A mango for your thoughts

On my hammock, listening to the goats baah fiercely - they've got a lot to say - news in French hums in the background on a crackling radio. It finally rained, after almost four months of parched mouths and dry wells. They call these the mango rains. O happy mango season! I've been eating so many mangoes my shit is bright orange, five, ten a day. Every house I go to they give me piles and piles; the other day a little girl came to me, grinning, and handed me one bigger than her head. Yummmmm.

Today was beautiful. Since the health center in my village services the seven surrounding ones, waiting for the patients to come to us is certain failure, especially when it comes to the devastating, all too frequent childhood diseases. With that in mind, frequent vaccinations to the surrounding towns is key, and my village did a 3-day Polio vaccine campaign with the Relais, or community healthcare workers. I rode to Karo with Nerega to give out Polio vaccines. Karo is about 7 kilometers from my village, across rock cliffs and now empty fields, some burnt down in anxious preparation for the rainy season in a few months, and palm trees. Nerega pointed out the palms that the Christian villagers use to make "banji," palm wine that smells like gasoline but is delicious when mixed with lots of sugar. The Christians invited me to a meeting of theirs, since "all Americans are Christian" and I can't come up with a coherent explanation of Judaism that they can grasp. Still it was interesting to talk to them, a vast minority here, they are struggling to try to create a community out of this strongly Muslim village.

Anyway, we made our way to the other side of the cliffs and there was Karo, a smaller quieter version of my village, with huts decorated with big blue flowers and stripes of red and black mud. We went from concession to concession, and gathered all the children under 5. Since they typically have no idea how old they are (birthdays are all but forgotten here), we checked to see if they were to old by having them reach over their heads to see if their arms were long enough to touch their ears. I dropped the oral vaccine into their mango sticky mouths as Nerega painted their little pinky fingers purple with a marker and drew white crosses on the doors in chalk. By the early afternoon we had vaccinated 167 children. We rested for lunch at the Chief's house and had chicken, macaroni and (of course!) mangoes. The Chief was impatient at my slow language, but then I realized that he couldn't see. I realized our language is so much more then sounds, and without the emotional cues that comes with vision I am sure I was completely incomprehensible to a blind old man. Its hard though to overcome that anger, and I become stopped up and insecure. The Chief told me how difficult it was for his people to get to the health center in my village, how women were stuck delivering on the rock cliffs on the way.

When I got back to village I hopped into a UNICEF Jeep with Oussman, the doctor and a Sage Femme, an nurse/obstetrician who was there to survey the health concerns here. We went to another village in the commune, Keniekenieko. There, I channeled Oussman's anger at the dismal healthcare there - all the sudden I saw only malnourished eyes staring quietly in their mother's bony arms, who responded with infuriating giggles at his pleading disapproval. But the worst is always the fathers, how can you not see! They look over at their children's gold tipped kwashiokor hair, acting surprised as they suck on a cigarette. Yuck. But at the end of the day, they don't know, they don't know. The protein is right in front of their faces - houses full of peanuts and fields ready to be sowed with beans, and they think that if the rice fills them up then they are doing their job.

Every Friday though I have been cooking fortified porridge with the mothers of the malnourished children, showing them how cheaply and easily they can improve nutrition with ground peanut and a little lemon or baobab juice, mashed mangoes. I go back and forth to the food groups mural I've painted, and I hope I see that light bulb go off. Some of the babies are already improving, and in general there are more and more women coming to get their babies weighed everyday.