I am holed up inside my hut, sheltering from the gusting
winds outside. Every surface in my house is covered in a fine layer of dust.
This is dry season, the half of the year I spend dreaming of anything green
that grows. My poor little herb garden I planted last month is suffering
terribly, battered and beaten down by the wind and the heat. My poor husband
lies nearby, sleeping off his unreasonably high fever.
In spite of the blustery day and the sick one I am attending
to, I am thankful. Thankful for an excuse to sit, thankful for the respite from
visitors, thankful for peace and quiet.
These past weeks have brought an onslaught of emergencies to
our doorstep. First came a young boy with a hard mass on his liver. We sent him
to the best excuse for a hospital that we have in Karamoja three hours away,
but we lost him not too much later anyway. Then came a concerned mother with
her mal-nourished baby, and Andrew and our teammate Jeremy made the three-hour
journey to the hospital themselves this time. Two days later an older man came
looking for help with transport to go to that same hospital for some severe
liver problems. I knew it was very likely his own drinking that had led him to this
point, but we helped him get transport nonetheless. The next morning we
received a quick visit from a girl we had sent to the very same hospital for
treatment a few months back. No longer emaciated from the combination of HIV
and Tuberculosis, we barely recognized her with all that healthy weight in her
cheeks. But her visit reminded us that she wouldn’t stay that way for long
without more food, which she needed from
us. As Andrew dropped me off for my
Akiru meeting that afternoon, a distraught old woman carrying a bundle of
blankets came up to our car gesturing and asking for help. I went to inspect
her bundle and found an impossibly small baby girl just barely two days old (we
would later find out she weighed less than 2 pounds). The mother had died after
giving birth two months early and this baby had no chance of survival without
outside help. Once again, we loaded them up in the car and our teammates left
for the three-hour trip within the hour. I made it through my meeting and left for home,
exhausted by the last 24 hours. Little did I know that another old woman with another
bundle of blankets came looking for me moments after I had gone. She found me later on that week, and once
again I laid eyes on an impossibly small baby, a boy this time, who surely had
been born premature as well. His skin was saggy and loose, his frame tiny for
all of his two months. His mother had not breast-fed him because of her HIV and
so he had survived so far on a cup or two of cow’s milk a day, if that. I went
to the old woman’s home to take them some formula for the baby and found the
mother suffering from her own debilitating mal-nourishment and some kind of
cough that I feared was TB. Hours later after health center waits and tests and
run-arounds that stretched over two days, I still didn’t have a diagnosis or a
solution. Still don’t for that
matter. I still don’t know if that mother even wants to help herself get better. I still don’t know if the
grandmother can really be trusted to care about
that baby or care for that baby.
But for now, I am a little bit thankful to have to care for my
own sick husband so that I have an excuse to hide inside, away from the wind,
away from the world for a little while. I will worry about today, because
tomorrow has enough worries of its own.
***Often people ask what a day in our lives looks like. What is a normal day for us, they want
to know. Though every day is not always how these past few weeks have been, weeks
and days like these are still very common.
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