ali's african adventures

It's nearly the end of Friday for me, but Zoe's down for a nap and I finally have a minute to write. Five minutes, to be exact, since I'm linking up again for Five Minute Friday with the gang over at Lisa-Jo Baker's blog.

Today's prompt: Here.

Go.

I sit at the table in my tiny cabin, staring out the window at the blue sea and the blue sky and the ships sailing past, wondering how I can possibly put into words how it feels to be here.

On the surface it's simple: I'm a twenty-nine year-old wife and mother, raising my nearly-eight month-old daughter and working the occasional shift as a pediatric nurse on a maxillofacial surgery ward. The heart of the thing beats so much deeper, though.

Here is a cabin on a ship, thousands of miles from anything and everyone I once called home. It's thirty-four countries crammed into five hundred feet and eight decks, a mathematical conundrum that somehow works out to harmony (for the most part). It's a hospital in my basement, a Starbucks in my living room and a pool made out of a shipping container on my roof. It's fishing boats and calls to prayer at sunset, a sweaty crush of market sellers at midday, and the sun rising through the haze of the Harmattan in the morning.

It's babies asleep on my back while I'm busy measuring out medications and daily dance parties to the beat of African drums in lieu of sedate post-operative walks in the hall. It's three-layer translation, broken telephone style but somehow accurate enough, and volleyball with balloons, and beautiful souls finally realizing that they are loved with a love that is so much bigger than an eternity of pain.

It's the chance to watch lives pieced back together, one careful suture at a time, bearing witness to transformation so profound that even with my great love of words, I can't find the right ones to describe it to you.

Offer me the choice, tell me I could live anywhere in the world. Ask me what I'd choose, and the answer would be simple.

Here.

Here's another glimpse of that moment I was talking about the other day, the one that nearly had me on my knees in the red dirt.



Here is Tracey's account of the day: Milk Delivery. Head over there for her beautiful perspective and even more pictures from the day!

And just in case you wondered whether I was really there or not, here are a few with me in them. Zoe, it would seem, is unsure about this baby she has to share her milk with, but I'm pretty much in love with him.



(The photos aren't watermarked, but they're copyright Mercy Ships and thanks to our awesome photographer/navigator/friend Michelle Murrey.)

Every other Tuesday is milk distribution day for the Babies Without Milk program here in Conakry. This morning, we decided to take advantage of the fact that we had milk to deliver for Alseny and loaded up three mamas, three babies, one husband and a photographer/navigator to make what should have been a forty-five minute trek out to Dania's house. We were all in good spirits; the girls were happy in their carseats, we had directions from Estel, and we were desperately looking forward to snuggling some babies.

Which is when Africa stepped in, as she usually does, throwing curveballs and monkey wrenches into our best-laid plans and turning the excursion into one of those experiences best filed under This is going to be a funny story someday. If we survive.

The Africa Mercy is docked in a port that's at the bottom of a long, thin peninsula, cut through by a four-lane highway. In order to expedite traffic, all four lanes run in one direction, either towards the port or away from it, at various points in the day. There are no lights, signs, or signals of any other sort to indicate when this is the case or to tell you which direction you should be going. We found out the hard way when we merged onto the motorway and realized that all the traffic was coming straight towards us. Unflappable John (Tracey's husband) executed a neat three-point turn in the middle of the highway, we booked it back up the on ramp and started out on the grandmother of all detours.

There are also no street signs (and often no pavement at all), further complicating matters when the little piece of paper that served as our GPS contained directions such as turn left at the market (there are many) or go a long, long way on the autoroute (tried that; it was nearly the end of us). So we took the scenic route. Through the dense crush of market-goers, past women hanging clothes out to dry and babies bathing in buckets, over potholes and next to herds of cows and goats we drove while the babies took it in turns to scream and several of the adults succumbed to motion sickness.



