It’s my last shift. There are only ten patients left and most of them are here only because their homes are too far away for them to be able to come back, day after day, for dressing changes. My co-worker and I are taking turns watching them sleep. We are all layered under blankets in the cool of our air-conditioned boat, these Africans and I. Most of them are eager to go home. Especially Josie (photo above) who has been here long enough to learn to do her own sterile dressing changes and to take vital signs on herself and her neighbors… the many neighbors she has seen come and go. I’ve watched a lot of people come and go myself. And now I am the one going. I can’t say I’m ready, but it’s a good time. The hospital is half torn down and packed up already. I will only miss out on the bleaching, the boxing and bagging, the floor waxing, a few dressing changes.
So tonight I am doing my laundry and making a last minute check-list of things to do: I must change my extra West Africa CFA back to U.S. dollars. From blue, purple, green and red back into dull green dollars. I need to pack up a box or two to leave behind and pray over, that it will not have turned to moldy remnants by time I return in six months. I need to say goodbye to lots of good, beautiful people. I will get to say hello again to many of them in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone or heaven, I suppose. I need to charge my ipod for the journey, get a few photos from friends.
So tonight I am doing my laundry and making a last minute check-list of things to do: I must change my extra West Africa CFA back to U.S. dollars. From blue, purple, green and red back into dull green dollars. I need to pack up a box or two to leave behind and pray over, that it will not have turned to moldy remnants by time I return in six months. I need to say goodbye to lots of good, beautiful people. I will get to say hello again to many of them in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone or heaven, I suppose. I need to charge my ipod for the journey, get a few photos from friends.
And I could use one more zimmy-john (motorbike) taxi ride in the evening -at the time of day when stifling heat fades to comforting warmth and the breeze feels soft on your skin, the time when the falling sun makes the red sand glow. Or I'd like to meet just one more child on a street corner who will run up to me and grin with thier flashing white teeth and thier wide eyes and make me think, one last time, that I have just seen the most adorable child on earth. Maybe one last meal of fufu, eaten with my fingers, dripping with red, spicy sauce. I don't know if I have time for all that, but here is one last blog entry sent from the Africa Mercy, Lome, Togo. I remember googling "Lome" not so many months ago. Didn't I just arrive here? In a sense, yes, but long enough ago that it aches to leave.
In the morning I'll have Josie take my blood pressure one last time. She won't know what the numbers mean, but it will be good for my heart. Last night our translator, Yaovi, was singing, "you give me fever, fever when you kiss me, fever all through the night." I told him I was gonna kiss him, but I didn't want to give him a fever. He pointed at the tub of tylenol and told me a little fever would be ok, it can be fixed. Better to have a fever than to miss out on kisses. And it is better to come and go and feel your heart ache when you go, than to not have come at all.
Oh, it must be the crazy hour of the night, the still-dark of morning, that makes me want to cry.
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