The Baby

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.