communication, perspective, and blogging continued

communication is a funny thing. i never thought that when i left sierra leone that my ability to communicate via internet and e-mail would so dramatically decline. i never thought the internet at the team house and the fistula centre – admittedly up and down – would be more reliable and generally faster than the internet at my house in van, texas. it has been wonderful to have my phone back – to hear the voices of the ones i love. despite that it’s taken quite a bit to not get frustrated at my internet-less state.

that said, i write this as we drive to beaumont, texas to move my brother into university there. he’s enrolled in the texas academy for leadership in the humanities, talh for short. it’s an accelerated high school program in which high school juniors and seniors enroll as full time students at lamar university, live on campus, and lead the life of a college student while all of their class credit counts to finish high school requirements as well. it’s a small program with a dedicated staff allowing for a smoother transition into college life. my sister went through the same program, and i would have as well if we had not moved that same year from the ship to the small east texas town of van. too many changes at once.

i want to keep writing here as i go back to school and continue along this adventure of life. my first plan was to use this blog as a tool over the summer to stay in touch with those far away and as a processing tool to deal with the many experiences i knew i would face. but i’ve been learning that life and its happenings can be almost anything you want it to be with a simple adjustment of perspective. having a blog forced me to keep my eyes open when i hit the doldrums of my summer in freetown and felt that i had perhaps written about everything worth writing about. but i was so wrong. peeling back the layers of preconceived ideas about what’s worth mentioning, i discovered a myriad of little things which each deserved its own mention: a look shared between two patients on the ward which, though silent, said so much; the little girl in the poda-poda wearing a wig that made her look twice her age, sitting on her father’s lap and swaying to the reggae music blasting through us and out the windows; the overwhelming feeling that hit me every time i sat down with one of the ladies for my study and recorded bits and pieces of her rich and textured life. but the pattern of life’s weaving is just as complex and detailed in east texas or in boston as in freetown. i just need to open my eyes, change my lenses – any number of cliches could be inserted here. :)

that’s all i wanted to say really. that and thank you to all of you who have been faithful readers. it’s much more fun to write knowing that you’re writing for someone not just the nameless void of cyberspace. i head back to bc on friday, and the adventure continues...

a turtle in east texas

home.

it’s such a fickle, flexible word.

i was talking to christa the other day, and she said that if she could pick one animal to describe her, it would be a monkey. i think my animal would have to be a turtle. someone that takes her home everywhere she goes. i realized that today when, as we pulled into the parking lot, i told my mother something about, “that’s just like home.” home being sierra leone. but sierra leone isn’t my home anymore. i have left that place, and i have taken my home with me.

but can east texas be my home for these few short days? i suppose it must be because i am here. funny logic, i guess.

but i am in east texas. that is for sure. i had the funniest experience the first day i got in. having sat empty for a month, our house and the refrigerator in it were empty. so i ran out to the grocery store. i was so excited, really, to be driving again – to go to a supermarket and know exactly what you were going to find there. it was my first real thing to do, having landed only a few hours earlier.

as i was checking out, an elderly woman came walking into the store holding a remote control in her hand. ‘ah need to git sum bat’tries fer this here ree-mote,’ she announced to know one in particular. ‘but ah cain’t git the back thingy off.’ the store manager appeared from behind one of the shelves, greeted her by name – apparently an old friend, and ushered her over to the display of energizer batteries while he took the remote to sort out the back. i smiled to myself and then turned my attention back to the cashier who was asking for my membership discount card.

a few minutes later, after everything had been sacked and reloaded into my cart, one of the clerks appeared to take my trolley out to the car. at brookshire’s you can never take your own bags to the car. he was a young guy, and we chatted about the weather. a dry spell has hit here leading to several weeks of temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. somehow it came out that i had been in sierra leone, and he asked if i was from teen mania. no – mercy ships. he had heard of us, and knew several people that worked up at the ioc. by that time everything had been loaded into the back of the car, and i was pulling out my keys and sunglasses. he turned to go, wishing me a nice day, but then he turned back. “is there anything i can be prayin’ for – for you or for sierra leone?” i looked from his clear, honest eyes, to the metal cross he wore on a leather cord around his neck. yes, i thought before answering, i’m back in east texas...

rain and re-entry

whenever i told anyone that my flight out of sierra leone was on the tenth of august, the reply was generally the same: the moment of thought, the widening eyes, then the same comment, ‘the day before the elections.’ no one ever said to me, ‘oh, the rainy season.’ but, in the end, it wasn’t the looming elections or campaigning or little skirmishes in the streets which made my journey out of sierra leone the adventure that it was. it was simply the rain.