To be totally fair to the other babies, it was mostly Zoe doing the screaming. Red-faced, lip out, crying sads screaming from eight o'clock until sometime after ten. For a child who rarely cries, these two-plus hours felt like eternity. We eventually determined what was wrong with her when she vomited everywhere; it would appear that my poor little girlie gets as carsick as her mama, and the entire contents of her stomach from the last few days seem to have paid the price. (Yes, I took a photo of my child crying. I couldn't get her to stop, so I figured I'd better at least get proof for the inevitable blog. I am nothing if not thorough in my reporting of life to you all.)



It's hard being stuck in a barely-moving vehicle, crammed in like sardines, while someone screams and you have no idea where you're going. It took a lot of time at a standstill, nearly being crushed by trucks that were far too large for the narrow streets they were squeezing through, several police officers (it was really hard to understand the toothless one's French), a kind passer-by who was willing to lead us back to the main road, a questionable jaunt up a dirt road past a sign clearly stating that we were to do no such thing, and Estel herself coming out to meet us, but like all terrible good things, that drive finally came to an end.

Team Front Seat was overjoyed. Team Back Seat had mixed emotions. And I'll just let Zoe sum up how Team Middle Seat felt about the whole thing.



But, oh, was it ever worth it.

Every two weeks, as many as two hundred babies flock to Dania's house, a small building somewhere off a dirt road in Conakry. They come in the arms of everyone but their mamas because their mamas are all gone. The women take a number, sit in the sun and wait to be called so they can receive two cans of powdered milk for the babies they've taken in. They are aunties and cousins and sisters and neigbours who have opened their hearts to these motherless little ones, stepping in to care for them after their mamas pass away. While we were there, a new little boy arrived, his auntie pushing her own grief aside as she quietly related the details of her sister's death just this morning.



That tiny courtyard was full to the brim with heartbreak and hope. I saw them both collide with a force that nearly took my breath away when I looked up to see Tracey, smile as wide as the sunrise, cradling a tiny bundle of arms and legs and round, brown cheeks.

This is him, she told me, and of course I knew exactly who she meant.

Alseny has been living with Dania since his mama died. He's going to be up for adoption eventually, but there's a six-month waiting period and a residency requirement for adopting out of Guinea, so unfortunately there won't be any little stowaways coming with us when we sail for the Canary Islands in June. But we brought three coolers full of milk for him, nearly two hundred ounces (the vast majority of which was Tracey's since Zoe's been a bit of a hog with hers recently). And when he opened his big, dark eyes and started smacking his little lips, Tracey sat down right there in the middle of the crowd and nursed him.



Life ebbed and flowed around them, children playing, babies crying, aunties and cousins and sisters and neighbours talking and laughing, and I could almost see God holding it all in the palm of His hand. As I stood there and watched that little orphaned baby fill his tummy, I wanted to slip off my flip flops and dig my toes into the dirt, knowing somewhere deep down that Dania's courtyard was a holy place today.



We feasted on rice and fish and peanut sauce under the shade tree and bundled the tired girls back into their seats for the drive home. It was uneventful, and Zoe surprised us all by chatting to herself and then taking a nap, which was a welcome break for our ears. We made it back to the ship a little after lunchtime with empty coolers and full hearts.

It was a good day. One of the best so far.

Zoe and her best friend Hailey had a pool date this afternoon.



I know. I, too, almost died from the cuteness of it all. It would appear that she's feeling better, and I never even had to break into the second pack of Fun Dip that a kind yet anonymous stranger left taped to my door after the last update! That's a win all around, since I've now got a backup supply for the next time the plague / teething / unswaddling (for real this time, since I totally chickened out yet again and she's still wrapped up snug as a bug at bedtime) hits our cabin.

As we were heading home to put the girls down for their naps, we passed by the patients, all sitting outside in the fresh air on Deck Seven. In the middle of the group, peeking out from behind a mass of bandages and around a half-crafted nose, was a pair of eyes I was pretty sure I remembered from Sierra Leone. Hopeful, I called out the little girl's name. Kadiatu!.

