Thankful

Yesterday I went out again with the PMI community health nurses. This time we took a motor boat (although they still the traditional word, pirogue, to describe it so I thought we were going in a dugout boat by paddle, which was really exciting until I saw that it was a regular boat). Traveling by boat was an adventure in itself because we are in the dry season right now and the river is quite low. This makes for lots of sand bars. One of those sand bars caught the boat's motor and we almost flipped over in the river. Mercifully just the boat driver fell in, but judging by the cries of "Jesus sauve nous, dieu sauve nous" emanating from the nurses you would think that we all drowned. We organized ourselves and made it to the village though. Even today at the hospital everyone was gossiping (congossa in the local dialect) about our plunge into the Oogue and how dramatic it all was. That is the culture here though, that information/gossip is very theatrical and communal.

Once we got to the village it was very interesting to see how a village that is only accessible by boat is so much more communal and basic. There were really sick babies (hydrocephaly for two months! malnourished to the point of exhaustion!) there whose parents were taking care of them the best that they could, but were in bad shape because their families were too poor to take them to the hospital. Can you imagine the thoughts and decisions that go through a parent's head as they grapple with the health of their child in a village like that? It's almost unbearably complicated.

As I was sitting on a bench under a mango tree seeing baby patients, eating fried fish a la chocolat, and riding in a crazy motorboat through a gorgeous tropical rainforest, I was struck repeatedly by how lucky I am. Lucky that I live in this beautiful place, that I get to speak French and German everyday, get to take time out of medical school to experience how people live in equitorial Africa, and think about the choices that I face and that my patients face. If I were more religious I would ascribe this all to divine providence, but I will say instead that I have been given a great deal of chance dans ma vie.