10 August, 04:02 – awake to the sound of pounding rain rattling the windows outside. surprised to be hearing the rain over the generator, only to pleasantly realize that npa has come to 12 lumley road.

07:29 – ride to work for the last time. note the angry waves off of lumley beach.

09:13 – leave for bliss bakery. get relatively wet despite the nice young guy ferrying people from their cars under a giant beach umbrella.

10:37 – return to work. find that lumley roundabout has turned into a river.

11:56 – phone the helicopter and hovercraft. both are operating their 14:00 services.

12:10 – decide to try for the 14:30 helicopter rather than wait and potentially miss the 18:30 flight. the frenzy begins.

13:07 – grab a sandwich in terri’s apartment. begin goodbyes.

13:25 – tear off a massive piece of plastic with stefani to cover my rucksack. followed by a hilarious attempt to cover said rucksack.

13:45 – load into the 287

13:46 – realize the 287 won’t start

13:48 – load into the land cruiser

13:49 – last hug. last wave.

13:58 – arrive at the heliport. can barely make out the helicopter through the rain and wind. assured the helicopter will go on time. yeah, right.

15:32 – assured the helicopter will go by 16:00.

17:14 – load everything back into the land cruiser

17:18 – arrive at the hovercraft terminal

19:21 – hovercraft departs aberdeen. we were finally on our way as the rain still fell, although the dull roar had calmed to a steady trickle.

departing lungi airport deserves a separate post all its own. quite the experience, i can assure you, full of things like manually propelling the luggage conveyor belt, having to personally assure that your bags make it through the security check and on the carousel headed to the plane, and having your bags searched and a package of peanuts removed while the water was allowed to stay.

once on the plane, things went well. i was sitting next to a lovely elderly sierra leonean woman headed to the uk to help her daughter-in-law who just birthed her third child. three under four – i’m sure grandmum’s help was appreciated. at one point, the nameless woman leaned over to me and asked me in her quiet, whispery voice, ‘are you a believer?’ ‘yes, i am,’ i replied, with an equal measure of the solemnity the woman conveyed. ‘well, that is wonderful,’ was her final statement before returning to her book entitled ‘seven kingdom principles.’

seven hours later, we arrived in london, and the past thirty-six hours or so have been lovely. although, i must say i miss sierra leone terribly. i missed sierra leone when i went to say ‘tenki, ya’ to the immigration officer and then again to the girl behind the ticket counter at the train station and again in the store today. i missed sierra leone when i had to go back to the bathroom, remembering that we do, in fact, have enough water to flush the toilet every time. i missed sierra leone when i thought of the wonderful teammates i have left behind, and how i wish i could share the blessings of these past few days with them. stefani – i went to starbucks for you (twice!) :D i keep finding myself practicing krio in my head as has been my habit these past few months. i keep thinking about what everyone is doing back in 12 lumley road.

tomorrow is monday. tomorrow i will finish my journey and return to my house, to my room, to my life in the united states. tomorrow morning someone else will feed charles’s coffee addiction in the office. someone else will clap and sing in morning devotions. someone else will sit and pray with the women going in for surgery. someone else now somewhere else.

262,800

from this moment, i have seventy-three hours left in sierra leone. what those seventy three hours will bring, i have no idea. but that is four thousand three hundred and eighty minutes. that’s two hundred sixty-two thousand, eight hundred seconds. 262,800 moments – 262,800 more chances for 262,800 memories. it seems like a lot, but it isn’t enough.

being so close to the end lends itself naturally to times of reflection. but i’m trying my best to fight that urge because every moment i spend living in the past i miss a moment in the present. i’m also trying my hardest to avoid planning the future because, again, those are precious moments that i won’t get back. living in the present has always been one of my greatest challenges. my tendency is to be a forward-looker, a plan-aheader and i have followed this instinct for many years. but i have to say that being in africa rather forces you to live moment-by-moment. like when we woke up yesterday morning and the generator had gone off. you learn to adapt, light candles, boil water, etc. and when the generator would not turn on again last night, the adventure continued, including taking apart, repairing, and putting back together again several kerosine lanterns. no worries, all my camping friends, i now know quite a bit about kerosine lanterns. :)

you make plans here, but you hold them loosely. like my eight o’clock appointment who still has yet to come at 9:10. at restaurants its probably the best plan to select three good options from the menu in the common event that they do not have what you first ordered. like yesterday – at ramada’s beach bar, christa and i stopped in for a drink on our way back home from the centre. the situation went something like this:

- we have soft drink, juice, star beer...