She and her papa looked over, and her dad's face broke into a wide smile as he waved and yelled back his own greeting.

Ali Tumba!

A year and a half later, it's nice to know that I'm remembered, even if it is largely as a result of the size of my rear end.

Last night, Zoe learned how to flip over while still snugly wrapped in her swaddle strap. This sort of behaviour falls firmly in the 'unsafe' camp, so the long-awaited and much-dreaded cold turkey weaning off the swaddle commenced. Unfortunately for her, last night was also the night she came down with a cold bad enough that crying for longer than about thirty seconds resulted in her vomiting everywhere and being mostly unable to breathe. After an hour and a half of crying and jammie changing and soother replacing, I gave up and brought her into bed with me for the night.

Last night was also the night the Husband of Joy came home after being away for a month.

The timing couldn't have been worse. Phil ended up bunking down in Zoe's room while I laid awake in ours with a whimpering, coughing baby in my arms, tears running down both our faces. (Zoe's and mine; I have no idea what was happening with the HoJ way over on the other side of the cabin.)

I realized a few things last night, about motherhood and expectations and just how long the hours can be when your baby can't sleep.

I had it all planned out in my head, the joyful reunion on the dock, smiles all around followed by Zoe going down for the night without a peep so Phil and I could spend time together catching up. (I think that's what the kids are calling it these days.) Blissful, perfect family time.

Instead we had rivers of snot and a crying baby who took a little while to remember who her Daddy was and that endless night, still in separate beds.

There was one beautiful moment in the middle of all the crying when I got Zoe from her room and brought her into ours. We laid on the bed and Daddy came to snuggle and she couldn't stop beaming up at him and then looking back at me like, Mama, it's Daddy! He's really here! Which I suppose is how I got through the rest of it, lying motionless in whatever odd position I happened to be in when she dozed off, a sad, sick little baby wrapped around my arm who woke up crying if I breathed a little too heavily.

I guess what I'm trying to say is this: my husband is home, my baby is sick, and I've resorted to eating the Fun Dip out of Zoe's Easter basket just so I can make it through the day. (As a side note, eating powdered sugar off a candy stick is every bit as awesome as I remembered.)



I wanted it to be perfect, but instead I got smacked upside the head with reality. Because no matter how much it makes my little OCD heart cringe, life is messy.

I know there's a lesson to be learned in here somewhere, one that will help me face the rollercoaster of parenting with much more grace the next time around. But I'm out of Fun Dip, so it's just going to have to wait.

Linking up again for Five Minute Friday with Lisa-Jo Baker.

Today's prompt: Broken.

Go.

I laid awake deep into the night yesterday, waiting for Zoe's cries over the monitor, knowing that I would go to her the moment I knew she needed me.

Somewhere in the darkness, the tears came, thinking of that other mama two thousand years ago who spent the same night watching her child be torn from her.

I held my own firstborn in my arms, tracing the smooth line of her cheek with a trembling finger, and I could barely breathe when I thought of how she had to watch them beat Him and break Him until she was the only one left who could have known Him. It says He was unrecognizable, disfigured beyond belief, but a mama's love would be able to see past all that. In the ragged, swollen lines of His face, she must have seen His first smile, His first steps, the first time He said I love you.

I see her at the foot of His cross, weeping and broken, living out every mother's worst nightmare, the one she knew she'd have to face since the day the angel gave her the news, and I cannot imagine how she kept herself from climbing that cruel tree and tearing Him down with nothing but the strength of her love.

And then I hear Him with torn lips and clumsy tongue doing what He does best, putting the broken things back together, setting the shattered pieces perfectly back in their place.

It is finished.

Bloody and broken and utterly victorious He hangs while His mother weeps in the shadow of His triumph.

My heart is so full - I have two awesome updates for you.

First, thank you all so much for praying for our four noma patients. I shared your responses with the nurses on the wards who shared them with the patients, much to everyone's encouragement.

