plenty pikin and apple pie...

We opened the door to the house and were instantly greeted with the smell of apple pie. A little out of place in this African setting, but welcome, all the same. It was a nice gift at the end of a long day, to be sure.

Today I had the special treat of sitting in with Sandra and Annekoos in the Outpatient Pediatric Clinic which shares a property with the Fistula Centre. It was really, really great for me to get a taste for what a clinic such as that takes to run on a daily basis, and what the work is like, especially since it’s part of my heart to work in such a clinic focusing on maternal-fetal care and well-baby care. I saw lots of babies, lots of young children, and there were a lot of tears. :) But I think that I would cry, too, if I felt crummy and had no other way to express it.

I don’t even remember all of the kids that I saw, but there were a few cases which stood out from among the rest.

One was a three day old baby with a clef lip. Upon giving birth, the mother, one of five wives, was instantly ridiculed and derided by the other women. She packed everything up, I suppose, and headed off almost immediately because she was in Freetown today. She had come to visit her sister, but upon arrival, she found her sister’s house empty. Her sister had gone to Kambia – another town up country, close to Guinea. So she had stayed the night with the neighbor and had come today after someone at another clinic told her about Mercy Ships. The Africa Mercy will be in Sierra Leone in February, and I’m hoping that she will get a surgical spot. Sandra added her to the list of patients she is referring, so we’ll just have to wait and see. It was so sad to see the mother so crushed by the ignorance of the other wives. I can’t even begin to imagine the weight that she has carried since delivery, all the way coming here, believing her child to be completely abnormal, not understanding how this could happen or what it means, blaming herself for doing something wrong during the pregnancy or during delivery…I think that when she left, a lot of that had gone. A beautiful transformation.

The other was a young boy. Really sweet, quiet, and very intelligent-looking, he had come in for various complaints of unknown origin. He came with his father, whose love and deep concern for his son was written all over his features. It wasn’t very long before the father told us that the boy had lost his mother about ten months ago. And suddenly, the pain was there, the uncertainty of suddenly being a single parent with two children, having to do things you’ve never had to do before. And now one is sick, and you’ve never had to sort out the medicines. And you look at the boy, and you wonder how many times he has cried himself to sleep at night.

Here, now, in my room again, I am surrounded by the exuberant sounds of the community around me. I hear the children calling to one another, a mom calling for her son, and men talking business across the road. The clouds roll in to bring more rain, and the room grows dark, only illuminated by my computer screen. My life is so incredibly far from that of the mothers and fathers and children that I saw come through the clinic today. But for a moment, here and there, I understood, and I shared a bit of their life…