Maggie went to the Hope Center clinic with Mamou and worked on labtracker, entering data. Sad to say but the data is pitiful. It is filed on bits of paper and collected in a pile in a three ring binder. There were only 28 patients in the binder, but 52 are being followed. I’m going with her tomorrow to find more. Then we’ll go up and see Dao at the Point G clinic and get the information that is missing. Rama is sick but she held together for the meeting with the peer educators- seven of the 11 came to the house today to give us their reports and get paid. We went over the 5 points of Here Bolo and they loved the T shirts and visors, and they posed for pictures (hopefully Maggie will send). Thanks Elizabeth and (brother!). We talked about the project and the results at the clinic so far – a big INCREASE in HIV tests and people testing positive for other STDs – which means the message is getting out there, folks are getting the message and the link between STDs and HIV and they are coming right on in. This is so exciting! We told the peer educators we were proud of them. They asked for the smaller condoms and after a back and a forth about that, and laughter about how the Americans were too big – all the while knowing that what we were really talking about were the small foil packets that easily fit in your pocket and are somehow ‘cooler’ then the ones we give them now.
My favorite event today was the meeting with the TB program folks. We met with them and explained who we were, talked about the TB/HIV infection and the cough monitoring program and and our hope that we’ll be able to get that set up at some point this year. And then we were introduced to the head of the national department of health, a man called Dr. Ibrahima Bamba.
What I wish I could write for you but can’t would be an auditory description of the slow pensive sound of this man’s voice telling the story of the measles vaccine campaign that was carried out here in the nineties (yes, just about 15 years ago). He talked about how it made such a huge difference for the farmers in the small villages – that it made them believe that medicine worked. One year they were burying a child a day in the measles season. The next year they weren’t. In fact he started this conversation when we were talking about the weather – the rain – he responded by saying that now is the time when the grain stores have all been used up in the countryside. Food is planted but it is not ready yet, there is nothing but sticks and insects to eat, he said. He said it so slowly and so pensively you could do nothing but sit and listen for the next sentence to come. This is when the children get thin, he said, and when measles was around, they would get a cough and a cold with the wet weather and the measles would follow and the treatment was not to give them any meat – and not to bathe them either – so they would get malnourished and infected and while he was saying this in a slow, melodic, deep voice I was thinking of the children that we used to vaccinate in Zaire, and the children (one of two twins I was remembering in particular) who died on the way back to the hospital in the truck we used to go out for vaccination campaigns. I remembered it, and he remembered it, and between the two of us there were images of the children that we saw, in different countries, at different times, dying from a disease that no longer exists because there is a vaccine that made it go away. We both turned to Kara and asked him if he had ever seen a child die of measles. He said no. I said – that’s what we want to be able to say too, when we have our vaccine. What a chance to see that. I want to be there.
Another sound I’d like to share is the one we heard last night – much like a freight train passing – it is a sound that comes when the humidity is just right, and is as close as you can imagine to an earsplitting, earthmoving roar. It’s a sawing, reverberating, deep noise that makes the air dense with sound right after one of those wonderful downpours. Tree frogs. Too tiny to see. Tonight they are silent – instead, the tinny sound of mosquitoes around our ankles as we sit and type.
Then, since you are listening now, mix in the sound of snippets of Habib in the restaurant where we shared dinner with the Drs Dao and Traore (our advisors in Mali) and Boubacar and Abdul from the Habib Koite band – and more snatches of radio mixed with diesel fumes of course as we drove from place to place – and the twisted sound of worn taxi doors shutting – and children laughing as they play soccer in the street – and the haunting whistle of the train as it is coming in from Dakar. The day today ended with the sounds of the dog talking to us as we came in the door, wagging her whole pregnant body and talking to us in small dog words telling us that she is hungry, she has puppies in her belly, and that she is glad that we are home.
Once again, we are so pleased to be here, so thankful for your support, and looking forward to another wonderful day making mountains move and hearing tree frogs roar, right here in Bamako.