Absolutely Nothing There!

Nine years ago, in ’06 was it? Yeah. I did a six-month tour in the Sudan, south Sudan, trying to enforce the peace agreement there. And again, I got time off work to go there and so forth and so on so that was good. And we were…Sudan was a hard spot. I mean, there’s no word in the English dictionary that would describe ‘nothing.’ Like, what is nothing? There’s nothing there. The people are… they live off the land but it’s a desert. So, how they do it? I don’t know. Anyway, there were six of us and we were sent to this place called… a little town called Bor. B-O-R. And it was on the Nile River, way down in south Sudan and there was a lot of killings on the go there. And there was six of us that went there; myself, a guy from Brazil, two from Zimbabwe, one from Yemen and one from the Chinese Navy. So, we had a great mix. When we got there we had to live in… picture this room here, knock the windows out, there’s no electricity, there’s leaking in the roof and it’s been like it for the past two years. The wind and dirt blowing through. That’s what we lived in. One of the guys that was with us, one of the Africans from Zimbabwe… he was in charge of getting food for us because we had to buy our own food from the local market and such. And he’d go down into the market place every morning at around five or six o’clock and see what’s there and pick the best. So you almost had to trust him. And he came back one morning and he said to me, “We got enough meat now for the next four days.” They just killed a cow on the market. Like, if you walked down to the street here, there’s the old cow laid out and buy your meat from it that way. That’s the way it was done. We had no water, we ran out of water. And we had to use chlorine pills that I had with me for a week because the flights couldn’t get in because of the weather. So, you’re taking water from the Nile River, which is the most polluted place in the world and put it in bottles and putting in these pills to make sure you had drinking water. That’s sort of the hardship. And in some places like in Sierra Leone, in the jungle where we went to… again, it’s hard to describe but you almost had to be there. Like, we had an incidence where they would come across the border from Liberia and these places and snatch young girls and go off with them. And you never see them again. And people will ask like, “That can’t happen. How do you do that? You phone the police.” Well, first of all, how are you going to phone the police? There’s no phones. There’s no road system. There’s no nothing. There’s no lights, there’s no nothing there. You could almost get away with what you like. You got to almost picture yourself being dropped in the middle of nowhere, now live.

Officer Hickey describes the culture shock felt when arriving in south Sudan where the country had absolutely nothing to offer them; no accommodations, no food, nothing at all.

Bill Hickey

Mr. Bill Hickey was born July 5, 1956 in a small town outside of St., John’s, Newfoundland. As a young boy, Mr. Hickey always has great involvement with sports and recreation. Realizing his desire for community work, Mr. Hickey held a career as a Police Officer and as well at a very young age joined the Reserves in role as chief warrant officer having opportunities to deploy to different areas of the world. Together with this Police and Reservist career, Mr. Hickey expresses his great sense of pride for his achievements and opportunities throughout his years in service. After 34.5 years of police service, Mr. Hickey has retired and now resides in St. John’s Newfoundland with his family. As part of the delegation of Newfoundland Veterans, Mr. Hickey accepted the opportunity as part of the 100th Anniversary of Battles of Somme and Beaumont-Hamel to travel overseas to commemorate this special event.