benedicte's auntie

I'm starting to get my feet back under me, and I don't think it's just because the ship has been rocking less these past few days. Over the last four evenings, I've had to do almost everything I had grown used to doing during the last outreach. I've worked on the wards, in the ICU, on the wards with an almost-ICU patient, and to top it off, I was in charge tonight. Just one more shift to go, and I can call two glorious days off my own.

But the best part of all this re-learning is knowing that I really am back in West Africa, that the Beninois are just as wounded, just as needy, just as loving as my Liberians. It's different here, but the heart of it is the same. While Liberia as a country was still clawing her way out of the vast hole left by more than a decade of civil war, Benin has enjoyed those same years in peace and relative prosperity; the people here have been to school instead of hiding in the bush from the rebels. But that doesn't change the fact that an entire ward is filled with VVF ladies, women who didn't have the money or access to healthcare that would have allowed them to bring their children into the world without tearing holes in body and soul. Maybe some of my mamas have come in with more than one outfit to their names, but that doesn't change the fact that, in an unspoken tradition of making the most of everything they have, they won't ask for a new diaper for their baby until the old one is literally falling off. But I think my favorite thing, the thing that most reminds me of Liberia, is their spirit.

One of the littlest patients in the wards is a tiny baby named Benedicte who just had her cleft lip fixed. Benedicte's mama died giving birth, so she's joined in her bed by a great auntie, a large woman in a blouse and skirt of matching, incredibly bright fabric, who cheerfully informs me in French that she never expected to have another baby. That her oldest child is in his thirties, her youngest twenty-one. But when your niece dies, someone has to take the little one, and, (as she expertly juggled small Benedicte from hand to hand), could we have some more milk please? I call Benedicte ma petit cochon, which, unless I'm insultingly wrong, means my little piggy, because of the vast amount of formula she seems to be able to hold in what must be a very small stomach. Benedicte's aunty just smiles and laughs and pats my rear end as I walk past (another trend that seems to be West African, rather than solely Liberian). She challenges me to complicated games of tic-tac-toe, ones in which you only get three pieces which can move around the board at will, and when I give up, she cheerfully bathes and feeds and changes her tiny charge without a single complaint.

It's easy to forget that this is a woman who has had her own children, who has finished raising her own family. Saddled with another infant to mother, she acts as though she couldn't be happier about the sudden turn of events. As though it had been the plan all along. In her cheerful countenance, I see all my Liberian mamas mirrored back to me, their stoic resolve in the face of unspeakable tragedy.

And I am suddenly and fiercely homesick for another West African country, not so far from this one.