The Girls and Boys

22. novembre 2009

I did a paediatric malnutrition ward round today. It breaks me sometimes to see these children. I know that it’s not right to, but I find myself comparing their weights with babies of friends and family back home and the difference makes me gasp.

Oedematous, horrific scalded-skin or burn-like lesions, pneumonias and diarrhoea resistant to all treatments and often a sneaking suspicion of something more serious underlying, like TB or HIV.

And always, that same staring look of disinterest that so characterises malnourished children. Not grumpy, not agitated, but a staring indifference. Old before their time.

The last child on the ward round was a 1 month old baby, one of two malnourished twins, who weighed only 2.2 kg. Skin and bones, and a face that made him look like he was 70years old, he reminded me of Brad Pitt in Benjamin Button, the film about the baby born an old man.

His mother started crying half way through us examining her child. It’s strange, it’s unusual to see a Congolese woman crying. In all the time I’ve been here, she is only the second women I have seen in tears, and considering we have such sick children on the wards, and a paediatric mortality of 10/month I would have thought I would see more.

“Why is she crying?” I ask. She’s upset by how small her child looks, I am told. But even though I can’t understand the Swahili that’s being spoken around me, I know that there’s more to it than that.

“What did she say now?” I ask. “She says that she is the second wife of her husband and in the whole time that she’s been in the hospital he hasn’t visited her once”.

“Will you tell her it’s alright: all men are scumbags, all over the world” I say, tongue in cheek, to John Didier, the male chief of service of paediatrics, about to get married himself next month.

He laughs but refuses to translate it, saying that some men, himself included, are good men. The female Congolese doctor I’m with whispers something to the mum who laughs suddenly for the first time, albeit briefly.

“What did you say?” I ask her later. With a wink and a mischievous glint in her eye she says “J’ai dit ‘Votre mari est un bandit, et je vais le frapper’” (‘your husband is a bandit, and I will beat him’).

Maybe you had to be there but it had me laughing all morning. Even in the Congo, it’s all about the girls and the boys…

Post-script: For every laughter-filled moment, it turns out, there’s sadness too. I arrived the following morning to find that the same baby had deteriorated overnight, been transferred to ITU, but despite this, had died at 4am.

The absconding husband turned up and the couple fled in the night, taking the other twin with them, no doubt choosing to seek out a traditional healer instead.

Tags: Kinder, Mweso