Sunday Afternoon ~ Cape Maclear

Sunday Morning ~ Cape Maclear

December 17, 2017

Hi Everyone,

I’m sitting in a hanging bamboo chair under a thatched palapa on a secluded beach on Lake Malawi. George is hanging in a chair next to me, his beer in the little round drink holder attached to the woven frame. He’s got a gash on his shin where cement met the bone last evening as we dashed to the dining shelter in the tropical downpour. I’m watching flies buzz around the open wound… I’m going to find a bandaid…it’s bad enough shooing them off the top of the beer bottle, I can’t stand seeing them feast on his blood…

Nine guys are digging a trench from the main lodge to the lake. They did the same thing yesterday: dug a trench, lined it with brinks, covered the bricks with cement, and made a lovely path for the rainwater to travel off the mountain behind us to the lake without damaging the beach. We went off for a little kayaking adventure and returned a few hours later to find they had completed the entire project, something I would have imagined would take a week. We commented on how some things around here work so efficiently. We congratulated them as we walked by, leaving the kayak on the beach as instructed, someone else’s job to deal with that. We walked to our thatched room to shower and sit on the beach to watch the sunset. The lake had calmed since we’d set out. It had gotten so rough, we had to take the kayak ashore to sit out the wind and waves. We found a secluded spot, more secluded than the one we’re on now, to protect us a bit, around the side of the mountain that shields this little resort. There we sat in the surf and talked while the front blew through. When we got to our sunset spot, we commented on how much calmer it was, then heard thunder behind us. Arriving at our hanging chairs, we realized there would be no sunset, as the storm was moving toward us with a vengeance. Our views were soon obliterated and the torrential rain started. We sat in the shelter watching a man put a catamaran, named Mama Afrika, out on its mooring in driving rain, towing it out by hand and swimming back. When we started getting wet we made a dash to the dining room, another thatched shelter about thirty meters away. Water was pouring around the buildings and down the new trench. Roiling water gushing by with waterfalls pouring down the steps. I was barefoot and waded through; George in flip flops missed a step somewhere and fell into the dining room face first, but caught himself with the empty beer bottles he was carrying. The bottles and his shin were the only casualties, fortunately. The mishap didn’t even delay the eggplant fritter appetizer. The man is indestructible.

The new trench, however, was not. This morning when we went to breakfast we saw it had all been washed away, the brinks scattered and the cement now in the lake. I guess the timing was off. Rain came before the cement dried. Today, no complaint, no cursing, no throwing tools, the guys just started over and made the entire thing again, wider this time, now that they can see the path the runoff made. It’s calm now and we sit and watch the fishermen with their lanterns heading out on the lake for the night, the catamaran safe on its mooring, and dark clouds coming at us from the west this time. We’ll see if the trench is there in the morning.

I want to hold on to the image of these men, uncomplainingly starting over and doing the job again, but it’s hard to keep the spirits up sometimes. Then again, I haven’t seen a single fly on the shin since I placed that bandaid. And the crops are happy for the rain.

Love to all,

Linda

Sunday Morning ~ Blantyre

Sunday Morning ~ Blantyre

Dyera linapititsa nchenche ku manda ~ Gluttony brought the fly to the grave.

~Malawian proverb

December 10, 2017

Hi Everyone,

I can’t believe it’s only been a week since I last wrote. It seems like a month.

The internet has been down or very slow so getting news was spotty this week. When it picked up yesterday, I was almost sorry we could read about current events. Again, it feels our country has gone mad (or madder). I woke this morning thinking “I wonder how I’d be writing this blog if Hillary were in the White House where she should be? What would the world be like?” But she’s not in the White House, and dealing with the reality we’ve got has taken on a hostage-like feel. When my marriage crumbled in a heap. I’d wonder what we’d be doing if we were still together? How would holidays or graduations be? Then would remind myself, “We’re not together, so stop thinking like that.” That’s what I feel like when I consider my country right now. Reality is so unfathomable. The lunatics have taken over. My weekly stories seem trite and banal. Who cares? Rome is burning.Then I think, but I pulled my life up from the shambles it was, so the country will, too. Am I in denial? I wonder if I should just mentally prepare for armageddon or believe that, in the end, good will prevail? This proverb gives me hope. When the fly won’t leave the corpse it gets buried along with it. I think all those heinous, sexist, racists being buried alive is a cheery thought!

