Life here is hard.
Every day, people die. Babies don't make it, mothers bleed to death just after giving birth.
There is tetanus and malaria and other horrible diseases.
Joyce, a seamstress who sews skirts and clothing came by
House 6 last night to take an order from one of the volunteers. Sager, another volunteer, a surgeon, told me
she’d just had a baby.
“Congratulations!” I told her. “What’s the baby’s name?”
“We have not named him yet,” she said.
Death is so prevalent that mothers don’t name their babies
for months.
“Oh, so it’s a very new baby! How wonderful, but you should be resting!”
She looked at me like I was completely insane.
“I am not used to all of that,” she told me.
She’s 3-days post-partum- from a C-section.
I don’t think she’s any less tired, or any less emotionally
spent than I was after giving birth. But
Joyce doesn’t have the luxury of lying around.
Instead, she walked a couple miles, in the dark, looking for orders of
clothes to sew.
Last year, satellite internet reached our
house, and so I escaped anytime I wanted or needed. This year, the internet is sketchy and hard to get to. The realities of living in northern Ghana seem
more constant and overwhelming as a result. I say that, but my reality is a guest house
with electricity, with a washing machine, with running, filtered water and ice
cubes in the freezer. And all I can
think of is how hot it is, what I wouldn’t give for some A/C. I remind myself that I only have to deal
with this until the end of the month.
All around us there are people living their lives without
any of the luxuries of a guest house.
Jared’s having a hard time, too.
“How’s that mama doing you were telling me about?” I’ll ask him when he gets home from the
hospital?
“She died.”
Sometimes he comes home with blood all over him, soaked
through his clothes.
Sometimes it’s easy to think this is a God-forsaken place.
But you see the hospital here, you see so many people who
would have died but didn’t, because of volunteer doctors and missionaries like
Dr. Hewitt and Dr. Dickens, both of whom have left opportunity for wealth and
successful medical practices in the states and chose to work and raise their
children here in Nalerigu, instead.
Dr. Hewitt drove us to the market yesterday. He spent the past two decades here, and speaks Mamprusi fluently. I asked him if he's ever overwhelmed.
He just kept steering the lorry through the goats and the donkeys and the people balancing heavy trays full of fruits on their heads, grinned slightly, and said, "Not anymore. Been here too long."
It's not all bad, of course. Here, too, is kindness, kids playing soccer in the pitch. Strong communities, strong
familial bonds- everyone’s in this together.
Back in Fort Worth trauma centers, you’ll see gunshots,
stabbings, acts of unthinkable violence roll through emergency rooms with uncanny frequency.
Not here. Violence is
almost unheard of. Carpet vipers and scorpions are the only stab wounds at the BMC.
Yesterday a group of boys came by to play with Ollie. They pop by every now and then, unannounced,
just to say hello, how are you. Jared
said, “Back home, we have a Facebook village.
Here, there is an actual village.”
You know, he’s right.
*Internet is insufferably slow- I've taken some photos, but picture loading is just about impossible, but I'll keep trying.....