This afternoon, Zoe and I were taking out our trash. As is our custom, we stopped by the tent that serves as the outpatient waiting area on our way back to the ship to see if we knew anyone. Sure enough, one of my patients from last week was there, along with his mama and his little brother. My patient, understandably, wasn't thrilled to see me since I had been taking care of him right after his surgery, but mama and baby brother were all smiles so we sat down to 'chat' for a while. (Given the fact that neither of us speaks a single word of the other's language, conversations are limited to smiles, hugs, and babies being passed from arm to arm. It works surprisingly well.)

We'd been there a little while when I heard someone greet me. Hearing the quiet bonjour, I looked up and saw one of the patients you prayed for, Alpha. It took me a moment to recognize him, since I've never seen him out of a hospital gown. I've also never heard his voice, since he had a tracheostomy while I was down in D Ward. But there he was, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, greeting me with a twinkle in his eyes.

At my look of surprise, he smiled as well as he could with his new lips, gesturing towards town to tell me that he's staying at the HOPE Center now. I handed Zoe to him, and they sat together for a while in the heat of the afternoon. She rested quietly in his lap as he carefully wiped her drool with her bib and then his own on the blue cloth he carried while the two of them just stared at each other in wonder.

God is on the move; our patients are getting well.

And if you had any doubt at all about His working in this place, I'd like to introduce you to Alseny.



My dear friend Tracey took that photo this morning, and I'm going to let her update you on our little friend, because the story is so much bigger than I could even have imagined.

Click here for Tracey's story about Alseny.

I love this place, and I love watching God unfurl His plans over His people like a banner, triumphant against a backdrop of death and disease.

Over the past couple weeks as I've worked a few shifts, I've been struck the the number of patients in D Ward who are there for reconstructive surgeries following battles with noma. I've written about this disease before; Aissa's story is a prime example of the havoc it can wreak in a person's life. Ninety percent of those who suffer a noma infection will die, leaving one out of ten behind, horribly disfigured and doomed to a lifetime of shame here in West Africa where different is often the same thing as cursed.

Several of my patients were in for these surgeries; I just admitted the smallest seven year-old I've ever met on Friday so we could clean his wound over the weekend in preparation for surgery today. As a pediatric nurse, I ended up taking care of all the little ones, but there are four adults in the wards right now who are also undergoing the extensive, painful process of rebuilding faces that just aren't there anymore.

Sometimes we see miracles, and sometimes the healing takes much longer. For these four, the battle is not just against a lifetime lived on the fringes but also against infection and malnutrition and wounds that just aren't getting better.

So we're going to turn to the One who knows them, who created them and wept over them when they fell ill all those years ago. We're holding a twenty-four hour prayer vigil for Marietou, Alpha, Fodi and Bala, starting tomorrow (Tuesday) at eight AM our time (four AM in New York) and running through eight AM on Wednesday. The last time I asked for prayer on this blog, it was for the six hundred pink sheets, and in less than a week, all six hundred patients had someone praying for him or her.

We don't have a week this time; starting tomorrow morning, we're storming the gates of heaven on behalf of these precious four. You don't have to pray all day long, but please stand with us as we plead with the One who holds them in the palm of His hand.





(Bottom photo by Deb Louden.)

If you're willing to pray, would you let me know in a comment or an e-mail? I'd love to be able to share with Marietou, Alpha, Fodi and Bala just how many people from around the world want to be a part of their healing.

Linking up again with Lisa-Jo Baker and a whole community of free writers for Five Minute Friday.

Today's prompt: Remember.

Go.

Last week, I was talking with another nurse about a patient we took care of in Liberia five years ago. You remember him, right? He was in bed ten in B Ward. We did a neck and arm contracture release. His father crocheted hats and spoke fourteen languages. I didn't realize until I saw her shaking her head and laughing that these sorts of details aren't typically stored up for this long.

I remember them.

I sit here in front of my computer and their names and faces and stories mix and swirl in my heart. Hope and healing to the world's forgotten poor. Except they're not forgotten. Not as long as we stand to bear witness to their lives, not as long as we remember them and tell their stories.

