ali's african adventures

She's smaller than he was, but her tumor was bigger. It jutted out from the side of her tiny jaw, as big again as her head and wrapped inside around bone and blood vessels. She was the kind of baby whose mother Dr. Gary sits down with before surgery, trying to explain, often through several translators, that this time it might not work. That we might not be able to fix it, and that she might not get her second chance. Invariably, the mamas sign the forms anyway, pressing their thumbs hard into the pad of ink and mashing them onto the page, their eyes steely and determined and sometimes a little hopeless.

So Maomai went into the operating room yesterday, and I took care of her today. Fitting, that in this land of French speakers, the phrase thrumming through my mind all afternoon was deja vu. It all felt so much the same that I half expected the crew nurse to appear through the door and give me some more bad news to top off my day. I wish there was some way to explain how surreal it all felt, using the same instruments, seeing the same numbers, hearing the same things. Haven't I been here before, bent over a tiny, brown bundle engulfed in blankets and tubes and surrounded by the hum of machinery? Don't I know that sound all too well, the sound of a baby who can't quite get enough air into his lungs. No, wait - her lungs. This isn't Baby Greg. This is Maomai, whose name is a lilting song on her mama's weary tongue. Maomai, a person of God, as the translator explains while I curl my body over hers, stroking her tiny, fuzzy curls in an effort to calm her cries.

I'm sitting in my cabin right now, tired and happy and perilously close to tears. Maomai is doing well. Her mama trusted me enough to leave her side and sleep this afternoon, the first sleep she's gotten since her little one went into the operating room almost thirty-six hours ago. Maomai's breathing is calming and she's starting to tolerate some milk through the tube that leads to her stomach. (Just like Greg, we're cutting out the middle man, letting her devote all her energy to that ever-important task of getting air into her lungs.) I should be happy. I should be elated that, at least this time, everything seems to be going well.

But all I can think of is that night, almost a year ago now, when I sat in a dark, hot room and saw grief all around me by the light of a single candle. Because I can't do it all again; I'm just not strong enough.

So either my little person of God keeps getting stronger and eventually goes home with her brave mama, or I'm going to claim Maomai's name as my own. In this place where names mean so much, I'll claim to be a person of God, and He will not let me fall.

I just finished my first shift back on the wards, and it wasn't quite what I thought it would be. Truth be told, I'm not sure what I was expecting, but something didn't feel right. Maybe it was the translators. If anything, they're better than the ones we worked with last year in Liberia, but I don't know any of them. I felt like a kid on her first day of school, hesitant to ask for help in case it marked me as a poor student. Maybe it was the way that one supply cart had been set up in the opposite direction to where it stood last year. Countless times, I found myself on the wrong side, looking for something I thought should be there. Maybe it was the names. Unfamiliar on my tongue, I resorted to calling every single one of my patients Bebe, which I'm hoping was French for Baby, and probably wouldn't have mattered anyway, since most of my mamas didn't speak a lick of that particular language.

I'm not sure. Maybe I was expecting it to be perfect. (I tend to put that onus on myself more often than I should.) I guess maybe I thought I would waltz in there and save Benin in one eight-hour shift. Instead I felt like I was treading water, just barely getting things done, lost in a sea of unfamiliar faces and surrounded by languages I couldn't begin to decipher. So I did the only thing I could think to do: I put on my game face and I plunged into that sea.

I took report, asked all the right questions, told the off-going nurses that I was good to go and sent them on their merry way. I looked up forgotten doses, mixed drugs and forced tylenol down squirming babies' throats. I taught a mama how to make salt water for cleaning her baby's sore when they go home, just like I did countless times last year. Take a clean pot. It must not be the same pot you use to cook pepper; a clean one... I danced a little, handed out a couple stickers, and still felt like something was missing.

It came when I finally got a minute to breathe and found a translator who had a while to sit with me and talk to the mama of my sickest little baby. I'd tell you her name, but like I said, I was sticking to the basics and can't for the life of me remember it. She's a beautiful little one, with chubby thighs and creamy brown skin, and her mama spent the day curled up next to her, carefully removing the IV tubing from Bebe's hands every time she tried to cause mischief. When I sat down on the bed next to her, she looked concerned, probably wondering why that busy Yovo (white girl) was finally stopping to talk.

