had the first twin stabilized, wrapped in a skimpy rag and passed off to a family member to hold, I prepared to deliver the second twin. This little one came out pink and screaming, a blessing, but by the time I’d delivered the placenta and ensured that the woman was stable and not hemorrhaging, the second twin was grunting and in distress. I had to bludgeon my way into the operating theater to “borrow” an oxygen concentrator, and I insisted that they keep running the generator to keep the concentrator on until the little twin’s breathing returned to normal. Having just got the second twin sorted out, with both getting a mixture of sugar water for feeding as there was no formula in the hospital, I was called back to see the mother, who was now comatose, feverish, and seizing from presumable malaria, which had likely triggered the labor!

A month later when I returned to this community, I managed to track down this mother and her twins, and visited them in their tukel, or thatched mud hut. Both babies were alive, and while still scrawny, they were nursing, taking extra formula, and gaining weight.

While the world watches, South Sudan will vote this Sunday, January 9. My sense is that the majority will vote for separation. With oil revenues at stake, while President Al-Bashir states he will abide by the vote, I fear that conflict will erupt. My colleagues will continue to provide the best care possible under horrendous conditions, but I fear for them and their communities. And I hope to return to help.