Life is like this here, or La Vie au Gabon

One thing that people seem to like doing here is to compare various nationalities and their dirty habits. In my eavesdropping on conversations around me, it seems as though every Central African country has a slam for every other Central African country. This funny habit the Gabonese have of trash-talking other countries is also tempered by a heavy dose of self-criticism.

When I go on PMI trips one of the constant topics of conversation is the ways in which Gabon is screwed up. Most of it has to do with the sexual morays here. Men and to some extent women are allowed and expected to have multiple sexual partners. Polygamy is also legally permissible. I have tried to figure out exactly how many wives a man can take, but peoples' responses vary from 4 to 8. En tout cas, people are not expected to be in committed monogamous relationships. When a child is born from one of these multiple unions, quite often it is raised by just one of the parents. Or by the parents alternating who takes care of the kid. Or by the grandparents. This infidelity and instability is much maligned but also much joked about and serves as gossip fodder.

There is a tradition of trash-talking the younger generation in Gabon for having children too young, for not going to school, for turning away from the values of their parents. This type of criticism of the young is a cultural constant in my opinion, but here, people insist, it is really true. Maman Sophie pinpoints the age of adolescent decline in Gabon as 1990. Why, I don't know, but she is sure that something changed after that year and all the babies born then or later are wild children.

Spirituality is also a big topic of conversation and even joking, especially in reference to the above two issues. Everyday discussions are liberally peppered with Jesus and “Dieu merci” interjections. Of course, all of these topics sound so much cuter here because the Gabonese add -o to the end of most sentences or paragraphs. So you might say “bonjour-o” and your conversant partner would say “ca va-o” onwards and upwards to -o infinity.

How fun it is to listen to these discussions as people bemoan the habits and morays of Gabon, while also secretly, I think, being fiercely proud of their country.

La Saison de Pluie Commence

Good news first: my intestines seem to be getting back into some kind of order! Yeah for not having greasy pale stools all day. This is something to be celebrated. Although it would have been fun to see those little smiley faces under the microscope. I can always hope for next time.

Medium news: la saison de pluie seems to have started today. It was hot hot during the day and there was more blue sky to be seen than I have seen in my six weeks here. Then at about 7pm the skies opened up and it began to pour like all craziness for several hours. It just stopped actually. The return of the rains is a good thing because the river level will rise thereby preventing further boat accidents from occuring.

Bad news: There is none! Life in Lambarene is always pretty spectacular for me. We continue the fight here for the health of the region and for inter-national cooperation. Good night mes amis where ever you may be!

Giardia!?

Bonsoir tout le monde. I apologize for the long break over the weekend. There were a bunch of things going on: I took call with the pediatrician on duty on Saturday and Sunday, one of my favorite people here left so we had to fete her, and I feel as though I might have gotten Giardia last weekend in Libreville. Not to be too graphic, but I have all the tell-tale signs. I have yet to look at a stool sample under the microscope but I may just start empiric treatment to get rid of some of the symptoms. Its such a close call as to whether I just have bad traveler's diarrhea and it will go away without a harsh antibiotic or whether I need to jump on the Flagyl bandwagon. As this is my first real gastrointestinal derangement since I have arrived, I will keep everyone updated as conditions progress. For the meantime, wish my intestines luck in battling whatever it is that ails them.

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.

PMI en pirogue