The other day at work, I met a woman close to my age. When she was three days old, an oil lamp fell on her while her mama slept, burning her face and arm, fusing her chin to her chest and destroying one of her hands. She has three children, and when I asked her their ages, it took almost five minutes for her to explain that the youngest is nearly two, the middle one is five and that there's another boy, too, older than the rest. She can't remember how old he is. She can't do the math because she was never able to go to school.

This other mama sat up straight in her bed as she told me her story, a flood of details that spilled out through twisted lips and over clumsy tongue. I held her hand in mine, her three bent fingers finding their places in the spaces between mine while I thought of my own firstborn, of the thousands of photos, every detail of her short seven months carefully recorded and catalogued and stored away for future reference. I have an entire book of letters I wrote to her when she was still inside me, letters full of the promise and the hope of her.

All this mama has is a lifetime of pain and one bright spark of hope that, somehow, someday, she'll be able to stop begging and get a job selling clothes in the market.

I memorize the lines of her face, the smooth stump of her hand and the thinness of her legs under the blanket. Many years down my own road, I will remember her. I will tell her story, because it's the best way I know to honour her life. And maybe one day I'll be back here in Guinea and I will buy fabric from her on the side of a dusty street in a crowded market.

Zoe is seventh months old today, and her list of accomplishments is growing by the minute. When I wrote her six month post, I was certain I'd be back this month to report that she's crawling all over the place, but, true to form, she's doing things her own way. She's absolutely mobile; it's just not exactly pretty all the time. In the last couple days, she's finally started lifting her hands as well as her knees, but she can't coordinate the two. It invariably ends in her getting so excited to go somewhere that she spends her days lunging forwards, belly-flopping and face-planting all around the cabin. She rarely seems to mind, thankfully, since she spends a good amount of time with her nose buried in the carpet.

It's so fun watching her master new things. Over the weekend, we were at the beach, and she was eyeing up the straw in my Nalgene. I let her put it into her mouth and she started drinking my water like she's been using a straw her whole life. (I think she was as surprised as I was on that one.) Just yesterday, she spent the entire morning focusing really hard on pushing herself up from her stomach into a sitting position, and then right in the middle of taking her seven month pictures, she all of a sudden just sat up like she'd been doing it from day one.

She's growing hair, now, enough to be styled into tiny little mohawks and finally starting to cover over the bald spot on the back of her head. The drool continues, but there's nothing resembling a tooth anywhere in sight. One of my favourite developments this month (and hers, if her glee is any indication) is the addition of a few consonants to her verbal repertoire. She's mastered the B sound and is working hard on D, although that one seems to come out more often when she's mad. Much to her delight, she can now also blow raspberries. We're starting to work on some sign language with her; she doesn't do any of them back to me yet, but it's fairly obvious from her reaction that she understands the sign for milk! I think she's getting food and all done, but her tells aren't quite as pronounced on those ones.

Speaking of food, she's finally decided that it's a good idea, and we can enter carrots, peas, beans, oatmeal, cereal puffs and apples on the approved list. The jury's still out on rice cereal, avocado and bananas, but she'll eat them when she feels like it. She seems to be a bit picky about her foods; we recently inherited some jarred baby food, and she's made it very clear that she prefers the fresh stuff. This is where her ability to blow raspberries comes in handy, as far as she's concerned; it's not hard to tell when she doesn't want to eat something. And finally, after seven months of fighting me almost every time she nurses, she's decided that she loves it. I'm absolutely drinking in our quiet times together, discovering that this really can be the joy that I've heard so much about.



She's perpetual motion and constant smiles and about three seconds of snuggle each day. But oh, in those three seconds when she rests her head on my shoulder and her wiry little body goes soft in my arms, I realize how well we fit together, my daughter and I. She was made for me, this one, and she's making me new every day all over again.

And now for something completely different, since I think we could all use a little change of subject after the last post, no?

