Shakira

There is a lamb that sleeps outside my porch.  When I get up early in the morning to run she greets me before the sun does.  If I leave my front gate open she will sleep on my porch.  Her droppings are neat islands of pellets that are mysteriously cleaned off the tiled deck every evening when I come home only to be there again in the morning when I open the door.  I leave the gate open now for her.  We lost our canine savant Orville in October and I am not used to being without an extra four legs at my feet to ground me.  I have named her Shakira after my daughter's favorite singer.  She doesn't move much but when she does, the hip gyrations are refreshingly kindred to that of the Colombian goddess.

The government of Sierra Leone has lifted the curfew now that the holiday season has come to a close.  The markets are alive again with color, volume, and denisty.  Hawkers carry around the world on their heads, random objects like sunglasses, toilet paper, and spatulas dangle from the plastic buckets that are more wide than deep.  Motorcycles lean and dart through the crowds driven by teenage boys in sunglasses who show off for girls carrying bags of papaya, cassava leaves, and baggies of salt.  Music rises and falls out of clapboard store fronts.  Water sluices in a ditch along the main market road, just enough for tiny birds to wet their wings.  A boy gets his hair quaffed as the other barbers play a dice game and gesticulate fervently.  Yes, the market, the source of life in this rural village, has roared back colorfully to reclaim the air.

When a patient survives Ebola in our treatment center and is ready for discharge there is a recognizable crescendo of elation in all of our staff.  Yesterday, a young boy named Martin was finally going home.  The WASH team is responsible for escorting him to a chlorine shower where he will shed all of his clothes and belongings and decontaminate his body before re-entering society.  If he wishes to bring anything out it will need to soak in chlorine for a set amount of time, usually less than 30 minutes.  That includes cell phones, most of which do not recover from such an assault.  After the chlorine shower he is able to take a shower with soap and water.  He is given new clothes and then emerges triumphantly to reclaim his life.

As the WASH team was heading into the ward to get him yesterday, they all spontaneously started dancing in full PPE (video forthcoming in future posts!), shaking their booties, swirling their hips, and lunging their chests in one fluid rhythm to make one wonder if they actually had bones.  All the seconds, minutes, days, and weeks of not knowing if Martin was going to make it exploded into a rhapsody of relief and injected our whole center with a much needed infusion of hope and gratitude.  Later, when he emerged from the soap and water shower, there was another celebration with djembes, traditional dance and chanting to send him back with all that he may have lost temporarily while he was awaiting his fate inside the hot, white Ebola tents.  Godspeed Martin!

Infrequent as they are with a case fatality rate approaching 60% in our unit, these fetes are what keep everyone going.  I imagine back to the days of the plague, or of the pandemic influenza outbreaks, or even before the advent of antibiotics, when people just held on and summoned the deepest of faith, forged the widest freeways of hope, and prayed the prayers of the dying because there was no cure to what had seized them.  For us this is now.  Ebola has no cure as of yet. No vaccine as of yet.  To have personally overcome Ebola here in West Africa is to have glimpsed the face of God, a visage now recognizable by Martin in all that he sees in the world.

Now that Martin is heading back to his village out there in Port Loko district, I think about what his future holds.  It doesn't take a village.  It takes a village with running water.  It takes a village with access to affordable, quality health care.  It takes a village with quality education.  It takes leaders who resist corruption for the sake of social justice.

All these things and more.  May it be so.