Dear readers!

Three weeks ago, esthergarvi.com saw its first guest blogger when my sister shared her thoughts on the choice of our parents to trade the comforts of Scandinavia for a meaningful life in Niger, West Africa.

In 2006, after more than twenty years in the least developed country of the world, our mother fell seriously ill. Her evacuation from Niger marked the beginning of a new era: painful, dramatic and difficult, yet contrasted with generous moments of joy. She passed away in 2008. For the first time since the evacuation, my brother writes about his experience and about the day when it all changed…

* THE MAN WITH A CRUSTED FOOT *

It was the day Dr. Charlotte called on Dr. Soria for her expert opinion. My mother was at home, resting and weak. I don’t think I fully grasped the severity of her condition, even though I knew she was ill. The two doctors came out of her room and gave their report to Esther and me. Heart failure. She had to be hospitalised at once. We were not very keen on this. The Zinder hospital is not the place you go to get well, it’s where you get worse. We’ve known doctors who have worked there. Very good doctors. And we’ve heard their stories.

But the Zinder hospital had something crucial: an oxygen machine. Without it, my mother might be at the end. It felt very unreal. I could think of nothing to say. Esther couldn’t hold back the tears. Dr. Soria looked at us and said: I have seen you are a family with faith. This is not the time to cry. This is the time to pray. Esther gathered strength, and we spoke of how to proceed. Esther suggested she follow my mother to the hospital, and that I head up north. We had special guests, visiting family from Norway, and my father had had to pick a day to guide them to our field station. No day was a good choice. Now we needed to bring him back. I think Esther knew already then that she had picked the toughest lot for herself. But I think she absolutely wanted to be close to my mother at that moment, and she was probably also the one who could help her the best.

My trip up north was unreal, surreal. I drove a Land Cruiser from 1991, a car I knew quite well. I had to hurry. However, I knew that if I pushed the car hard, the engine would blow. I knew the oil could leak out before I reached the field station, but there was no other way to reach my father, for the first mobile mast had not yet been set up around Tanout.

Copyright Eden Foundation

And so I drove… It was a very serene day on the road. The sky was clear, traffic almost none. It was peaceful, quiet. I came upon a long long straight, one of those you only find near deserts, that stretches into the horizon. And then it happened. Smoke, a big cloud of black smoke in my rear mirror and the smell of burnt rubber. I had no idea what it was. I stopped. I went out, I looked around, I checked the car, but I could see nothing wrong. The smell was gone. So I decided to head on and hope for the best. There was just one problem. The car wouldn’t start. I knew this could happen when the car was hot, and that it might well start again after some hours. But I couldn’t wait that long. I was uneasy, restless, and now I began to feel stressed.

That’s when a donkey cart appeared in the far. I had been waiting for some time. Everything felt very surreal. But sometimes the surreal is real. There was a man sitting on the cart, a middle-aged man with graying hair. He was smoking, and he was friendly. He asked if I needed help. I figured that I could probably start the car if someone pushed it. However, pushing a diesel-driven Land Cruiser is more than a one-man job. Still, this man insisted on giving it a try. So I sat behind the wheel, whilst he stood by the hood and tried to push the car backwards, for I was standing in a slight upward slope. To my amazement he managed to get the car rolling, but only just, and it was still too slow for a kick start. So I stepped out of the car and told him that he had made a very brave effort, but that the car was simply too heavy for one pusher. We needed more. To this he replied that the problem was not us being too few, he was just not able to push hard enough. The reason? He was having some trouble with his foot. I took a good look at his left foot, and was stunned. He had suffered a fire accident, and the whole top side of his foot, apart from his toes, had been carbonised. The carbonised crust was cracked into smaller squares, and in the cracks one could see red flesh glinting thanks to a thin layer of some body fluid. I knew this type of wound; it’s the type that gets infected. I felt ashamed of having let a man with such a foot push a Land Cruiser all by himself. He, on the other hand, was happy and acted as if the wound was just one of life’s ordinary nuisances. I told him he should go to a health care center to have his wound treated. He replied that he knew the health care system very well, and pulled out a few papers from his chest pocket that included his identity card and a work attestation to the bearer of the same name, proving he had worked some months with a health campaign of some sort. “I know the health system well,” he said. “They will take my money but not cure my ill.” I could not contradict him… But I gave him a small sum of money as thanks for his brave efforts, hoping he would not simply spend it on smokes, and insisted he should get something done about his wound.

After yet some time, a green bush taxi drove past. We waived it to a stop, but I’m not sure that the waiving was important. For the first man that stepped out of the minibus had seen the logo on the side door of my car and said: “You work with Maurice! He’s a good friend of mine.” Three or four men, all in good health, stepped out of the taxi and within half a minute my Land Cruiser was running again.

I went on, wondering what became of the foot of my wounded friend. I still wonder.

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Josef Garvi works as a programmer for Eden Foundation. He lives in Zinder (Niger) with his wife and daughters.

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