A few months ago, we mums on board got word that a group of ladies who are in a small group together wanted to bless us by taking us on a weekend retreat. Since there are lots of mums and not everyone could go at the same time, they planned two retreats. When I found out that there would be one in March and that my own mother would conveniently be visiting at that time, I immediately started pumping and storing milk for Zoe to drink while I was away.

And then the protests started.

Over the past weeks, there has been some instability here in Conakry and in other parts of Guinea, and travel outside of a very small radius around the ship has been limited. We were understandably a bit disappointed when we found out that, instead of a weekend away somewhere up country far, far away from ship and kids and responsibilities, the second retreat was just going to be one day, and that day was going to be spent mostly on board.

I could write a whole novel on how incredible that day turned out to be and how it was obvious that God's hand was on it, no matter where we were, but I want to tell you about something completely unexpected that came out of it.

Last week, I met a woman who's involved with a program called Babies Without Milk here in Conakry. Her name is Estel; I don't know if she runs the whole thing or what exactly her role is. I just know that there are so many babies with mamas who don't have enough milk here and even more babies with no mamas at all. Since we were planning on staying on board for the weekend, I suddenly had a whole stash of milk in my freezer that suddenly didn't seem to be very useful, so I told Estel that it was up for grabs.

There aren't any donor milk banks here in Guinea, so the babies in the program are usually fed powdered milk. Every so often, though, they come across a baby who just can't handle cow's milk, and it's times like that when they desperately need donated mama's milk. Estel took down my name and number, promising to call if they found a baby like that in the next few months while we're still here.

I'm sure that since I just met you, she told me with a smile, we'll be getting that baby very soon.

Sure enough, when I walked into the cafe today, one of the baristas was on a cell phone. She beckoned me over; it was Estel, and of course I just happened to be walking by right when she called looking for me.

Two weeks ago, a little boy was born to an unwed teen mother. She has since passed away, and her older sister, a young mother herself, just doesn't have the means to feed another mouth. Alseny was signed over to the police and will be placed for adoption at some point in the future, but right now he just needs to survive.



Estel and her daughter, Jamie, came to the ship this afternoon to collect my extra milk. Fifty-three ounces isn't much in the grand scheme of things; it's not going to change the course of history, but hopefully it'll make a difference for little Alseny.

And once again I'm left in awe of the way God orchestrates our lives. He weaves our stories together, and it's so rare that we get to see the beauty of the tapestry so clearly in the moment. I'm marveling at that beauty today.

(I'll be sure to keep you updated if I hear anything more about how Alseny's doing.)

Fair warning: this blog entry is probably best read far away from food.

I've been living the missionary life for a while now, and while I love pretty much everything about what God's called us to, I have to admit that the places He choses to put us have left their mark on me.

In Liberia I contracted hepatitis B from a needlestick injury at work. In Benin we discovered that I had latent TB and would need to be treated with a nine-month course of medication before it would be safe for me to get pregnant. In India, while on the TB medication, I had a toxic reaction to a malaria medication which left me warding off panic attacks, paranoia and visual hallucinations. Peru gave me Dengue and the resulting post-viral arthritis crippled me for the better part of a year. When I got pregnant in Sierra Leone, I ended up with morning all-day sickness that lasted for three countries. The HoJ has been by my side through all of this, holding my hand (or my hair, depending on the situation) and reminding me that everything would be okay.

I'm pretty sure today's development would have had him jumping overboard; it's probably some kind of divine intervention that has him thousands of miles away in England right now.



I'm going to let Zoe ease you into this one. Here she is in her Sunday best, a few hours after coming home from ward church. (That's another story altogether; it was her first time, and she handled the drums and the crush of people and the being passed from stranger to stranger splendidly.)

Isn't she cute holding that tape measure? There's probably about a foot or so marked out between her sweet little hands.

And this is the part of the entry where I'm not exactly sure how to proceed. You see, if you were all nurses, I could just lay it all out there and you'd probably react in one of three ways: you'd either be intrigued, impressed or just a little jealous.