When I have bouts of hopelessness I usually just keep my nose clean and plod along and that’s what I did this week, showing up on the postnatal ward where my students are doing their next rotation. We’ve moved from labor and delivery and I thought it would be an emotional relief; it’s so hard to watch what happens to women in labor and delivery. It’s a miracle to me that any of them survive. It’s no wonder postpartum depression is so common; the trauma is hideous. But they have nothing else to compare it to and I’m wondering if that’s a blessing. They don’t realize how abused they are. Is that a good thing? Not knowing? There’s another way to experience this? I don’t even know what to think anymore.

My eager students started Monday, learning to care for women in the 24 hours post delivery, on the postnatal ward. Most women go home within 24 hours, and man, I don’t blame them. In this hospital there are between 650 and 750 births a month, so, you can imagine, the postnatal unit is always full. The 60 beds there have at least one woman in them at all times recovering from their ordeal. At 7:30 a.m. the students arrive and “dump dust”, a term I could not, for the life of me, understand. It’s actually “damp dust” they mean, but “dusting” is a stretch. It’s more like dirt than dust, so this term is not accurate. They basically clean for a half hour. They wipe down spots on counters that have no paper or supplies on it, beds that are temporarily vacant, shelves, and carts within their reach. I guess this is a useful activity; I’m all for cleaning up a bit and I’m happy to see the kids are there on time and finding something productive to do. At 8 a.m. the women are all corralled into one bay with twelve beds and they all find a spot to sit holding their babies and looking as if they can barely stay conscious. They sit on the edges of the beds, six or eight to a bed and listen to a health education lecture. One of the students did it the first day, which, I thought showed incentive. They started with a prayer, led by one of the maids, then sang a song about family planning before beginning the talk on proper hygiene: how to care for the umbilical cord, their wounded perineums, and their breasts. Adding a chapter on caring for their minds would be a good idea, too. No one deals with that at all. Except for the family planning part, the talk is the same one they did when I was here 38 years ago.  Several of the mothers shush their crying babies trying to get their nipple into the tiny mouths while balancing uncomfortably on the side of the bed. It looks like torture to me. When the talk is finished, they are all lined up on hard wooden benches in the dark hallway and one by one go into the exam room to be evaluated by students who have never done this before. Fortunately the midwife who works there full time is a great teacher and guided the students through without having to translate everything the mothers said into English for me. It was a real time saver. As it is, it takes at least five hours to get through all the women and they are just sitting out there, many of them having difficulty staying awake since they delivered during the night, waiting to be evaluated. I do not understand why they can’t let them wait in their beds. Those are uncomfortable enough, why do we make them sit on painful incisions in this hallway for hours holding their new baby? There are so many things I would do differently. I so badly want this model ward to happen.

Friday is the postnatal clinic where mothers come back at one and six weeks after they deliver. Half the students stayed in the ward and half went to the clinic and I went with them. There the mothers sit for hours on cement benches instead of the soft wooden ones they have in the ward. Presumably they’re less sore by then, though, so it didn’t seem as inhumane. They’ve had to walk miles to get there, but are dressed to the nines and look quite smart, actually. These women are well off, city dwellers, with husbands who have good jobs. The villagers who’ve delivered here go to the clinic closer to their home for their follow up. Or they go home and never want to be seen by a health care worker ever again, not that I’d blame them.

