IRC-Liberia Good-Bye Speech
Peanuts in Bangga
When I was a little kid I remember how slowly time passed. In school, classes were so long I would fall asleep, dream, awaken, secretly wipe dry the drool that had formed on my desk, sit up and realize that I hadn’t even fallen behind on the lesson. In the summer, the days dragged on so long, I couldn’t wait for school to start. I watched so much TV that I had to put drops in my eyes to keep them from drying. My mom would force me to go outside and I would play so long, my muscles would tire and my skin would burn and I would beg to come in.
As an adult, it’s the opposite. Time passes by quickly. There is not enough time in the day. You wish you could fall sleep on the couch or at your desk and not have the clock hands spin around so many times. When I look back at my 21 months in Liberia, it is as an adult who has just run a sprint of years. Not because this place has aged me, though my freckles can now officially be called liver spots and I do have an awkward appreciation for the word logistics, but because the past is now running through my present like the texture of a fine Liberian Obama Lapa Cloth or the cool flow of water that we can only dream about in this office. I like it a lot, but I can’t get it to stop.
So let me describe “it” while it’s still here so you know what I am talking about and why I feel right now a mixture of sadness and excitement, jealousy and freedom at the thought of leaving. The experience comes as a series of flashbacks, like I have just taken a fantastic trip. I guess you can say I am sort of tripp’in.
It includes landing at Roberts Field Airport February 17th, 2011 at 11pm only to find that both luggage and greeting party weren’t there. Blama would eventually find me amongst a crowd of Liberians calling me white man. Yet in the car as we drove to Monrovia, he would not talk to me. It was very dark. I didn’t blame him. I figured he only spoke Kran. He probably thought I only spoke Chinese.
When I first met Allan, I knew he was smart but couldn’t stop fixating on his designer glasses. Later when I would be yelled at, or challenged for not knowing if our programs were set up for success, or taken through the spectrum of Allan’s emotions, all Allan’s, daily, sometimes in 30 seconds or less, I would fixate again on those glasses to keep myself grounded and in a safe place. Allan, I have learned so much from your direct hawkish management style, you strategic thinking and your glasses in our short time together. I want to thank you.
Distraught
Last week, like many weeks, during Sunday rounds at JDJ, we sent a beautiful baby home to die. The mother had traveled with daughter all the way from Sinoe because her baby’s belly was getting big, so big it was pushing up her lungs and making it hard to breathe. The girl was named Success. This sixth month old looked up at us with big brown eyes really scared as if she knew she was really sick. The oxygen was helping her a little but not enough. We did an ultrasound and found a tumor so large we didn’t know if it was coming from her kidney or her liver. We knew in Liberia right now you can’t treat this kind of thing and we explained this to the mother and with tears streaming down her face she said she understood and she thanked us for trying and telling her what we knew. And then very quietly she gently took off the oxygen prongs, wrapped or her baby, lifted Success up to the air to kiss her on the forehead and like that mother and daughter walked away. We kind of wanted to run away, but there was no time, because waiting for us were our diabetes patients who come on the weekends to get checked up and to get their insulin, which they place in a box of ice. The two kids, Daniel and Princess, we are putting through school show us their report cards whenever they get them and they are proud even when I say, I don’t like B’s. These kids don’t have to come every week but they do. They kind of like it and they say as much.
In the field, the car ride is a cure for constipation. You appreciate things like roads and sun, barbecued plantains for thirty Liberty, drivers who are skilled and who don’t answer their cell phones and our teams working hard in the bush. In Grand Gedeh, Dr. Abiy is forming an army. In Zorzor, Malou is registering her army. In Kolahun, Matthew thinks he is the army. In Voinjama Dr. Khan wishes we were in the Pakistani army. In Nimba, Fola is thinking about defecting from his army, yet all their teams are strong in their own way, doing things for others in very real ways. What I admire most is the spirit of the teams. When the national staff welcome you with the pomp and circumstance of a presidential inauguration and then “wrap it” for you, hot, like this, rubbing their palms oh so quick, you feel all at once blessed and embarrassed to be given such a dear present. One of my fondest memories was sharing a big mound of potato greens on a big mound of rice with one of the Nimba drivers on a wood table in front of his house with large spoons while his grandkids played and the sun was setting. The food was delicious with meat that I didn’t want to identify. The weather was perfect and I felt right at home and like a fellow citizen.
Kids in Zwedru
I am closest to Famatta and Augustine. Famatta, in case you don’t know it by now, is my secret weapon: She runs the health program. When I don’t know something, like how to get the Ministry to approve our narcotics order or how to request five-hundred T-shirt’s from NY and then how to return them when they get printed wrong, I pretend to look it up, and then when no one is looking, I call in Famatta. I don’t think I have ever seen Famatta without a smile on her face except the time I proposed that I take the budgets from all the health grants, buy $750,000 drugs under my name, store them in our Monrovia warehouse and have the programs buy their drugs from me. She said, I don’t think that is a good idea Doc. I don’t think that is a good idea.
Augustine is with me whenever I am in the hospital. He is tireless. A work horse. He knows more than many doctors and I trust him more than most doctors. When I leave JDJ on Sundays at three p.m. because I can't stand it any longer, Augustine stays longer to help a medical student friend with his homework, or a PA with a power point presentation. Augustine is never afraid to give me feedback but his style requires some interpretation. Augustine says no with the word “maybe” like “maybe we should tell the medical director before throwing away the nasty medical charts and reorganizing the ICU” or he admits bad things happen with the phrase “that is true” like “that is true that there should not be a man recuperating from surgery in our children’s hospital.” Augustine is inhuman. I once asked him how he could work so hard and he said, I don’t have anything better to do. More than anyone else, Augustine and I have slogged through the hospital trenches together. Our greatest accomplishment are a silly play room for kids at JDJ and research on things that no one cares about which feature piles and piles of dangerously high collapsing medical charts.
I could talk on and on but Mohamed is currently monitoring our fuel consumption and the numbers aren’t looking pretty. The longer I go the greater the chance Atif will charge this party to health programs under “international drugs” then tell me to recode. Eventually all of you would be mentioned because all of this is really the story of what we do together. Joe, Seleke, Teahdi, Lawrence, David, Lester, Josephine, Blama, Kamo, Mousa,…. I know I just used the present tense. The hard work, the sustainable work, the fulfilling work continues by those whom most importantly stay. I admire you, miss you, learn from you and will rejoin you soon here or elsewhere. We are after all adults. Time will fly pass quickly and we will meet again. You cannot reserve all the fun for yourselves.
Not the end
