How on earth do people do this blogging business? Three weeks have dissolved under my tongue – still have the taste, but my hands have been too busy with other work (and our compound too without electricity) for me to write.
For those of you who *haven’t* heard my crazy story from a few weeks ago…. We were at one of the clinics we operate. It’s not a full medical clinic: only cares for patients with guinea worms. We were taking care of records, running in the endless wheel of paperwork that rolls when you work in the field, when O, one of the clinic staff, came to me and said, A woman is having a baby in the bushes outside – let us go. Yow! Yow. Not only two yows, but three! Yow! We go to the bushes. This is the place where our patients sometimes sneak out to go to the bathroom – the latrines have been flooded, and lots of folks from our villages don’t trust latrines anyhow. (You know those latrines; they’d sell their grandmother for an easy Sudanese pound.) We smell the shit as we are walking. And there, under a tree, surrounded by a small group of women and curious kids, is a lady squatting over a bloody sheet. Between her knees is a tiny, blue head. O is a trained nurse, and has put on his white coat. Bring gloves! We say. And soap, and clean water, and a clean sheet, and bandaging gauze. O sits by the woman and strokes her belly. This helps with the contractions, he says.
Here it is! This is the scene in the comedy movie, when the hapless hero/heronine has to deliver a baby. Thank goodness l am the only hapless one – O has delivered many babies in the past. Also the baby is allegedly all the way out. O pulls on the head and shoulders, and the woman shifts in a way that *might* be like a wince, to a badass woman who goes off to have a baby in the bushes. In any event, after this the baby is… all there. Out! (This is the term we use for worms, that they are “completely out,” and so I feel odd, applying it to this baby.)
[O told me to tie the cord three times with bandage gauze, and then to cut inbetween the first and second. Insurance against blood loss on the baby's side.] We take him and wash him gently with water (no harsh antibiotic soap for you, new little man). [A kid from the CCC comes with a clean, new bedsheet,and I wrap him up. His skin is so delicate I'm sure the cloth and my clumsy hands must hurt, but he keeps quiet, eyes shut. The ladies think it's hilarious that I'm bouncing him, shushing him. I think about my dad singing me to sleep when I was young. I sing to him. Summertime, his first song.]
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