written Thursday, 2 August 2007
One of the children in my village, whose parents I am good friends with, had a fever and other malaria symptoms for several days. I knew he was sick, but I didn't push his family to take him to the health post because I figured they know better than I do how seriously to take malaria.
But then Tuesday night the dad asked me to come over and look at his child. He was covered with a sheet to keep flies from bothering him while he slept, and when I pulled the sheet down I saw that he was covered in blood. I couldn't tell at first where the blood was coming from, but it turned out it was from a bloody nose.
I hadn't heard of nosebleeds as a symptom of malaria before, but it really scared me. (Plus I embarrassed myself from becoming very close to fainting from seeing all that blood - I had to sit down and put my head down for a minute). I wondered if it meant that his fever had gotten so high it was popping his blood vessels somehow, or if it meant he had something worse than malaria, and might have internal bleeding. (I have a tendency to imagine the worse-case scenario). I told his dad the boy should be taken to the health post immediately, but his dad said they would have to wait til the morning - it was already getting dark, and there was no way to get him there except by donkey cart, which would be a really difficult trip to make at night.
Besides being terrified that the boy wouldn't make it til morning (it seemed like he had lost an awful lot of blood, and he was very weak), I couldn't help but think what if I were the person who was so sick - would I be stranded like this? But no, I wouldn't - because the gendarmes would come in their truck to get me, or Peace Corps would find another way to get me help. And because I have money.
The unfairness and wrongness of my life, as an American, being valued more highly than this little Senegalese boy's, is not something that hasn't occurred to me before, and you could even say that that has something to do with why I am in Peace Corps. But that day the wrongness of it was staring me in the face, as I sat with the little boy and wondered if he was going to make it til morning.
I feel like I should do something about it, but I don't know what. How does one protest such a situation? Refuse to get medical care when I need it? That won't help any. I can't trade my health care coverage or situation in life with anyone else. So for now, I am just sitting here, feeling powerless and guilty.
Luckily this story has a happy ending: the family finally got the boy to the health post, where he was given medicine and is on his way to a full recovery.
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