Male Patients with an Interesting Problem

Back to interesting news articles. The Liberian Observer today published an article about fistula surgery performed during an upcountry surgical campaign. In addition:

"Dr. Mulbah disclosed that other patients suffering from other forms of sicknesses were treated during the two-week massive surgical operation.

"He said the foreign doctors and their Liberian counterparts operated three male patients that had problem with their uterus.

"The patients, he said, were involved in road accident."

All I can say is, that must have been some road accident!

Rocks on Tarp on Zinc

A few days ago I wondered if I would remember the houses with corrugated zing, covered with tarps and the tarps held down with rocks. En route to the airfield in Sierra Leone today I snapped this photo from the window. Now I know I should remember!

I was also pleased that they didn't weigh ME when I checked in, so I knew it was going to be a larger plane than the one I flew to Freetown in.

Flying in Africa

My post earlier this morning was thoughts and recollections on returning to Sierra Leone. Last week I was in Benin for an assessment trip in anticipation of the ship's visit there last week. Brenda, who was one of my cabinmates during my DTS 12 years ago, was the other person on the trip. We met up with Daslin, one of my former managers who now lives in Benin. Getting there had a few humorous moments. One of them was when we walked across the tarmac to the plane and Brenda exclaimed, "You've got to be kidding! I'm not getting in that small plane." After we eyeballed our luggage and nodded to the guys loading it, we ascended the few steps into the 19-seater prop job. All I could think was, "At least it has portholes." One time I flew out of Liberia on an UNMIL flight and all the portholes were blacked out. It's very disconcerting to fly during a storm, through turbulence, and not know if the current descent is intentional or not nor just how close you are to the ground!

When we arrived at the airport, we had our luggage weighed (for all of you in the US worried about the new luggage restrictions, imagine if you had 12kg/26.4# for a one-week trip and you wanted to take a laptop computer that would consume about 8#. We asked for and received an extra 5kg allowance a few days ahead, so we had a bit more leeway and managed ok). Then they handed us our boarding passes...and in the process I noticed that Brenda had become Doris and I was now Arthur! For Brenda they used her middle name and I was given the first name of the next person on the manifest. And to think, I even wore earrings that day.

Arrived at the airport yesterday morning and had to wait outside for about 10 minutes for the WFP personnel to arrive. When they did, the person who checked me in for the last flight, greeted me by surname and asked, "You're flying again?" At least I was Marie this time and not Arthur. They still don't get that whole first name/middle name thing! The purser said every time she talked to them or emailed them about my flight, they called me Marie. Maybe Jean will get to fly home Tuesday.

I should have known there was something different about this flight when they weighed not only my luggage, but also had ME get on the scale! Let's just say that Brenda would not have been excited at what she saw when she walked across the tarmac if she'd been with me yesterday. The Toyota Land Cruiser the driver picked me up in had more headroom than the Cessna Grand Caravan with seats for 9 passengers. I had to walk hunched over to get to my seat. I picked the single seat in the front row so I had a clear view out the window without much wing interference. The safety briefing was a verbal from the pilot who pointed out a fire extinguisher in the door and a blue box in the back which contained enough food and supplies for a week should something happen to strand us somewhere!

At times it felt like a roller coaster ride, but the thing I love about roller coasters is that the swooshing sensation is predictable...and in a plane you never know when turbulence is going to hit. I thought my neighbor across the aisle was going to lose her lunch, the way she held her stomach, pursed her lips and kept blowing out her cheeks.

Anyway, it was a good flight and I think I may even have seen Mattru, Jong, where I used to live, from the air. It is pretty close and certainly had the different landmarks I could think of: what looked like the outline of the hospital buildings in an area soon after the town started, a split in the road later, the falls where we used to camp upstream, a small island mid-river, etc. The pilots had propped a GPS on the dash for the flight, so when I thought I recognized the village (I know you can't tell much from the photo above, but I could in person and when I zoomed in), I took a photo of the GPS. I couldn't see the numbers from my seat, but I could in the photo. When I look up the coordinates, they correspond pretty closely with the location of Mattru or possibly one other town on a different river, but that town is on the opposite bank of the river. Who knows. It's nice to think that maybe it was Mattru.

Back to Sierra Leone

I flew back to Sierra Leone yesterday morning. Fayah, a Mercy Ships driver from the fistula center picked me up and took me across Freetown via the hillside route in order to avoid traffic. The road travels through villages whose names recall the British connections: Bathurst, Charlotte, Leicester, Regent.

I noticed things as though seeing them for the first time because I realize it could be the last time. In two weeks I'll leave West Africa.

Twenty years ago, when I first landed it Sierra Leone, it was also rainy season. Coming down the steps from the plane, the humidity assaulted me. Rain often made conversations difficult if not impossible...nothing like trying to chat when a downpour plays kettle drum with the corrugated zinc roof over your head. On the road I remember the kids filling potholes with rocks and asking for a dash to reward them for their work before allowing us to pass. I remember sitting at the bottom of a hill contemplating whether it was better to stay to the right or left of the rut or straddle it and cross where it turned at the top. And I remember my first trip to Mattru with Michelle, when a rock struck our windshield, shattering it...and THEN the afternoon rains began. We ended up replacing the windshield with a sheet of plastic, on which the windshield wipers were of course useless, and she drove much of the way with her head out the window while I shifted according to her instructions. A friendship was born on that trip.

Yesterday I found myself wishing I had learned a lesson from my friend Ann and carried a notebook for recording observations and thoughts. Would I remember the zinc roofs covered with tarps and held down with rocks so the tarps would help keep out the rain and the rocks would keep the tarps from blowing away? Brooks that were often invisible from the road during dry season, now waterfalls and rapidly rushing streams visible from a distance? The sight of kids and parents washing laundry and themselves as the water dashed over rocks beside the road? Red clay rutted roads? Men, women, and children carrying usual and unusual loads on their heads (15' pipes, baskets of cassava leaf, bundles of charcoal or yams)? Men and women sitting beside a rock pile, hammering rocks into gravel to sell?

Fayah stopped at one point and backed up a bit, looking to the stream beside the road before continuing. When I asked what he was looking at, "there's a crocodile down there," he replied. That was a a little ways after the entrance to the chimp sanctuary. "It's open again; the chimps are under control for now." A few years ago there had been an attack on people and a massive chimp escape. These chimps were ones that had been kept illegally as pets.

Will share more thoughts and observations later.