I am amazed at what kind of outfits and undergarments the women with means wear. Underwire bras, girdles, layers of slips, skirts, and zithenje are common. Slinky skin-tight dresses with complicated closures are donned for this outing. It takes them forever to get it all off to be examined. The undergarments look like they are from the 50’s and 60’s and tremendously uncomfortable. When I was a week postpartum, I felt like a sweatsuit was dressed up. I found this experience exhausting. It’s not life-threatening as in the labor ward, but the care they get is so substandard, I was completely depressed by the end of the day. As each woman came into the exam room I asked the students how old the baby was, one week or six weeks? They immediately picked up the health passport to look for a birthdate. Each time I’d say, “The mother is right here, you can ask her!” I do not understand why they don’t do that. Half the time it isn’t even written in the health passport, and for a culture that is so focused on polite conversation, you’d think they’d address her directly, but no. Never. They act a little like she’s a mannequin. Many of these women were well educated and could speak English, so I could talk with them directly, trying to model to the students, but it wasn’t sinking in. When I found myself getting angry at them, I decided to give it a rest and plan a skills lab for this week. I’m going to role play with them a visit where the woman is actually treated like a living, breathing, human being and make them practice it until it comes more naturally. I don’t have any other ideas. The midwives who work at that clinic disappeared when they saw students had shown up, so there was no one teaching them anything and it was their first day. It was, like I said, depressing.

I’m frustrated that the hospital director cancelled our meeting this week to discuss the model ward project. His excuse was he needed more time to read our proposal (a two page document given to him months ago). It’s discouraging. I thought of the wise words of Dr. Yun, a Korean man who was the head of WHO in Malawi back in the early 80’s. He said, “Does the mosquito give up when you are under the net? No! The mosquito looks and looks for the one little hole until he gets in.” I’ve thought of that a lot this week. It seems any improvement we want for women is always a fight. I am so bloody sick of this. My colleagues here think we should consider an alternative location in case we can’t get this guy to agree to it, but my feeling is he’s just a hospital employee like everyone else. I’m not sure why we need his permission. I’ll keep looking for the hole in the net, but maybe we should look for someone else to bite in the meantime. I thought maybe sitting in his office until he agrees to at least listen to our idea would work. I need to follow my colleague’s cultural lead on this one though. It feels like the same crap we dealt with trying to get the new Women’s Center built in Bar Harbor. Uphill, all the way.

We’re also going a little crazy with cabin fever. Despite the fact that hardly anyone even remembers the violence related to the bloodsucker frenzy, we are STILL restricted from traveling in the region. It’s getting ridiculous and we’re starting to feel like teenagers whose parents are too strict. A few places have opened up, like Cape Maclear on the lake, and we are going to spend the weekend there next week. We really need to get away. It’s hard not to do work over the weekend when we stay home, though I have an easier time with that than George does. He sees horrific cases all week, emotional trauma, one worse than the next, and I think it’s getting to him. Last week he had to deal with a woman with postpartum psychosis who killed her baby in a most horrifying way. He medicated her with an antipsychotic, but when she recovers she’ll be at high risk for suicide when she realizes what she’s done. You don’t just come home after dealing with stuff like that and forget about it. Last year we would mentally regroup by weekends away at beautiful places, get grounded, and remind ourselves how remarkable this place is. Not being able to do that is getting hard. We are taking advantage of the weekends here as best we can, but it’s not the same as really getting away. Our holiday vacation got approved since we are going north to an unrestricted area, so that’s something to look forward to. We’ll leave here on the 21st and have two weeks to camp and relax in the gorgeous north. Hanging on…

The news from home is also depressing so I’m trying to find a lighter note to end on…let me think…we got some really good ripe pineapples and the mangos are abundant.  A woman’s book group started this week over at the international secondary school, and I went to that. That was fun. They are getting the books on their kindles, which I don’t have, but George said I could borrow his. So that’s nice. My sourdough starter worked like a charm and I made some fabulous bread with that….hmm, what else? We decided to treat ourselves and booked the last remaining available room at a luxury place in Cape Maclear, so will write next week from a tropical paradise where we’ll kayak on the lake and try to think of nothing else but how lucky we are to have found each other and have exotic weekends for R&R.

