Walking the Wall

When I was 18 years old I went on a 2.5 week trip to Togo, West Africa. We traveled for nearly 24 hours and flew into the capital of Togo: Lome. I remember when we were descending to the airport I was so afraid that when I stepped out of the airplane it wouldn’t look much different than home–one look out of the plane at the little airport carved into acres of lush green and I knew that wouldn’t be a problem.

We spent the next two days in the capital scrubbing out a little building that was going to be used as a school, I believe. They were going to paint it, but it was filthy and needed scrubbing from top to bottom. It was incredibly hard work but there was a whole group of kids following us around, teaching us songs, and generally laughing at our clumsy attempt at work–it was a highlight of the trip.

We took the one road down the middle of the country to Kpalime, a gorgeous and lush area about 2 hours from the capital. We stayed and worked at a blind center nestled in a valley and surrounded by low mountains–it was so beautiful and the people there were even more beautiful. I went naive and full of intentions of helping the poor people of Africa–I quickly learned that they were amazing people in their own right and not to be pitied but admired and learned from. For a very small town, sheltered girl this trip was hugely eye opening to a world that was so much bigger than I could have ever imagined and towards understanding that different didn’t equate to lesser.

I’m rambling, though, my point: we toured a hospital that was everything you would expect of a hospital in a rural African area–open windows and doors, people lining the hallway walls, rooms over filled, it was disturbing to think this was the primary care for these people. I watched a small online documentary about a trip that Angelina Jolie and Dr. Jeffery Sachs took to a village in Africa that is becoming a model for how the people can be giving small resources that allow them to turn poverty around in their own villages. They toured a much worse hospital and it reminded me of my trip.

When I was at the hospital wandering around, a doctor grabbed my arm and started talking to me quickly and intensely–I had a bite on the middle of the underside of my forearm and a bruise radiating around it out to my elbow and to my wrist. I never learned what he said, but I always wonder if that was the bite that gave me malaria.

I was surprised to learn recently that Malaria not only kills an incredible number of people, especially children, in Africa–but they believe it increases the person’s susceptibility to AIDS in that country. On the documentary Dr. Sachs talked about one terribly simple solution to reducing malaria–nets that are coated with an insecticide that repels the mosquitoes and kills them if they land on it. They protect the people inside it, and when enough villagers use them–they protect even the people in the village not under the net. I had seen these before and even ordered a few to be sent, but I was rather skeptical–I’m not any more. I say terribly simple because it is so simple, and so cheap, that there is no reason more of these aren’t available and sent immediately.

There are a few forms of malaria, but I contracted the lethal version. The day after I came home I woke up with an incredibly high fever, I remained at home longer than I should have while my mother fought with the doctor who said it was a flu and she insisted over and over “it might be malaria, she just came home from Africa”. When my blood work was finally sent to a tropical disease specialist I was in the hospital in a heartbeat–he told me had I not been put in that day, I would have died. As it was, I wished I was dead when I was conscious enough to wish anything at all. My grandmother brought me this rock she had painted and it sat by my bedside, I remember staring at it like a touchstone when I was rolled over getting one of the hourly shots to try and control the vomiting. Nine days later I remember waking up lucid and looking under the covers and being horrified–my legs were bones and looked like something from concentration camp photographs. When I left, the specialist told me I knew what it felt like to be in my 90s–it would be a few months before I had the strength to push the gas pedal on a car.

I’m barely alive because we had the treatment in America to keep me alive by a thread–those hospitals in Africa haven’t a chance. Preventing malaria is the best way to keep people alive. At Malaria No More you can pay for the nets and the distribution of the nets in a one time order or a monthly reoccurring order. Even my children now split the money to send a net a month, which is a good learning experience for them. I am sometimes overwhelmed by the need that is in the world and feel like I can’t do enough to make any difference:

We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.

In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.

It is not the magnitude of our actions but the amount of love that is put into them that matters.

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.

~all quotes by Mother Teresa