Except you're not all nurses, and so I can't quite figure out how to tell you that I passed a foot-long worm this afternoon.

Yup.

After all this time in Africa and various other parts of the developing world, I've finally come face to face with an intestinal parasite of my very own. I haven't felt sick at all, and since every breastfeeding mother is pretty much hungry all the time, I had no reason to imagine that there was a not-so-little friend hanging out in my digestive tract.

I took him (Her? Someone better versed in these things might want to spot me the proper pronoun here...) down to the duty nurse and was quickly surrounded by a group of friends and strangers, all of whom were as fascinated as I was. I got some high fives and even a congratulatory hug from a fellow nurse (which just goes to show you how messed up in the head we all are), and then the on-call doctor arrived.

English isn't his first language, so the exchange that followed was absolutely priceless.

Could we conserve this please?
Oh, you want my worm? Sure, you can have it.
Yes, I would like to put it in ... how do you say this? Formal ... pie?
... Formaldehyde? (Internal note to self: don't eat pie any time soon.)
Ah, yes. This is it. I want to conserve it. May I have it?

I started to give him my worm (safely ensconced in several layers of ziploc baggie and paper towel), and as the specimen was passing from hand to hand, the doctor got a huge smile on his face.

Oh! Now I recognize you! I saw you on the show.

I smiled politely, hoping that it was okay to let go of the worm as I confirmed that, yes, I was the one he saw on 60 Minutes and tried to pretend that there was nothing strange about the fact that it was me presenting him with an enormous worm that had triggered that memory.

He held the plastic and paper-towel wrapped package tight, searching for the words to say what was on his heart.

Oh yes, he finally managed. I was wiping. Wiping.

I have no idea how I controlled my laughter. Because it's one thing when someone from another country says 'wiping' instead of 'weeping.' It's another thing entirely when he says it while holding a worm that you just fished out of your own toilet with a couple of q-tips and a whole lot of nerve after performing that very action. (TMI? Yes, I think so. I've got no shame left at this point. There's not much room for that feeling when you have to show your giant worm to someone you'll probably see in the dining room at dinner later.)



I've taken the first of the six pills necessary to kill any of its friends that might be lingering inside me, and after looking it all up on the internet, my mother's only input about the potential for a repeat performance was, This could be spectacular! (Side note: my mother is awesome.) Since I'm fairly sure that talk of this whole thing is going to be spreading around the ship like wildfire, I figured I might as well come clean.

My name is Ali, and after five years in Africa, I can proudly say that I just pooped out an enormous worm.


(If you're either a nurse or have an incredibly strong stomach, you can click here to see my intestinal intruder. It's really not pretty, so only click through if you're really sure.)

I had just woken Zoe up from her nap yesterday afternoon when I heard the patients' chairs scraping across the roof of our cabin as they got ready to come inside from Deck Seven. I scooped her up and ran out our cabin door to the blue stairs in time to intercept the mamas of two of my patients from the weekend, arms outstretched to hold her. While she was being passed around, one of my six year-old girlies, NG tube dangling, caught sight of me and flew into my arms for a slightly damp hug. (It seems I cannot escape drool whether my own kid is involved or not.)

I felt so much like myself in that moment, having names and stories to match with the faces trooping down the stairs, feeling other mamas slip their tired hands into mine while we admired each other's babies.

So many people told me that it would be different going back to work after having my own child, but I don't think I realized just how much being a mother would affect me as a pediatric nurse.

Take my little Monkey* for example.



I look at him and I see Zoe. Not in any obvious ways; they're different sizes and different colours and different genders, but holding him, all I could think was, This could have been her. It could have been my baby born with a hole in the bone between her eyes, my baby all wrapped up in white gauze and clinging to me when yet another stranger approached with yet another syringe of medicine.

