I have been reading a book called "Gilead," about a multi-generational family of preachers in American Civil War times and this popped into my head this morning, eyes closed still ,after I woke up. Maybe it is because I have been thinking about my parents a lot lately. It is their wedding anniversary today. Or perhaps it has to do with all the kids I have seen lose both parents to Ebola. Of course, family structure as it is here, the children will be raised by aunts, uncles, sisters,brothers, cousins and so on who live in the same village. Every parent is haunted by the thought of leaving their children behind or their children leaving this world before they do.
Some kids are born into families with little wilderness. Everything is provided. And controlled. Others are born into great wilderness. Parents are not involved for whatever reason from the start. Or part way through go missing. Or disappear during the crucial years. And then there are children who are born with the wilderness in them. I know how my parents would comment if posed this question. Tonight, I think of Kadiatu, who lost both her parents here with us to Ebola, and was placed in the Children Fund's temporary orphanage after testing negative to be watched the requisite 21 days to make sure she doesn't start showing signs of Ebola. She will go back to her village but has little family. I wonder how the wilderness quotient will play out for her.
I went for a run this morning on the road to the iron ore mine. It is a hard-packed red clay dirt road with occasional ribbed areas that are less than affectionately referred to as "washboards." The road is wide enough for two articulated dump trucks to pass easily. Iron ore is used to make pig iron and ultimately steel. It is arguably the world economy's second biggest player behind oil. Sadly, the mining company is owned by a Swedish firm. Lunsar, as a community, shows no overt signs of benefiting from this precious mineral harvest. At the end of the road there are box cars that are loaded up to be taken by rail for processing and then exportation to China I am told. The mine operates 24/7 and I can hear the lorries wheezing and rattling from my room as I lay in bed reading. I picked up a piece of rock that had an argent glaze on it that rubbed off into my hands like the glitter my daughter dusts onto glue to "spice up" her pictures. It looked pre-historic like it had been taken out of a formation that had been made by a drastic event that shook the earth to its core and was not witnessed by any higher functioning creatures besides bees. I stuck it in my pocket for my son and kept running. Up ahead I saw a man walking in his Sunday clothes carrying a machete in the way that a man in Detroit might carry an umbrella, tucked under his arm but still able to strut. A lorry downshifted to make it up a hill and coughed up a cloud of exhaust that drifted like a black veil off the road and was suspended briefly in the early morning air before diffusing. Banana tree leafs drooped with a thin, red dust that took away their waxy lustre. The industrial effluvium reminded me of running in medical school on the banks of the Kaw River in Kansas City, Kansas behind the Colgate-Palmolive factory. There was a sweet, synthetic scent to the air then. We called it the "Industrial Run." I suppose this one here on the road to the Sierra Leonean iron ore pit would qualify as an industrial run, the soot and the particulate dust sticking to my skin as if I were a lollipop dropped on a wood shop floor. But when the trucks all passed and the morning sun poured through the palm trees and the birds cawed from high up on ancient mango tree branches, I inhaled the landscape as a whole and it filled me with power and light and a transient equanimity that made who I was or where I was blissfully irrelevant.
Our psycho-social team often goes out to provide support to families who have lost loved ones to Ebola. Anna, an Australian, has spent the past four years working in South Sudan and Bangladesh in international relief work camps. She is quiet and has a sadness about her that is more than situational, almost a settled, habitual sadness. She flowers when she is working with families in that way that some people are better suited to weep with those who are suffering as opposed to those who are better suited to rejoice with those who are rejoicing. Today, I rode out with her to a village where an 18 year old girl, Hawa, contracted Ebola before being sent to our treatment center. You may recall her from an earlier entry. She was 24 weeks pregnant and believed up until her last breath that her baby was still kicking. I met her husband and all of her immediate and extended family from behind a small plastic green rope that was tied between the trees that surrounded their house in the village. To keep them as effectively as the wind, under quarantine. We talked about her death, expressed our sorrow and delivered the bereavement package donated by the World Food Programme which consists of 50 kilos of rice, a large sack of what looked like lentils, a sack of enriched corn meal, cooking oil, and some laundry soap. I brought along some crayons, pens and pencils for the kids. We reminded them to guard the death certificate that certifies that Hawa passed from Ebola as it will entitle them to certain small governmental benefits down the road. I watched the kids watch me as I watched them. They all came out of the house and stood quietly in flip-flops. Mothers in tank- tops hipped babies. Charred aluminum pots cooked cassava leaves and fish stew over open flame branches. We had come to talk about an eighteen year old pregnant woman's death and have some sense of dignified closure. When we finished we sprayed our boots with chlorinated water before getting back into our vehicle. We are so close but we are not out of the wilderness yet.
I didn't realize they compensated the families who lost love ones to Ebola. Do you always visit the families? That has to be hard.
ReplyDelete