Generating Nirvana

At the Bai-Suba compound where we stay they shut off the generator every day around nine in the morning.  Air conditioners, televisions and radios take their last beepy breaths and go blank, motionless.  I work the night shift tonight from 8 pm until 8 am so I read the novels I brought (currently "Americanah"by Adichie and "Blood Diamonds" by Campbell) and try to keep what cool air there is from escaping my room.  Later, I will walk into town and change some US dollars to Leones for the week.  You can have as much solo time here as you desire.  You can tell who finds solitude useful and who finds it unbearable.  The experience here in the Ebola Treatment Center can swing from thick, murky, and inchoate to pure holy water.  Solitary time allows you to put it in a mason jar, turn it upside down, shake it, or just sit and look at it all interact.  Otherwise it all spills away.  Even without the availability of all of our modern distractions here you can still easily distract yourself.  Consciousness becomes digitized.  If knowledge is power then self-knowledge must be nirvana.  Nirvana, in sanskrit, literally means "blown out" as in a candle.  Here, in the stifling humidity of this epidemic, you try to blow out your ego, desires, delusions and reach for mindfullness.  Everything you attempt to do at home but with one glaring difference: time to take the mason jar out of the shed and hold it up to the light.

Going back to work tonight, we have another pregnant woman, Hawa, who is 18 years old and 28 weeks pregnant by history.  Her belly shows more like 24 weeks.  There have been no documented fetuses who have survived when the mother has Ebola.  It has to do with the placenta harboring a high level of Ebola virus and the mother's antibodies not being able to cross the placenta to help the baby.  Insert image of  a dump truck trying to cross over a raging river on a 2x8 plank.  The woman often spontaneously aborts and the fetus is delivered stillborn.  The beautiful freeway of nutrients and building blocks from mother to fetus, sprinkled with the magic of creation caves in and is no longer open for passage.  And the woman continues to fight for her life with a high risk for hemorrhage when she passes the fetus.  Maternal mortality from Ebola is higher than the general population infected with Ebola.  If the woman doesn't spontaneously deliver the fetus , we have medicines to help this process along.  But awaiting the delivery of a dead fetus with Ebola is an act without a metaphor.  It is just that- awaiting the delivery of a dead fetus.  In the waiting rooms of our minds here, there are rows and rows of prayer candles, all lit by sanguine souls, their voices as quiet as dry season windfall.  And waiting is dynamic.  Her wait, alone in the metal treatment tent bed, staring at the flood lights that almost ignite the white ceilings, is different than my waiting.  Which is different than her mother's waiting.  Which is different than her father's waiting.  Which is different than your waiting.  This is the value of life experience, the flavorings we drip into our consciousness through our experiences and our processing of experiences.  All shaped by some framework of what we think we are doing here and where whatever we are goes when we cease functioning.  And so we wait, some of us fidgeting with ourselves, some fidgeting with science, some fidgeting with gadgets, but all waiting for IT to happen.  We write our personal scripture in our deeds.  True.  But who is reading them??

Thanks to everyone for reading this blog and adding your comments  I had no idea what to expect when I started writing it.  I thought it would be a good way to convey what was going on over here.   And it is, but I apologize if it drifts from what is going on OVER here to what is going on IN here.  I have received so many insightful comments and emails and regret that I cannot answer them.  Please know that they are appreciated and I look forward to reading them everyday more than you can imagine.  They connect me back to you and remind me how grateful I am to have such community.

And, by the way, the generator just turned on again....