I went through my usual spiel. The surgery went well. She will need lots of medicines which I will give her through that tube in her hand. She will need to rest. This is how you will care for her. This is how your life has just changed. She sat silently, nodding her head with each phrase the translator spoke, her face inscrutable. When I finished, I asked if she had any questions. She thought for a moment, and shook her head. No questions. And it was then that everything made sense again, because her face broke out into that huge grin I've seen so many times before on this ship, the face of a mama whose baby has just been given a chance. She held her hands out towards me in a gesture I haven't seen before, her face wreathed in joy. I turned to see the translator standing next to me with a matching smile.

She says thank you. She is telling you thank you.

And after that, I couldn't bring myself to care whether or not I felt out of place or unsure or imperfect. Because those wards are filled with babies and mamas and men and women who are all being pieced back together, drawn out of the shadows and shown the path back to life. How can I not love being a part of that?

The feeling of being back on this ship is one of the strangest things I've experienced recently. One one hand, like I mentioned already, I feel overwhelmingly that I'm home. I find nothing strange about lining up in the cafeteria to get my meals, seeing container ships outside my window and being hugged enthusiastically by about half of the people I walk past in the halls. Contrary to my own expectations, I have not, in fact, forgotten where things are in this eight-deck floating city. The only thing that throws me for a loop is the fact that the gangway leads down to a dock on the starboard side of the ship, not the port side, which last year was the only thing that helped me remember what the heck starboard and port meant in the first place. (My oft repeated mantra, Port means the side where the port is, doesn't seem to be helping me this time around.) But really, things feel normal. When people welcome me back, all I can think to tell them is that it's good to be home.

On the other hand. (There's always another hand, isn't there?) Remember how I just got married? And remember how, before that, I told you guys I wasn't really going to talk about my husband on this blog of mine? Well, both are true, but the latter isn't really going to be a problem, at least not for the next three weeks. Because after our first three weeks as married people, I actually got to come back to the ship all by myself. The Husband is taking part in a training course in some country that is Not Remotely Benin, and I'm here in a country that is Most Definitely Benin, rattling around our enormous (at least to me) cabin all by my lonesome.

And it's strange. For all the familiar faces and dearly loved friends whom I'm reconnecting with and eating meals with and sharing stories of the past five months with, it feels wrong to be here without him. There were so few days last year that didn't see us hanging out for hours on end, and, truth be told, I'm a little lost without him. I'm not used to not talking to him, but both nights since I've been here, I missed his phone calls because I was upstairs in the cafe, writing him emails that he hasn't read yet because he hasn't found a place to get on the internet. I laid awake in our bed last night, already instinctively leaving half the mattress free, and in the dark, wakeful hours until about three in the morning, I lost track of the number of times I slid my foot over to his side, just to make sure he really wasn't there.

In the grand scheme of things, three weeks isn't a long time. We just got through more than three months on separate continents, and I'm starting work tomorrow, so things promise to be busy. But that doesn't change the fact that I've barricaded myself in my cabin; armed with movies, a tea kettle and a wireless internet connection, I'm not coming out until I get to talk to him on the phone.

Now, who wants to bring me dinner? It's African night, and I have a powerful craving for plantains.

I stepped off the plane in Cotonou last night and was overwhelmed by the sheer familiarity of the smell. The warm air touched my cheek like an old friend and I couldn't help smiling and breathing deep; surrounded by body odor and humidity and the faint hint of mothballs from best suits donned for the flight, I knew that I was home.

I wedged myself into the crowd at the baggage claim, threw elbows like the best of them and managed to reclaim my things. I smiled my way through customs, offering the occasional French phrase when my courage was right. Bonsoir seemed to do the trick, since my passport was stamped, my bags were waved through and I was propelled with the crowd through the doors and into a hall filled with brown faces, colourful cloths and a small contingent of Yovos. The white people were my friends, Liz and Sandra and Suey, and after a few hugs and several small shrieks of pure joy, we were settled happily into our Landrover, headed home through the streets of Cotonou.

Home. The feeling only got stronger when I saw the lights of the ship, pulled up alongside and made my way up the gangway. I was home. Friends from my Gateway course met me in reception, helped carry my bags, pulled out food to make me a grilled cheese, and let me shriek a few more times when I saw that they had made our bed for us, started unpacking the myriad things I had scattered across the ship, decorated our door, welcomed us home.

So I'm sitting here on the very same computer I used last year to write my first blog entry from Liberia. The floor is still moving underneath my feet, but more than last year, and the view from the porthole next to me is of an unfamiliar port and unfamiliar ships and unfamiliar waters.

But I'm home again.