Dr. Seuss and the fizzy mango

Dr. Seuss and the Fizzy Mango: A bedtime story from Africa*

     by Heather Klassen, Laura Coles, and Trudi Attema

Travel to the beach and see

How fun my Africa can be!

Would you do what we have done?

Try it, try it, you’ll have fun!

Did you say no boats today?

No public boats today you say?

Are you sure you tell us true?

“Trust me, I no lie to you!”

800,000 we won’t pay,

These Fotay will just walk away!

Bargain, bargain, bargain more,

Check the price with three or four!

Would you could you stay afloat
 Maybe you should bail your boat?

Would you could you keep bread dry

When the waves are splashing high?

Would you stop along the way

With some local children play?

Would you could you go exploring,

Following the ocean’s roaring?

Would you down a cliff backpack-it,

Padded by an orange lifejacket

Camp out on a hidden beach,

Hotel comforts out of reach.

Would you could you in the dirt

Would you could you in a skirt?

Would you could you sleep in trees?

Swaying in the ocean breeze?

Would you hammock in a tree?

Disney princess you could be.

Would you climb in upside down

Eighteen inches off the ground?

Eighteen inches do you say?

No, we’ll hang them high today!

Chase a crab in rising tide,

From your headlamp he will hide.

Gaze at stars up in the sky, 

Rock to baboon lullaby!

Fizzy mango would you eat?

Or some donuts from the street?

Do not eat your street food bland!

Please add spices (and some sand)

Would you could you in the sun?

Coffee on the beach is fun!

Would you could you in a boat, 

Would you could you with a goat?

Would you could you wade through muck,

garbage, fish and not get stuck?

You would not could not, so you say, 

Try it, try it and you may!

Travel to the beach and see

How fun my Africa can be!

 *Based completely on a true story...I promise.

A different normal

More and more often I have moments when I forget I haven't always been here.  It's normal to tie an infant on my back if he's fussy and causing trouble - it doesn't matter that he's not mine.  I'm full of ideas of what to do when the usual procedures don't work, whether it be cutting the end off an IV cannula cap to put together oxygen tubing, or readily offering piggy back rides down the stairs when my patients get tired and the elevator is broken again. And I never, never would think to throw out a bed pan.  I'll probably be peeling the labels off of medication bottles and cutting my IV bottles in half for the rest of my nursing career.

We've run out of Ensure, the versatile canned milky supplement we usually use for NG feedings.  In it's place, our dietician Jess has cooked up a recipe involving milk and peanut butter, vitamins and fiber...and the nurses mix it up in the blender.  There are no Walmarts where we can pick up canned supplements - here we make our own.

This weekend we ran out of smooth peanut butter.  Several of us offered up our personal stash to make feeds with (mine was rejected - too chunky), and some of our nurses tried straining the mixture.  Eventually Jess melted down some chunky peanut butter and strained it, to hold us over until we could get some smooth peanut butter from town.  Even the smoothest of peanut butter has residual though, and when the NG to gravity drips ran slower and slower I fixed one with a pressure bag borrowed from the ICU.

It's creativity on a level I never really needed in the States, and the longer I'm here the more creative I've become.

Sometimes I remember that once I did things differently.  When the baby on my back gets his foot tangled in my patient's IV line and drops the pens from my back pocket all over the floor and I remember that they never told me in nursing school I might have this problem.  The moments when I look down at the working suction unit I've put together with a pair of trauma scissors, a variety of tubing types and sizes, a few odds and ends and a lot of creativity, and realize this wouldn't be considered a "normal" part of a Western nursing job.  Or when I put together pieces from two different blood pressure cuffs when the one we had on the machine didn't fit the patient in ICU.  I realized I had reached a whole new level when I heard myself suggest a partial endotracheal tube as a sterile trach cannula replacement, and realized that the idea actually had potential.

I've gained a different perspective here as well.  I've seen the joy in loving and being loved, in seeing past deformity to the person within, and joined in the worship of the broken.  I've learned pieces of languages and bartered in the market, gotten a wide variety of marriage proposals and comments on my fine African baby-tying technique...

And I've gotten peed on.  A lot.

I suppose it comes with the community aspect of ward life.  Babies are for everyone, and they get passed hand to hand and bed to bed, claimed in turn by each patient and nurse.  It happened to me again this weekend as Ibrahim's mama patiently fed him milk from a spoon and I entertained his baby brother Fala.  As breakfast finished, Fala climbed off my lap where he had been studiously chewing the plastic duck on my name badge and wandered away in his little-girl plastic sandals, leaving a few damp puddles on my scrubs.  Not even 9 am yet, and already I had gotten peed on.  Any American hospital, and this would have been an unfortunate event.  But here?

Me: I think the baby just peed on my pants.

Translator: Laura, this is very fortunate for you.

Me: I remember they said in Sierra Leone that getting peed on was good luck...something about fertility?

Translator: Yes, you will have many children.  Maybe fifteen.

I am wondering though, is that fifteen children total, or one for every time I get peed on..because I must be up to at least thirty by now.

Hear that, Mom and Dad?  Apparently you'll be having a lot of grandchildren.

Sunset Club

 There is an insistent breeze that lifts off of the water, dancing in the gray-gold of sunset and the cloudless dusty blue of harmattan sky.  It whispers poetry to me, cool and steady, weaving between my bare toes, wildly fluffing the skirt I try to hold down, and teasing the wisps of my damp hair.

A small tug sails by slowly, low in the water from fish caught that day, or a few scattered holes. It looks more like a child's bath toy than a seaworthy boat; rust-covered sides make me wonder if it will soon join the other shipwrecks scattered along the sea wall.   Wooden canoes paddle by constantly, and there are a few patched sails of other boats in the distance.  The larger ships leave long wakes in the water, reflective trails there long after a ship has gone, a path of promise to open oceans and distant lands.  I follow their calm wakes out past the rocks and into the sea until they are lost in distant ripples.

When I was a teenager my family would trickle up to our open gazebo rooftop just before maghrib and watch spectacular displays of color surround us as the sun set over rice paddies and red-tile roofs and the call to prayer echoed off the mountains.  Here on ship,

Sunset Club is a tradition that carried over from our outside "family" picnics in Sierra Leone and into the early weeks of the Guinea outreach, one of my favorite evening activities even now.  Almost every evening at the beginning of September found groups of nurses and most of the ward team leaders in a row along the deck facing the ocean sunset.  It was a quiet time away from the busyness of the hospital deck, a taste of fresh air and sunshine and beauty.  Some days the books and ipods came out, while other evenings were filled with lively discussions and back massages.  Attendance began to decrease as life picked up pace, and some days I had sunset club alone with Jesus on the narrow, netted walkway next to lifeboat 3.

 A peace is here, where seabirds wheel and dive, or wing their low way home across the water.  A peace that draws me up to settle with friends every free night after dinner, for chats or chocolate or silence.  No sunset is ever the same, and I marvel at God's endless creativity when the lightning storms crackle through the pink twilights and touch the early stars.

Photos courtesy of Jenny Darvas and Heather Klassen, who documented this amazing beauty while I put my feet up on the railings and drank it all in.