Esther

This weekend when we were driving home from the beach we passed and man and his daughter selling beautiful fruit on the side of the dusty road. We stopped and for Le 3,000 I was able to get half a dozen perfect sweet star fruit then on top of that he piled that many more sour ones so I could try them. That was less than a dollar. I just ate one and it was delicious!

I walked past a patient today who was leaning over her bed digging around inside the plastic bin all the patients are given for their personal belongings. I noticed she had a stack of those composition notebooks. When I asked her if she was in school she said yes. She told me she was studying agriculture. Instead of being in school she is laying in a hospital bed trying to not leak urine. We got to talking for many reasons but it was also nice being able to talk to a patient in english. She learned english in school and spoke it very well. I opened her agriculture book and quizzed her on the difference between substance agriculture and commercial agriculture. Pretty smart cookie she was. She told me that she didn’t want to be a farmer but someday she hoped to become a nurse. At seventeen she has her life in front of her.

Here’s a bit of Esther’s story: She became pregnant about a year and a half ago and was in the midst of taking her exams when she found out she was pregnant. She decided to continue with school though. The “young man” who got her pregnant continued to help her with her school fees. When she started feeling a little pain she told someone but she told me that because she is only a child, she didn’t know what to expect from labor. She thought that when her labor started her whole belly would start moving around and everything would hurt. When this small small pain started the woman took her to the TBA, traditional birth attendant. For three days she labored. She asked them to take her to the hospital but they said they could not afford an ambulance. It would cost Le 20,000, about $4. She gave the TBA a small amount of money to call her boyfriend but they took the money and never called him. She told me the baby tried to come out but it got stuck. “It wouldn’t go up and it wouldn’t go down.” Eventually they gave in and took her to the hospital. The surgeon there said he would only do the operation for Le 200,000, money she did not have. Another day went by and that night she passed her dead child on its own.

In the hospital they inserted a catheter. She was having a small amount of urine coming out but the rest just fell out of her. By the third day nothing was coming from the catheter. It was all just pouring out. She went home.

There was a car that came to her village. It was the screening team from AWC, where I work. The nurses met her and although there were other women in the same condition, they all ran away but she stayed. Others told her to run because these nurses would eat her. She knew she needed help though. She came and had her surgery but was still wet and had to come again for another one. She had her second surgery yesterday.

Esther told me that when she went home after her first surgery, although she was still wet, she didn’t tell anyone. She dressed fine and made herself look happy because she wanted to help the other women in her village. She wanted them to see that she went and was healed. She wanted them to come as well. Even if after this surgery she is still wet, she will do the same thing. She knows she is the one who can help her friends find healing.