Firsts.

May 2011!! I am in my parent’s house in London right now. We spent two days in Bamako, then we sent three days in my site, then one week in a Moroccan surfing town, and now we are in London as a family until June 3rd. This blog was written from site in April because I had to write about when I went to the president’s house and when I delivered my first baby. (That part is kind of graphic and really sad because the baby was dead and I wrote the part right after… my apologies for the most depressing blog ever) I also had to write about Cary’s visit to my site because it was really fun.

To start from the beginning, on April first I went to my friend Lizs site because she had organized an AIDS awareness bike ride to three small villages and her own in cooperation with two non profits. There were six Peace Corps volunteers, three nonprofit employees, and a few doctors. We rode bikes to these villages and then spent a few hours watching their traditional welcoming ceremony, dancing, talking about aids, and then testing people. Of the 4 villages, only three people came back positive. It is crazy that there is someone with aids in Lizs village. Getting treatment is not easy though. It can only be obtained in a village south of Lizs, though it is free. I wonder about the quantity of it though, and where it comes from. We also handed out cards to urge people to get conunseling, no matter what the result of their test. I don’t think that the results are entirely accurate though. Not everyone was tested, out of fear or what not, and most importantly it wasn’t the most vulnerable population which came out. Liz’s town is a truck stop, an area notorious for the spread of aids. Truck drivers sleep with women in these towns and if one of them has aids, he spreads it like wild fire along the truck route. We didn’t test them though or the prostitutes. I think this is really important and I would love to do it again next year where we only focus on bars and the people at them.

Then I went to Bamako for a few days to do some work and then Cary and I went to my site together April 6th to April 11th. This was really fun; I introduced him as my husband in hopes of setting an example to my village of a healthy American relationship. Cary cooked and cleaned and I hoped that this would make people notice. It seemed only to make women judge me negatively though as a slave driver of sorts and they would tell me constantly, “Awa, Fabure is tired, he should rest and you should be cooking and cleaning and doing his laundry.” It was all in good fun though and it made for a really entertaining week.

Now I have been back at site a few days since all this, trying to get my soak pit project done in the next two or three weeks. But today I was walking home after some rounds of nagging people to dig their soak pit holes to get my nail polish and go back over to my friend’s house because she and her girlfriends wanted to paint nails. But then I saw fode and the doctor sitting on a bench so I stopped to say hello. As I was walking over there, I was again intercepted by an old lady I had never seen before saying that her stomach was hurting. I said ok well Adama is right here, let’s ask him. Turns out, it wasn’t her stomach that was hurting but it was another lady who was pregnant. I was ecstatic, thinking that this was finally my chance, the moment i had been looking forward to forever. Her friend had just gone to the doctor’s office 4 k away by bike; I guess someone actually did know that something was wrong. But we walked over to her house to find her sitting alone in a room with a toddler next to her. I sat in there for a while fanning her and giving her water through her contractions while we waited for a moto to come to take her to the maternity. When we got in, we set her up on the delivery table and got her situated. I don’t know if the matron, the old lady, already knew that things were bad at this point. But as we examined her I noticed that something was already protruding, I assumed it wasn’t the baby’s head. But as the contractions intensified and as the delivery progressed, it was in fact a head that came out. A silent head with a strange shape. The matron must have known now that things were bad. The head was stuck and for ten minutes she pulled and pushed on the silent out of place head. She slid a bed pan under the pregnant womans body to collect he blood. She made the pregnant woman reposition but this put the baby’s head at a strange angle, and pushing against the bed pan. She must have known it was dead by the way she was handling it, at this point only working for the mother. The mother was still silent through and through, fighting the contractions that hardened her tired body. Finally she began to get a hold of the shoulders and get the torso out. I should have known it was dead but you never want to believe that something is dead and I didn’t know what signs to look for nor did I have another birth experiences to compare this against. The baby was laying there, blue and still and silent. I passed her the suckers and other tools I deemed necessary and she looked at them and at me and touched the babies skull-less head and the brain that was not attached and the clearly broken spine that seemed to protrude from the back in a way that could not have held the head on. Then she looked back at me blankly, the only way that she and I could effectively communicate. The mother just stared, still having contractions. I hoped there was another one in there. Just the placenta came out though. She tried to get me to cut the umbilical cord but I told her not today. None of us were wearing gloves, so as much as I wanted to get close, I was afraid. And that was all. I hung around while she cleaned things up a bit and the woman got off the bed and wrapped the dead baby up in cloth. Her friend came over with a smile that one has when you expect to see a new baby. Her friend started crying. I hugged her and cried with her, two actions foreign to Malians, as the old lady berated her for not having prenatal consultations. She said that she couldn’t get them because she didn’t have money. I walked home with her carrying a bucket of blood and afterbirth while she carried a bundle of clothes and her friend carried the dead baby ahead of us. Like a silent funeral procession. I walked rubbing her back and she cried in the street. We got back to her house and she sat in her room. She had a few friends doing things in the room with her so I went back to help the matron lady clean up. I was actually intending on running home but saw Fode and Adama in the distance so I made a quick detour in the maternity. She commented to me how ridiculous it was that this woman didn’t get prenatal consultations. Unfortunately its part of a bigger problem, one that I am supposed to understand and attempt to alleviate at least a little. We went to the woman’s house to give blessing together. She was sitting alone in a room with the dead baby still wrapped up. I don’t know what will happen next. I was torn about what to do so I sat with her a second and then left, gave some more blessings, and went home. As much as I wanted to stick around and see what the matron would say, I couldn’t.