About Luck, Angel Thank you and Hope

21 aprile 2009

Back in Masisi, it was bringing us a woman in labour. She was 39 years old and had delivered nine children, two of whom are still alive. Her husband died during the pregnancy and she walked, in labour, for eight hours to ensure the safest delivery available to her. By the time she reached us she needed a caesarean section, which revealed that only minutes before her uterus had ruptured. This would be her last child and he made it out alive, against all odds. She named him Chance (Luck).

There seems no limit to what a mother will do for her child. On one occasion we brought a 40-year-old woman back with the mobile clinic. She had a serious pneumonia, possibly tuberculosis and was deeply emaciated. She weighed 34 kilos which in real terms means that I was easily able to carry her in my arms from the car to the ward. Even in this condition she had tenderly pulled her baby to her skinny breast as she lay on a mattress on the floor of the car.

“He said that the Congo was like a dark room. Even though there was a door to the room, it was so dark that no matter how long you spent looking or searching for the door you would never find it”

You sense that the burdens of the war, if not the actual wounds, fall largely on the women and children. Beyond the rape, which we hear sometimes kills, are the invisible infectious diseases. We are constantly on the look-out for measles, a quick killer, and regularly vaccinate against it throughout the health zone of Masisi. Spotting a trend, we decided to hold a two-day vaccination campaign in the military camp. Many combatants here travel, at least part of the time, with their wives and children. Measles is prevented by what is known as herd immunity – immunise the majority and the minority are largely protected as well. But this particular herd is hard to keep track of, and vaccinate. Nearly two hundred children later and a very satisfying day’s work done, I went to the pub with a friend.

There we got talking to a fairly high-ranking member of an armed group. Unprompted, he told us tales of the past 15 years. A job is a job, he explained, before counting off yesterday’s dead on his fingers. He enthusiastically shared his aspirations to use his diploma in administration when the war is finished (and he is still young, only thirty years old.) That begged the obvious question: when? He leaned back over a wall, and breaking eye contact for the first time, said that the Congo was like a dark room. Even though there was a door to the room, it was so dark that no matter how long you spent looking or searching for the door you would never find it.

The names people pick for their children are a telling contradiction to his perspective. One day as a baby called Hope sat on my lap, peeing and coughing away as I examined her, a mother rushed in holding a screaming mass of blood. Her baby, whose name translates as Angel Thank you, had just been seen and treated. When they got home a domestic dispute between sisters-in-law went wobbly and Angel took a machete to the head. Compresses were not stemming the tide of blood sufficiently, so I clamped her head to my chest and galloped to the hospital. Five stitches later and returned to mum, I looked down my bloody t-shirt and urine soaked trousers and how odd it is not to care at all and whether or not that’s quite right. As I walked up the road, the heavens opened and very soon I was twirling around, because sometimes you just have to seize the day, drinking rain and laughing to myself. As my dishevelled self puffed into the health centre, for the first time silence awaited me, as did Hope.

Tags: Ospedale, Masisi, Guerra