- what juice do you have?

- we have mango, pineapple, guava...

- i’ll have mango

- okay, no problem

(several minutes later, the waitress returns bearing guava juice)

- we have no mango juice

- guava is fine. :)

you really become used to it, and you hardly even notice anymore when it happens. or, you notice it, but you stop being surprised.

so what do the next now 261, 900 moments have in store for me? i’m not sure, but i’m excited...

the planned day v. the actual day

i am slowly but surely running out of creative ways to begin my blog-posts – not that how i have been starting them has been particularly creative. how many times have i started my posts with ‘it’s been a busy day’ or ‘it’s raining’? :)

i think i’m finally caught up on rest, though. i went to bed early last night, and woke up on my own accord at five thirty, so i guess i had gotten enough sleep at that point. you know, i just have to say, i love weekends. i love weekdays as well, but i love that on a weekend, i can get up, pad around – make a whole pot of tea instead of just a cup, and spend the whole morning drinking it. i love that i can choose not to take a shower and wear my most comfortable clothes.

i’m leaving in about half an hour to head down to lumley beach to see the sierra leonean amputee sports club (football team) practice. they usually scrimmage for a bit, and then maybe play a short game if the weather is nice. it looks as though the rain may hold off, which would be so wonderful. the past few days have been much less wet than before, but you never know. stefani is coming with me, and after we’re going to walk up to bliss patisserie – a little lebanese-owned restaurant where they sell coffee, pastries, and food. it’s a heavenly little oasis – one of the only places out that i’ve found that serves proper coffee – everywhere else is hot water and instant nescafe. not bad, but somehow fails to hit the spot when you want a good cup of coffee. :) then this afternoon, we have our long-awaited cooking lesson with abdul. a full day, but i’m looking forward to it all! it’s crazy that it’s my last weekend. at dinner last night, someone asked me what i particularly wanted to do on my last weekend, and i nearly fell out of my seat – i hadn’t even realized that i won’t have another saturday or sunday in sierra leone. not for a long time, at least. so weird....

i just wanted to jot a quick note about my day on thursday. stefani and went out with to new steps at waterloo. they send out mobile health teams every day to a few different sites on a kind of rotating schedule. as it was thursday, we headed out to rokupa – a village in between the outskirts of freetown and waterloo. after picking up vaccines from a local clinic, we headed out and set up shop outside a blacksmith’s shop. it’s operated by a man named pa mustafa, and it’s operated entirely by polio victims. pa mustafa is a victim of polio himself. so incredible to see – this extremely muscular man whose body suddenly shrivels up below the waist. a super friendly man, though. i wished that i could stay and chat with him a while, but we had plenty of patients waiting. i was afraid that i would end up spending the day just observing – so i spoke to the nurse, helen, telling her that i was a nursing student and more than happy to help. ‘nor worry, laurence,’ she said. ‘we get plenty work for you to do,’ and she was right! i ended up being in charge of all the well-baby checks. i weighed all the under-fives in our little hanging scale, charted their growth, and immunized the ones who were due for an opv and pentavalin.

it was absolute madness. i hunkered down to my task around ten am, and the next time i looked up, it was three. there was a seemingly endless stream of mothers with babies of various ages – the majority of which receiving their vaccines out of order or at a time other than the recommended age specified on their vaccination record.

