from Tofu with love

Violence truly scares me. In my adult life I’ve never felt the need to hurt someone physically because they pissed me off or wronged me. That isn’t to say that I’ve never intentionally tried to annoy or hurt someone emotionally. When I get to that intense point of anger I always think to myself how can I be the bigger person, how can I make the other feel really low? Physical contact never crosses my mind.  (I'm not talking self defense here, I'm all for that) Maybe because I’m bigger and stronger than the average woman, it just never seems like it would be a fair fight. After you put your hands on someone you automatically lose in my book. So when this situation of violence occurred at my site, with my friends I was completely taken aback. I was hanging out at my village pharmacy one evening while the Cecile (the pharmacist) and Fati is getting ready to go home. After Cecile locks the door she hands Fati a bag of ochre. The guard of my health clinic come runn...

This is a short list of some of the crazy things I’ve seen in my village.  Disclaimer: I take none of these situations lightly. Not for the faint of heart. I’ve witnessed many deaths, infants to adults. Seeing the actual moment when the person loses consciousness and the body becomes a machine slowly shutting down is an experience hard to explain.   If spirits exist I believe that I’ve seen the when a spirit leaves the body. The point when the pain seems to be irrelevant, breathing becomes mechanical- almost pump like, and they stop responding to external stimuli. After this point the family usually realizes that their loved one is gone. I’ve seen a mom strap her unconscious twitching toddler to her back and take him home. The child was beyond treatment. The nurses seem so numbed by death. They face almost every situation with such a frank cavalierness, it’s almost frightening. I wonder if this is an inevitable state that everyone dealing with death on a re...

As I sit at my health clinic weighing babies, I hear a commotion coming from the birthing rooms.   As the two midwives walk out casually laughing I hear a man violently yelling. Because of the cultural differences (or and unknown inability on my part to read obvious social cues) I have no idea whether this situation is serious or not. I ask the mid ladies what's the dealio and they tell me to go in and see for myself. Had I known that this story ends with me storming out of the clinic wiping away a cocktail of angry-helpless- furious tears I would have…nope, never mind. Sometimes my curiosity leads me to fault. Ok back to the desperate screams from the back room. In the dingy birthing room, I see a young frantic looking woman clothed in nothing but a t-shirt laying on the rusted operating table. I’m sure that she would have gotten up and walked out of the room had a woman- I’m assuming her mother- not have been holding her down. An old man who is either her husband or fat...