kuodjo

Some days I hate Africa.

I hate that I live in a place where twenty-five year-old guys can be perfectly healthy in May only to show up in July at a clinic with sunglasses hiding an angry, red tumor where there was once an eye. A place where the best diagnostic tool in reach sometimes is the fact that, if I can't walk more than ten minutes without getting dizzy, there must be something wrong. I hate that money and the lack of it determines that some people can't be seen by a physician when symptoms first start, before the side of their faces swell until the skin breaks.

And, in some ways, being on the ship makes it worse. Because that twenty-five year-old man might barely make it up the gangway before needing to sit down, and we might have access to the lab tests that explain this by counting his hemoglobin at a shockingly low 5.3. Access to monitoring equipment that traces his heart racing far faster than it should. Access to a CT scan that shows the tumor snaking its way through his jaw and nose and the place where his eye should still be, if only he lived in a country where he could have seen a doctor when the swelling in his mouth first started. Sometimes I hate knowing the truth.

Two months ago, Koudjo was healthy. He was twenty-five with his whole life in front of him. Yes, the tumor grew fast; he knew that, but he still thought we'd have the answers, that we'd be able to do a simple surgery or give him some antibiotics and he'd go home healed. He had no idea that coming to our dental clinic today was going to change all that. He thought it was a problem from where someone had pulled his tooth a few months ago somewhere in Benin. He thought we'd help. He thought it would be okay.

He was wrong.
I hate that he was wrong.

And the thing that's probably going to keep me awake into the dark hours of the night tonight is that I don't know whether he would have even had a chance in the first world. I'll never know, because we have no way of finding out just what it is that's probably going to kill him. Soon. And what little help we have to offer by way of palliative care is going to be taken away in a month when the ship sails away from this port.

And it's just not enough.

I stood in front of all the nurses at handover, and I said that I love seeing the pain and the joy balanced, and I hoped all the time that they wouldn't see in my eyes that I was about to cry, that I couldn't really see the joy today.

I feel so small, so useless when faced with a world that is broken like this. I tell myself that God is working to redeem it in His own time, but my heart wants it to happen now. While Kuodjo is still alive, while he still has a chance. I want him to get married and have kids and be an old grampa with white, fuzzy hair and a wooden cane, sitting on a bench outside his house.

It was hard to imagine a world being redeemed when I looked at Kuodjo today.