When I walked I ducked into the shade structure behind the
health center, it wasn’t the infant in the midwife’s arms that surprised me, it
was the bottle. Babies are omnipresent
in this area that has a 1% prevalence of family planning utilization. Bottles are not. This was the first bottle I had seen in
Senegal, while the number of breasts I have seen (breastfeeding or just hanging
out) are countless.
“Who is this?” I asked Yvonne.
“I don’t know,” she answered softly, gazing down at the
baby. That was clearly not the answer I
expected, but she was too enthralled with the baby in her arms to want to engage
in any kind of conversation that would give me any actual information. My curiosity was piqued, and I went in search
of someone who would fill me in. Mr. Sy,
the hospital social worker and my official counterpart, rounded the corner, and
I rushed to ask him if he knew anything.
He smiled sadly. The
baby was found in the woods outside of Koliya, a village with a big djoura
(artisanal gold mining site) on the border of Mali, by a man who was looking
for firewood. She was in a hole, covered
with rocks. The man gave her to the
village chief, and then somehow she was given to the Saraya Health Center. They guessed she was about two days old. “This is the kind of thing you might see in a
big city, but never here,” he said, shaking his head. “The djouras are changing everything.”
I was absolutely shocked to hear this. Even if women are not intrinsically valued in
this culture, mothers are. Teranga, the
overwhelming Senegalese hospitality, would never allow for such a thing. Families take in each other’s children all
the time, and in any typical Senegalese village, a mother would not have to
worry about raising her child if she were unable to. My host sister has four children from four
different men, and while she is not thrilled about her situation, all of her
children are welcomed and loved by the family, which is the typical reaction
here for children out of wedlock.
But the djouras are not a typical Senegalese village. The population is very transient—people looking
to seek their fortune and going from one djoura to another, crossing the porous
borders of Senegal, Mali, and Guinea to do so.
They are not tied to the location or the people, and the social ills
that this phenomenon has brought are at times overwhelming.
When I told my host sisters about the baby later on that day,
their reaction was incredibly strong.
(My friend Karin told me that I probably could not have told them
anything that would have upset them more.)
“Why did the mother not just give her to someone else?!” they cried.
In a way, though, she did.
After Mr. Sy told me the baby’s story, he concluded by pointing over to
where I had originally seen the baby. “There
is a long line of candidates to adopt her.
Including my wife.” I looked, and
Jojo had now joined Yvonne in gazing lovingly and unwaveringly at the tiny bundle.
I understood the first time I got to hold her. Up close, I could see the gashes, undoubtedly
left by the rocks. Seeing those, I
understood that she was not meant to live.
Yet here she was. I have never
been so moved by the miracle that is life.
This tiny life had somehow persevered through the dangers of abandonment
in the Senegalese woods during hot season—the assault on her life from rocks,
the intense West African sun, the animals.
She lived, and she was found. If
that is not a miracle, I don’t know what is.
Holding this nameless miracle, my thoughts wandered to
another miraculous life. The previous
day, I had learned of the loss of Pat Robins, a family member whom I held very
dear, to a brain tumor that was diagnosed in November. Pat and I lived with Pat and Kitte Robins
(Kitte is my dad’s cousin) right after we got married and had just moved to
Missoula. You know you have some amazing
relatives when you are newly married and are sad to move out of their
house. I will forever treasure that time
and all I learned from both of them. He
was truly one of the best people I have ever known, and I was having a hard
time imagining a world without his presence.
Yet, here was this new presence in my arms. It seems corny to think of “The Circle of
Life” while living in Africa, but there’s something to it. Human life is precious and cannot be taken
for granted. Lives end, and lives begin. It hurt deeply to be so far away while my
family was coming together to grieve, but instead, I was in Senegal and got to
see another family come together around the beginning of a life.
I have often thought of the staff at the Saraya Health
Center as a family, and I know they do too.
This area does not produce many high school graduates, let alone
professionals with the kind of training needed to become a nurse, midwife or
doctor. Everyone with those roles has
been sent to Saraya by the Senegalese Ministry of Health to fill in the
gaps. You really can’t get much farther
from the development of Dakar than Saraya, so it’s not a desired
destination. Yet, they still come, and
even though they don’t really integrate, they leave their families to serve the
communities that need them. And they
become family to each other. It was
really beautiful to watch this family welcome this new member that had no
connection to them. A collection was
taken to buy formula and diapers. The
midwives took turns caring for her when they were off duty. Everyone joked (in an only slightly joking
way) about how they were each the best candidate to adopt her. People talked of little else.
A week after she was brought into our lives, a baptism was
held. In the Muslim tradition, the
baptism and naming ceremony is held 7 days after a child is born. The date of the baptism was based on a guess
of her birthday and the time that the hospital is typically the slowest. Her head was shaved, and she was given the
name Fatou Traore, after the head midwife of the district. A fancy chicken meal was prepared to
celebrate this new, unexpected life.
I had thought that Madame Loum, the midwife who had taken
the most ownership of little Fatou and had come to be referred to as her
mother, would eventually beat out the rest of the hospital staff (and the rest
of the community of Saraya once the word spread) and adopt her. However, since the health center was a
government entity, they decided they needed to do things by the books. Senegalese social services (which I didn’t
even know existed) made a plan to come to Kedougou to take her. At the rate that things usually move here, I
thought we would have at least a month with her. But then, only a few days after the baptism,
I entered the health center to hear Madame Diarra tell me that I was too late.
“Too late for what?” I asked.
“They just left for Kedougou. Social services called and said they had to
bring her there this morning.” She would
then be taken to Tamba, where a judge would decide which of two candidates for
adoption could take her. Madame Loum was
not allowed to apply since she already had a child. The head doctor declared that the hospital
team would follow her case to ensure she was in a good home, just as quickly and unexpectedly as she had
arrived, she was gone.
But the reminder about miracles at a time that I
really needed comfort…that endures.
