01.12.03 - 12:49

WebMaster's Note: Molly wrote this entry hurriedly because she knew she had limited Internet time. She hoped to edit this page before returning to her village, but did not have the chance. Added commentary provided by Molly to the WebMaster is shown in [ ].

An entry from my written journal. Be warned! It contains a fairly graphic account of a burn and some other disturbing things…

Work is picking up – i’ve got about 110 kids measured. [WebMaster: Molly is measuring the sizes of their arms to identify children who will be invited to participate in an effort to improve nutrition] A while ago, a certain Mohammed Lemine took me (and annika) around town to measure kids. We broke fast in his garden by the lake – dates, cookies, and zriig made from innumerable powders and translucent well water fraught with live crickets.

On one of the visits, I saw a boy around 5 years old with the worst burn I have ever seen in person. He rested tranquil on a mat under a tarp-like hangar, serene at my presence, unresponsive to his condition – how could he move? All up his left leg, the first, blackened layer of skin had peeled. Things got progressively worse down to the crater of the burn in his foot. It had literally eaten away the flesh, down through the fat layer. I could see where the fat had bubbled and curled. Streaks of red, ecru, black. How? How could this happen? How could it help but become infected? Mohammed described a plant in hassaniya to the mother (aloe?) to be administered drop by drop. Geez. So that was disturbing thing number one.

Number two was being at the hospital when a woman died. She had just come in from the brousse that morning after a journey that had probably taken days. She was on the back concrete-slab porch surrounded by mulaffa-ed figures. (this was all I could see.) how did she die? “I don’t know. Malaria? Bronchitis?” suggested koumba. What will happen now? “her family will take her body back to the brousse and wash it and…” oh. It’s just that in America, there’s a lot of paperwork and process. “yes, it’s like that in Nouakchott too. But these people… they come from the brousse.” There didn’t seem to be much going on abut the woman after koumba, tahyé, and co. had initially left and returned some 5 minutes later.

Disturbing thing number three, interesting in that it aroused in me the same feelings as number two, was the frog I set loose from my bucket at the well. Fatimeta Traoré watched it and delightedly called Rougee, who proceeded to catch it. She held it dangling, swinging by one leg. She chased Fatimeta with it, and then threw it at me. It landed in the dust, blood slowly watercoloring its body from the joint of the leg. It did not move.

After this, I kept repeating to myself a phrase from a book I read here – “careless cruelty.” It had been careless cruelty with the frog – it’s just a frog, right? And I eat meat here everyday? – but it was done without purpose. And, to me, the treatment of the dead woman felt the same, even though I know and I knew that it was just cultural difference. “one man’s careless cruelty is another man’s culture” perhaps. And yes, it works both ways.

"pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living" - mother mary jones

"the strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung" - walt whitman

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