|
Articles
- - - - - - - - - -
- -
Armchair Travel
- - - - - - - - - - - -
From the Editors
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Directory
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Submissions
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Contact
- - - - - - - - - - - -
|
The Man Who Returned Home
by Kari Masson
Second only to the chief, 40-year old Daouda Mbengue is the most
respected man in the Lébou fishing village of Sindou. Although he
speaks three languages and completed his medical degree in the
capital city of Dakar, this is not what sets him apart. His two
wives and their sons are considered a symbol of status in his
Muslim community, but that’s not why he is admired. What
distinguishes Daouda is that he returned home.
After earning his degree, Daouda was offered a prestigious job
with the Senegalese military. He worked in the children’s hospital
of a large city and specialized in tuberculosis, a very different
world than he knew growing up in the small fishing village of
Sindou. His father and grandfathers had pulled their lives from
the ocean, but commercial fishing boats had slowly emptied the
waters. Now, the only way for a Lébou man to make a good living is
to leave the villages for the cities, just as Daouda did. But one
day he received news that his village had built a clinic, and the
country’s shortage of medical workers meant that there was no one
to staff it.
 “Asalaam
malecum,” I said, greeting the man wearing a lab coat as I took
off my plastic sandals and entered in. I had only been in Senegal
a few months, but already my cultural eyes had adjusted. I could
see that this small, cement block building, with no water or
power, was a symbol of progress for the people of Sindou. Unlike
their neighbors, they now had a clinic. When malaria made its
annual trek through the country, they would have a place to go for
medicine. When their children fell on the jagged rocks, they could
be stitched up. They had someone they could trust, one of their
own who had come home to help them. They also had me, a young
American who stumbled through their language and didn’t know the
first thing about treating malaria. But Daouda understood my
greeting, and he reached out to shake my hand. “Malecum salaam,”
he said heartily.
Daouda introduced me to the clinic staff, which included Aida the
assistant, Pape the pharmacist, and Mbaye Siny the crippled
receptionist. His painfully twisted leg was the result of a poorly
aimed immunization needle that had damaged his sciatic nerve as an
infant, a fact that did not escape me the day Daouda taught me to
give injections and run an I.V. I had prayed that my first
patients would not be children, the ones with big, fat tears on
their pudgy cheeks, screaming to their mothers that they were
scared of the white girl. In fact, the experience could not have
been any farther from what I’d imagined.
After dousing myself in sunblock, Daouda and I walked across the
brown sand, between the dry Baobob trees, to the village of
Pintiure. The rumor was that a woman was very sick, but her family
did not have the money to have her hospitalized. We found her
lying on a thin foam mat in a round hut, surrounded by her sisters
who were chanting and praying to Allah. Her name was Fatou. She
was severely dehydrated and not responding. Daouda’s
resourcefulness impressed me once again as he strung an I.V. up to
the straw roof. As I helped him he said, in what I hoped was a
joking tone, “Tomorrow you will do this by yourself. I’ll just
watch.”
True to his word, the next day Daouda watched me preparing and
then administering Fatou’s intravenous cocktail, a complicated
five-hour process that became even more difficult when I applied
hand lotion without thinking. Daouda only thought he had his hands
full with me before – now my slippery fingers were incapable of
doing anything, it seemed.
 But
my prayers had been answered. The first veins I worked on belonged
to an adult who could not respond with tears or cries. Ironically,
now I prayed that she would. As we drank rounds of strong mint tea
and waited, Daouda asked if I could come back tomorrow and do the
same thing alone. Even though we had been joking all day -- like
when I asked what to do with the used needles and he told me to
eat them to be sure the kids didn’t play with them -- I decided
not to respond sarcastically in case he was serious. He was.
Daouda had been forced to pick up a night shift at a hospital in
town to supplement his $50 salary each month from the clinic, the
most the village could afford to pay him. The next day he would
work in the clinic in the morning, come by Pintiure to check on me
in on his way to the hospital to work the night shift, then make
it back to Sindou in time to work the next morning.
When we left that evening, Fatou had opened her eyes a few times,
coughed once, and was moving her right arm. Her oldest sister
tried to pay Daouda 2000 cfa ($4) which would cover about a third
of the cost of the treatments, but Daouda refused and insisted
that the money should stay in Pintiure where many were
malnourished. His selflessness and perseverance never ceased to
amaze and humble me.
A few weeks later, one of the sisters in my Senegalese host family
brought her two-year old daughter to my house. I quickly
recognized the symptoms of malaria, which was actually quite easy
to do, so we took her to the clinic. It hadn’t occurred to me that
the clinic would be closed since it was Friday afternoon and the
men were praying at the mosque. Usually the clinic only closed for
weekly prayers, and maybe the occasional soccer match against a
rival team. Walking home, we ran into Daouda coming back from a
shift at the hospital. Even after working all day and night, he
opened the clinic for this little girl.
I followed Daouda into the pharmacy room when he went to get her
medications. I told him that I wanted to pay the bill for Awa. He
looked at me oddly, so I said again, hoping my accent would be
better this time “I want to pay for it.” He smiled, and then
mimicked me exactly and said, “I want the clinic to pay for it.”
To many of us, this may not seem like a lot, considering her
treatment cost $12, but in Senegal that was a week’s pay.
Daouda would not let me pay because Awa was part of my Senegalese
family. He knew that I had plenty of money to pay for the little
girl’s treatment, but in the Senegalese culture, relationships and
family are the most treasured things. I left Senegal a few months
later with stuffed bags, a filled heart, and a deep respect for a
wise man named Daouda Mbengue, the man who returned home.
© Kari Masson
If you liked this
read another article by Kari Masson.
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
About the Author
Kari Masson has a very colorful collection of stamps
in her passport. She grew up in Cote d’Ivoire, studied
in the UK, spent time with the Maasai people of Kenya,
camped in the Swedish tundra, worked in a health
clinic in Senegal, and currently lives in Lyon, France
with her husband.
She draws on her experiences as inspiration for
articles that have appeared in travel, cross-cultural,
and expatriate-focused publications in North America,
Europe, and Africa. See more of her work
here. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Lébou People
The Lébou people
are West Africa’s fishermen. Numbering 300,000, they
live along the coastal regions of Senegal, Mauritania,
Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau. As large cities have grown
up along the coast, they have lost much of their land,
and also their waters to commercial fishing groups.
Within the cities you can still find Lébou villages,
such as N’gor, Ouakam, and Yoff in Dakar. The village
of Sindou is located further up the coast, tucked
between Bargny, Mbao, and Cayar. |
|
|
|
|
|
Read More
Articles From Around the World
|
|
|
|
