first class taste, economy budget.
first class taste, economy budget.
on the plane to ethiopia were women wrapped in bright scarves, glass beads glistening. Africa again. I’ve made a life for myself here. during the 17 hours on the plane, before drugging myself into a coma, i transferred my contacts to a new phone. from ermias: taxi driver, just: “ermias”. my friend.
stepped from the airport into Addis’ high, blue air, and it was like coming home. on the sloped cement path to my waiting car, a mother and a daughter laughed as their carts wagging wheel lead them astray. i climbed into a waiting truck with my team of teaching doctors, our eyes heavy with sleep, and we drove down bole road, smooth, full with addis’ blue taxis.
the hospital was a first stop. men and women in white coats circled the sick, the locus of their murmuration not a shifting delight, but the pain of a person they didn’t know. we don’t flutter in such numbers around a suffering of the spirit. I wonder if it’s because we bear it too quietly. an ankle, though, that is redhot and infected, is plain, and if we fix it, you can hobble on that same trip we’re all making.
between the circles of doctors and nurses, a young man, blood at his mouth and nose, shivering, nails paper-white. it takes time to learn how to spot the sickest in the crush of so many, but I have a particular eye for them, with it, i saw that man from tigray, blood pouring from his face, stooped slightly forward, trembling, alone, between stretchers of women gesturing to me for help, and knew in a glance that those women had days, maybe even years, but this man, arms drawn in from the sleeves of a blood spattered shirt, holding himself, had only hours. the tough part is that once you tune into, you see age and suffering everywhere you look, in the faces of your friends, even your own eyes.
i picked that man from the pile, and he was swept into the eddy of attention that runs behind the emergency department threshold.
it’s been four years since i started coming to Addis Ababa, to make that threshold. with friends from toronto, doctors, nurses, colleagues, Wisconsin university, and ethiopians who understand that if you don’t make a place like that somewhere, for the poorest people, it doesn’t exist in its true incarnation anywhere. i’m here to deliver exams for the first class of emergency doctors the country who can make it last.
i remember the minute it all started for me. i was back from sudan, visions of what i couldn’t do to make that place safe flashing in front of my eyes, peppering my dreams with guns that sit there still. i was on the end of jeff’s dock, my toes just over its rough edge. my phone rang in the pants bunched beside me. it was toronto’s director for emergency. he told me that ethiopia wanted emergency medicine. would i help?
no, my first thought. nononono. say no. say no. but then: sudan. sudansudansudan.
no.
“yes.”
that man who got pulled into the river of attention, who got the platelets that plugged up his hemorrhaging holes, who got back the blood he had lost, gifted from someone else, wasn’t swept into it by me, but from one of the doctors we’ve trained since that phone call on the dock. i’m here to do give the first four their final exams. should they pass, we will move with them into a new, safer space where even the sick and poor can continue communion with our same shared heart.