I felt a kinship with Monkey's mama from the moment I stepped up to their bedside to find him staring up at me with his big, dark eyes. Motherhood is universal, I'm coming to find out. It doesn't matter whether our babies sleep in a crib in their own room or in a towel on our backs; at the end of the day we're all just muddling through, doing the best we can.



This weekend, sharing my love with Monkey was the best I could do. It meant becoming an unofficial lactation consultant, drinking litre after litre of water alongside Monkey's mama so the two of us would have enough milk for our babies. (In typical West African style, there were a lot of hand gestures to accompany this process. When these gestures include the milk-makers, you can only imagine how ridiculous we all end up looking.) It meant mastering baby-backing using nothing but that towel while mama was in the bathroom and Monkey was upset.

It meant holding my patient close and, for the first time, knowing in some small way what his mama was going through watching him hurt, because I've got a piece of me on the outside now too.

Every time I look at a child now, I see the mama holding him. I see the inky blackness of the sleepless nights and the days stained by the worry that she's not getting it right and the incandescent joy of seeing that baby smile for the first time. And it's going to change the way I practice my profession. I'm not sure how, exactly, but I can already feel it.

It's different now. Different is good.


(*Name changed for privacy. Although I think it would be super cute if he really were named Monkey. Deb Louden took the photos of him, I think. She's amazing.)

My heart is so full right now.



I just got home from my first shift back on the wards since I left for maternity leave last May. The HoJ is in England right now doing some marine electrical training courses, so my mother jumped at the opportunity afforded by an empty spot in our cabin and hopped on a plane to come visit Zoe for three weeks. (I'd say she was here to see me, but we all know the truth.) Taking advantage of the built-in Nana nanny services, I let the ward supervisor know that I'd be up for working a few shifts while she's here, and so two o'clock this afternoon saw me in blue scrubs, heading down the three flights of stairs to one of my favourite places in the whole world.

D Ward did not disappoint. My patients were all less than seven years old, and one of them was even younger than Zoe. He quickly found the spot on my hip that she's occupied for the last six months and spent enough time there to soak my shoulder in drool while my heart sang at the rightness of it all.

It was a busy evening with tube feeds and babies who wouldn't eat and more tears than I usually provoke in a single shift (theirs, unfortunately, not mine), but I'm sitting here and it's nearly midnight and I feel less tired than I've felt in months.

There's something about that place that fills me. It's the man with a big bandage on his jaw helping the woman in the next bed to adjust the tube in her nose, holding it carefully for her while the last drops of her feeding flow through it. It's the babies being passed around from one set of willing arms to the next while mama takes a much-needed break. It's the faces taking shape to cover lifetimes of shame and the man who was never allowed to go to school because he would frighten the other children, sitting on his bed, carefully printing letters over and over as he learns to write.

It's all that and a hundred more moments, carefully stored away for the times I start to lose sight of why we're here, buried under the weight of yet another load of laundry and yet another night with far too little sleep.

And when the next shift arrived and I handed over my patients, I came home and held my daughter tight, grateful in a way that words can't really express that, at least for today, I got to bear witness to the healing again.

Today's prompt: home.

Go.

Maybe it's where the heart is, but if that's the case then my home is shattered into hundreds of pieces, lodged in as many places around the globe. These days it's the dirt and heat and cacophony of colours on a West African street.

Home is baskets piled high with anything and balanced on heads with hair plaited tight. It's a sunburst of sunglasses, twenty pairs held with five weathered fingers as the seller calls out to passers by. It's the press of people when I stop at a market stand, offering help and translation and a good, good price despite the fact that the only thing I need is an avocado or two.

Home is the twins, nestled close to their mama on the sidewalk as we pass by. It's the beggar with the twisted leg who reaches his hand out, not to ask for money but to greet us. It's the women folding and refolding long yards of patterned cloth and the babies playing in the dirt at their feet.

It's nothing like what I'd always pictured for my life, but as I feel the sweat seep through my shirt, marking out the shape of the daughter pressed close to my chest, I know that this place, maybe more than any other, is home.