kpwede kpwede

I had a good shift today. The kind where it's not too busy, the nurses you're working with are lovely, and the babies aren't screaming more than entirely necessary. It was one of the shifts where a running joke between a co-worker and yourself involving Doing Awesome Things and a little starfish sticker makes everything more fun, even things like calming that one child who didn't get the message that we were only screaming as much as was entirely necessary today, thankyouverymuch. The kind of shift that starts with mamas around the ward grinning and shouting to you when you walk through the door, chanting the name of your favourite, kind-of-difficult little boy in the corner who wants to play shy, but can't help smiling from behind his blanket.

I had time to sit by Saibou's bed and make faces at him, to watch his eyes light up and his little arms and legs flail wildly as he belly-laughed his approval back to me. I gave discharge instructions to the mama of another impossibly fat baby. In French. All by myself. And she actually understood me to the point that she could repeat all the different medications right back to me, only with better grammar. I brainstormed ideas for how to get Maomai's mama home to her other kids, ways to teach an illiterate woman how to manage the precision of NG feedings, ways to teach a mama from a fatalistic culture how to care if her baby lived or died. And when I couldn't come up with a solution right that second, I settled for wrapping her up tight in a blanket, plopping her into a plastic bowl and weighing her on a scale we borrowed from the galley, one that usually holds carrots and lettuce, while her mama looked on and smiled, pleased that she had managed to gain fifty whole grams.

Nothing special happened today, and everything special happened today.

I stood at the counter, mixing up meds while a little boy fell asleep, tied tightly to my back in his mama's bright blue and yellow lappa. The mama of the tiniest baby (aside from Maomai) went home, but not before hugging me, giving me a kiss on the cheek and patting my rear end affectionately. I mastered my first words in Fon, the largest tribal language hereabouts. I have no idea how to spell out the guttural sounds; the closest I can come is kpwede kpwede, where it sounds like you're swallowing the first half of the word, the d sounds like something halfway to an l and the second part of the word comes up off your tongue, not straight out.

It means the same thing as the Liberian small small. The mamas seem to use it for everything including, occasionally, my name, because Alice apparently gets too difficult at times. Take your time. Go slow. Just a little at a time. Today, it meant more than that. As I moved through my shift, and all the mamas greeted me with those words, they were so much more than just the only thing I knew how to say.

Kpwede kpwede. Stop. Look around. Realize that you are one of the privileged few in this world who can say that they are living their dream. Don't rush through your days, just trying to get through the shift with all your tasks checked off. Don't lose sight of the fact that you're only here for a season, that your days won't always be lived out on the ever-shifting decks of a ship in West Africa.

So take time. Take time to mix up bubbles for a little boy to blow. Take time to tell a mama that she is doing a good job. Take time to make sure another mama really does understand what's going on, even if it means hunting down an extra translator. Take time to tickle and laugh and snuggle and burrow your nose into the folds of a freshly-washed baby neck.

The tasks will get done eventually. There are things more important. Your life will pass you by if you let it.

Kpwede kpwede.