| Tanzania: Waiting For Sunrise
By Heather Buckhout
We were back in Tengeru no more than three hours. I had been resting since we arrived. Mama Esther rubbed my forehead with swollen black fingers as I looked up at her through sagging eyes. She almost always avoided direct eye contact with me. Her gaze was intense and piercing, perhaps she knew that. She patted my forehead with the back of her hand, just as my mother had done when I was younger. A temperature would be hard to read on a sunbaked forehead reddened by the unrelenting equatorial sun.
“Dada, have you taken anything today?” She asked in a voice so sympathetic it bordered on patronization.
“Yes, I took some stuff before we left Zanzibar but it hasn’t been working. I think I just need to lie down for a while.” I walked into an unoccupied room on the bottom floor of the volunteer house. I pushed aside the mosquito netting and laid my battered body on the lower bunk. I could hear Mama Esther call out to Aunt Betty in Swahili from behind the dinner table. Betty had been working with Fortunata to prepare pizza for the rest of the volunteers. The fifteen white Americans had grown tired of white rice and stews. My stomach was crying out for food, but my body would not tolerate it. I would not be eating for a third day in a row. Lying on the thin mattress, I listened to the sounds coming from the village. Women called out in Swahili, and the distant replies were echoed through the window along with the breezes dusting my skin. I moved my hand up the front of my torso to the right side of my chest and ran my finger along my rib cage. I imagined if I had any sort of rhythm, I could play myself like a drum. I placed the cold towel Aunt Betty gave me over my eyes and head. My flesh simmered.
I lay awake on the bed for hours and moved only when my body urged me. My eyes were swaying back and forth with the movement of the mosquito nets when Brooke walked in. Brooke had been in Arusha for the better part of four months and seen her fair share of sickly volunteers.
“What’s wrong sweetheart? The tropical weather too much for you?” She smiled halfway.
“I guess so,” I said. She reached down and gently rubbed the pale side of my left forearm.
“Man, you got red this weekend huh?” She laughed a little bit and I smiled up at her. I was attempting to remember my Christmas weekend in Zanzibar.
“Yeah.”
Her face went dark as she lowered two sympathetic eyes to meet my blank stare.
“Do you want to see the doctor?” I think you should. He’s very good. He’ll probably give you the mystery shot, and you’ll be back on your feet tomorrow.” Her voice had changed, and her somber tone alarmed me. The mystery shot was what the volunteers came to call the “cure all your Tanzanian illnesses injection.” It was routinely administered to foreigners to treat everything from nausea to a sinus infection. I nodded my head in agreement.
“Alright I’ll go tell Mama Esther.” Brooke turned towards Melissa who hadn’t left my side since we arrived two weeks earlier and gave her a knowing smile.
“You’re going with her I assume?” Brooke asked Melissa.
“Yeah, of course.” Melissa’s voice was harsh when she was concerned; a little too loud and a little too deep. It would have been disconcerting if you didn’t know her.
I watched Melissa and Brooke leave the room and made my way to the bathroom. The plumbing in Tanzania was unpredictable, especially during the dry season, which was fast approaching. I held my stomach as I leaned over the toilet and pleaded with my flesh.
* * *
Mama Esther’s children all piled into the volunteer van with Melissa and me as we made our way down the highway to downtown Arusha. At the house they told us that the highway, which runs from Cape Town to Cairo, is the most dangerous road in Africa. The road was just about the only paved road for miles and was mostly reserved for cars rather than Masai herders. We bounced up and down along the highway, and I pressed my head hard into the rough felt of the front seat. I sat praying for my body to cooperate with me long enough to reach the next flushing toilet. Melissa draped a jacket over my hand and met my sweaty swollen palm with her own. We made a turn past a wedding processional before turning into the Arusha International Conference Center Hospital. My heart sank immediately.
My red face was suddenly flushed and my lips grew pale. Mama Esther’s youngest daughter grabbed my hand. She pointed to her stomach.
“You be OK sister. Don’t worry. It’s the doctor.” Her cotton soft voice and sweet accent settled my stomach. Her brilliant ivory teeth met my eyes as she smiled. I met her smile with my own cigarette yellowed teeth, which peeked out from thin pale lips. We walked up the steps and sat in the waiting room. There were four benches in a hallway. As I looked around the stark gray concrete walls of the hospital ward, I noticed the signs for Dentistry, Surgery, Wards 1-9 to the right, Wards 10-18 to the left, X-Ray, and Delivery. The hospital was no larger than your average American McMansion, and much more intimidating. Mama Esther’s eldest daughter grabbed a magazine Melissa had brought for me from beneath my feet. It was a Cosmopolitan, and I winced knowing that she would be reading such trash.
* * *
I paced down the long dark corridor between the benches and the bathroom. It was close to 9:00 PM, late for a city with little electricity. When night falls in Africa, it is pitch. I wandered in and out of the toilet area for what seemed like hours holding tight to a ball of fat around my navel. The toilet was little more than a hole carved into the concrete floor, and there was no door or sink in sight. I pleaded with my insides as we waited for the doctor.
He emerged from behind a stark white wall sometime after 11:00pm. He had been in emergency surgery; and when my eyes met his grave, desperate stare, I could only assume the surgery had not gone well. He took me to an examining room to the right of the dentistry area, which looked just as bleak in developing nations as they do in industrialized ones. Melissa sat down on the examining table while I sat in the chair next to his desk. He asked me questions, Melissa answered most of them.
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