every child should receive at birth bcg (against tuberculosis) and their first opv (against polio). then at six weeks it’s the first dpt/hep – a combined vaccine against diptheria and hepatitis – and the second opv. these two are to be repeated twice more at ten and fourteen weeks. then at nine months, the vaccines are completed with one yellow fever and one measles vaccine. out of the fifteen children i saw, i think one was on schedule. two were over the age of two. the vaccines themselves were out of date, and we didn’t have alcohol swabs to cleanse the injection site. the sharps container was nearly full when i began, making proper disposal of the syringes difficult. the cotton, when i retrieved it from the container, was swarming with ants. all in a day’s work, i suppose. it was a really eye-opening experience to the realities of a community clinic in a developing country. at the fistula centre and the opc, we are extremely spoiled in our accessibility to materials and medicines, and even they are not as nearly well stocked as almost any clinic in america. i was becoming extremely frustrated with it all, but then i saw the mothers standing in line, clutching their infants with a look of mixed anxiety and awe. i realized that to them i – childless, husband-less, younger, and less life-worn – was an authority figure. the weight of their expectation and trust was overwhelming. and so i did my very best possible by all of my tiny patients. i laughed with the mothers and with the crowd of little kids who gasped every time i uncapped a needle. it was an amazing experience – but absolutely exhausting. it has taken me until today to really overcome the aching tired which set in thursday afternoon.

- - - - - - - -

that was what i wrote this morning, intending to post from bliss, but they apparently do not have internet, so i've had to wait until now.

as always, the day ended up a bit differently than planned. in fact stefani and i were just commenting on how our time in sierra leone has definitely taught us both to hold all plans loosely - with the expectation that something will change or end up differently.

we made it to the beach right on time, only to find no football players. thinking we may be a bit early, stefani, christa, and myself spent some time just walking on the beach. we happened to pass one of the football players - the team's striker, and he told us that the coach had just phoned him to say that practice will be cancelled for the month of august - rain, elections, lack of funds, all combined to make meeting on a weekly basis too much of a hassle. so, fortunately, stefani has some pictures from when we went last time (when i had forgotten my camera), and i'll hopefully get those uploaded soon.

our time at bliss was good - but also different than we had expected. they did not have wireless internet, and i had packed everything up this morning, but not my adapter to plug my computer in. i totally didn't even think of it, completely forgetting that the restaurant would obviously have the different plugs. so i managed to get a fair bit of work done before my battery died, which was great.

the cooking lesson went really well - but again a bit different. abdul had done so much prep work that everything came together within forty-five minutes. :) i determined that i really liked eating with my hands, that fufu is good if a bit bland, and that okra soup is relatively easy to make if you have all of the right ingredients. i also determined that i do not particularly like palm oil, and i was reminded that africans generally have a much higher tolerance for the tiny hot peppers that you put in.

and this afternoon/evening has been a quiet one. it was a beautiful, clear day, and the rain has just begun to fall again. tomorrow's agenda: church one last time at st. luke's, a quick trip over to the clinic, and the beach (if the weather allows!)

more later...

roots redux

this morning, i started writing my final report today for my advanced study grant. at lunch, i had a deep conversation with terri about moving on from this time and this place. this afternoon one of the nurses who i won’t see again due to shift scheduling said goodbye to me. i’ve started to get this creepy-crawly feeling like goosebumps on the inside. when i think of leaving, my stomach knot and unknots itself in rapid succession – an altogether unpleasant experience.

this is how leaving always is for me – even if i have only been in that place for a short while. here is an excerpt of something i wrote over a year ago when i was leaving to return to school after christmas break. i stumbled across it the other day, and it’s funny how it still rings true:

the human tendency to put down roots. the most insidious part of this tendency is the fact that we don’t realize that we have put down roots until we have to tear them up. we tie strings from our hearts to people, places, special times, or significant others. then when the time comes to move, the only alternative is to rip away, breaking all of our bonds like a hot air balloon snapping its moorings, like ripping up the hair on our arm or leg when removing a band-aid, or like pulling up a plant by its stem.

as the pulling begins, there is a moment of greatest resistance, and if the pull is strong enough for long enough, the lines begin to break. it’s a kind of sucking pop which sickens the heart and yet is strangely satisfied in its own right.

some ties are harder than others to break, and generally the harder the break, the harder the hurt...

it’s a healthy pain, though. just like a tree or grapevine, our heartstrings must be pruned in order to be more fruitful and grow more strongly. the funny thing is that i don’t regret putting down roots, and i won’t hesitate to put roots down again. part of the reason why i won’t hesitate again is because i won’t know that i’m doing it. and ignorance is bliss.