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With the crisis beginning to come under control, relief agencies headquartered in Nairobi began to rethink their role in Sudan, favoring a hands-off approach aimed at getting the Sudanese to develop their own medical capabilities. Seaman was criticized in some quarters for being too hands-on, for doing too much. Hesselink says Seaman faced a mini-revolt in 1995-96 when some colleagues insisted that she see patients only during normal working hours or risk being sent home on the next plane. An MSF bureaucrat who replaced Hesselink as MSF's country director briefly banished Seaman to languish in Nairobi, before the bureaucrat was herself recalled to Holland. McHarg, Seaman's current boss, appreciates her special talents but also sees the need to go beyond emergency medicine. "If we pull out of Sudan tomorrow," she says, "we'd like to know that we are leaving something that lasts."
The Nuer are clear on where they stand in the hands-on vs. hands-off debate. Chief Tongwar, one of the area's most respected head chiefs, told a recent council meeting, "Jill is like me. What I think, she knows." Then he added softly, "If you did not come here, Jill, everyone would have died. We have named many of our daughters Jill. Now we will also name our sons Jill." After Chief Tongwar finished speaking, Chief Elizabeth, representing the women in the village of Nhiadhiu, stood up. "No other doctor came to us," she said. "Only you."
As long as she is allowed to continue, Seaman, 45, shows no sign of taking a step back in confronting human misery. "We all make choices," she says. "Sometimes you can decide to do one thing, and to do that one thing really well." McHarg has assigned her, along with De Wit and another doctor, to a flying satellite team that roams from village to village treating kala-azar and tuberculosis. TB is a special problem today because kala-azar has so weakened the Nuer's immune system that any subsequent infection is often fatal. In August, McHarg dispatched Seaman to Ethiopia to survey a new outbreak of kala-azar. Seaman is also working on a pilot project to try out a drug for kala-azar that will cost a tenth the price of Pentostam.
But it is really the work with patients that captures her. This summer she set up a camp in Manajang, Sudan, where the airstrip was so overgrown that the pilot was terrified of landing. In control once again, she seemed back in her element. There was no one to hold her back from healing the sick. On a recent night at around 10, a loud, flailing sound erupted outside Seaman's tent. A mother was desperately trying to revive her eight-year-old son, who was in a critical stage of cerebral malaria. As he slipped in and out of consciousness, his mother frantically tried to keep him breathing. When Seaman bent down to get closer, a swarm of mosquitoes descended on her ankles and arms in an African feeding frenzy. Ignoring her own discomfort, she prepared an IV, but the boy's blood pressure was so low and his arms so thin that she could not find a vein.