The medical campaign has revived the community’s misconception that we’re all doctors, so we’ve had a lot of folks coming to the house this week in search of medicine. Haha. Poor folks. If only they knew that most everything I know about tropical diseases and illnesses I’ve learned out here. But, we help where we can when we can. And we try to encourage them to go to the clinic, though sometimes I myself doubt the clinic workers’ competence.
Take, for example, earlier this week, when I sent Elizabeth and her week-old child down there, and she came back up with a bottle of adult Tylenol cough medicine for the teensy child. I took it away from her. Might as well give the child a chance to wait until adulthood to ruin his liver with balu beer, instead of damaging it now, right?
Anyway, we’re trying to help while at the same time resisting a full conversion into a village clinic. We’ll see how it goes.
Most of the week, we’ve been nursing little Miss Ellen back to health. Yesterday and for the past few days, she’s been pretty sick. Yesterday she was so hot we threw her in a bucket of water and tried to fight the fever. She spent the rest of the day alternating between Kim’s and my lap, dozing on and off. Today she’s smiling a bit more and beating her brother Francis on the head, so I feel like that’s a good sign.
I’m relieved.
The problem of living in a place like this is that your head gets all screwed up. It seems a mathematical truth that when kids get sick, they die. And so you panic or resign yourself accordingly. Alternately, you think that when kids outside tiny villages in Africa get sick, they go to the hospital and they get well. They don’t die. I realized that addendum when they flew Steve’s boy out and I automatically sighed a sign of relief, that he’d be just fine, since he was going to the hospital. And though Christian did pull through, though it sounds like it was scary at some points, kids—even kids in America—do die. Hmm.
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