EARLIER THIS year, Sharon Commins read An Evil Cradling, Brian Keenan's harrowing account of being held hostage for 4½ years in the suburbs of Beirut. Little did she know then that, months later she would be drawing inspiration from Keenan's book as she and her Ugandan colleague Hilda Kawuki endured their own kidnapping ordeal.
It stretched to 107 miserable and fearful days in the heat and dust of Darfur.
“His take on the mentality of his captors was so apt in describing ours. You could cut and paste what he said and it is applicable,” Ms Commins told The Irish Times yesterday in Khartoum.
“Even his almost-childish dialogue with his co-abductee was kind of similar. It was good that ours [experience] was mirroring his to some extent. I perceived this to be a positive thing.”
Sitting under the shade at the home of Ireland’s honorary consul to Sudan, Ronnie Shaoul, as they waited to fly back to Dublin and Kampala, Ms Commins and Ms Kawuki spoke animatedly with colleagues and friends, their tired, pinched and sunburnt faces betraying only the merest hint of what they had suffered at the hands of their captors.
On the evening of July 3rd, the two Goal aid workers were about to sit down to watch TV at their compound in the north Darfur town of Kutum. “Three guys came into the sitting room. They put guns to our heads and said get into the car,” recalls Sharon. “Initially, I thought it was burglary because there had been a spate of robberies in the area but when they said ‘Into the car, into the car’ we knew it was an abduction.”
The men kept repeating: “No problem, this is strictly business,” in Arabic as they drove the two women across the desert for several hours until they arrived close to the border with Chad.
It was the beginning of an ordeal that would last three months, two weeks and one day.
At the outset, the women were upbeat and hopeful their abduction would end as swiftly as the two others that had taken place in Darfur earlier this year. “I actually think we coped remarkably well. We didn’t cry,” Ms Commins said.
However their captors soon turned threatening and abusive and subjected the two women to mock executions. “I had never seen that level of anger and sheer evilness in people’s eyes,” she recalls. “It was a shock to have people screaming at you in Arabic and pointing a gun to your head or shooting bullets around you.
“They would make us sit down or force us on our knees . . . with everyone pointing guns at us. They would sometimes shoot a few bullets to frighten us. Each time you’re hoping it is a mock assassination but you don’t know.”
The two women were moved several times around a mountainous area of Darfur, where they were held in the open air both day and night. The desert environment was so harsh even their captors found it difficult to cope.
“Any guard who had to guard us more than 10 days was literally cracking up,” Ms Commins said. “There were very close to emotional breakdowns taking place and these were people who live there.”
She said some of the gang sympathised with them and others even appeared to question the kidnapping. “With one or two of the guards, there were moments when you would start crying and they would soften and be on the verge of crying themselves,” she recalls.
“There was genuine sympathy with us but they didn’t equate that what they were doing was ruining us. For them it was just money, but occasionally they did seem to see how badly they were making us suffer.”
She described how she felt her determination and spirit sapping as the days turned to weeks and then months. “In the initial days we were fierce.We felt we could cope with it and we had energy but, as the time dragged on, I found it harder,” she said.
“You have less of a resilience to let it bounce off you. The least little thing and you just feel helpless . . . I knew my parents, family and friends were fighting for us, but I had moments of severe doubt.”
Ms Kawuki said she was determined they would get out even if their time in captivity lasted years. “Even if I had to crawl out of here, see my family for five minutes and then drop dead, that’s fine. I’d be happy with that,” she said. “[I had] no doubt I was going to get out.”
The two women had to survive on strictly rationed food and water supplies. “When drinking water became a problem then it was much more difficult to deal with,” Ms Commins said.
Both said they were very fortunate to have each other for support. “Because we worked so well as colleagues together, we already had a strong foundation,” Ms Commins said. “With everything that happened, our response was the same. We never had a divergent opinion on what course of action to take in relation to specific things. . . . Put various other personalities in there and things could have been drastically different.”
An Evil Cradlingwas not the only book that came to mind in the desert. They recalled BBC reporter Alan Johnston's account of the 114 days he spent in captivity in Gaza. Sharon also mentions What is the What, American novelist Dave Eggers's book about Valentino Achak Deng, one of Sudan's so-called "lost boys" who spent months walking across the desert after militias razed his village.
“Both of us had read the book and I think we were both thinking, if a little boy can get through that, then we can get through this too.”