It’s so hot now I keep forgetting it is advent season except for when we sing Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel in church. The only presents I want this year are more indictments from Mueller and approval to start our model ward. Other than that, our lives are full.

Love to all,

Linda

Sunday Morning~ Blantyre

Sunday Morning ~ Blantyre

Dyera linapititsa nchenche ku manda ~ Gluttony brought the fly to the grave.

~Malawian proverb

December 10, 2017

Hi Everyone,

I can’t believe it’s only been a week since I last wrote. It seems like a month.

The internet has been down or very slow so getting news was spotty this week. When it picked up yesterday, I was almost sorry we could read about current events. Again, it feels our country has gone mad (or madder). I woke this morning thinking “I wonder how I’d be writing this blog if Hillary were in the White House where she should be? What would the world be like?” But she’s not in the White House, and dealing with the reality we’ve got has taken on a hostage-like feel. When my marriage crumbled in a heap. I’d wonder what we’d be doing if we were still together? How would holidays or graduations be? Then would remind myself, “We’re not together, so stop thinking like that.” That’s what I feel like when I consider my country right now. Reality is so unfathomable. The lunatics have taken over. My weekly stories seem trite and banal. Who cares? Rome is burning.Then I think, but I pulled my life up from the shambles it was, so the country will, too. Am I in denial? I wonder if I should just mentally prepare for armageddon or believe that, in the end, good will prevail? This proverb gives me hope. When the fly won’t leave the corpse it gets buried along with it. I think all those heinous, sexist, racists being buried alive is a cheery thought!

When I have bouts of hopelessness I usually just keep my nose clean and plod along and that’s what I did this week, showing up on the postnatal ward where my students are doing their next rotation. We’ve moved from labor and delivery and I thought it would be an emotional relief; it’s so hard to watch what happens to women in labor and delivery. It’s a miracle to me that any of them survive. It’s no wonder postpartum depression is so common; the trauma is hideous. But they have nothing else to compare it to and I’m wondering if that’s a blessing. They don’t realize how abused they are. Is that a good thing? Not knowing? There’s another way to experience this? I don’t even know what to think anymore.

My eager students started Monday, learning to care for women in the 24 hours post delivery, on the postnatal ward. Most women go home within 24 hours, and man, I don’t blame them. In this hospital there are between 650 and 750 births a month, so, you can imagine, the postnatal unit is always full. The 60 beds there have at least one woman in them at all times recovering from their ordeal. At 7:30 a.m. the students arrive and “dump dust”, a term I could not, for the life of me, understand. It’s actually “damp dust” they mean, but “dusting” is a stretch. It’s more like dirt than dust, so this term is not accurate. They basically clean for a half hour. They wipe down spots on counters that have no paper or supplies on it, beds that are temporarily vacant, shelves, and carts within their reach. I guess this is a useful activity; I’m all for cleaning up a bit and I’m happy to see the kids are there on time and finding something productive to do. At 8 a.m. the women are all corralled into one bay with twelve beds and they all find a spot to sit holding their babies and looking as if they can barely stay conscious. They sit on the edges of the beds, six or eight to a bed and listen to a health education lecture. One of the students did it the first day, which, I thought showed incentive. They started with a prayer, led by one of the maids, then sang a song about family planning before beginning the talk on proper hygiene: how to care for the umbilical cord, their wounded perineums, and their breasts. Adding a chapter on caring for their minds would be a good idea, too. No one deals with that at all. Except for the family planning part, the talk is the same one they did when I was here 38 years ago.  Several of the mothers shush their crying babies trying to get their nipple into the tiny mouths while balancing uncomfortably on the side of the bed. It looks like torture to me. When the talk is finished, they are all lined up on hard wooden benches in the dark hallway and one by one go into the exam room to be evaluated by students who have never done this before. Fortunately the midwife who works there full time is a great teacher and guided the students through without having to translate everything the mothers said into English for me. It was a real time saver. As it is, it takes at least five hours to get through all the women and they are just sitting out there, many of them having difficulty staying awake since they delivered during the night, waiting to be evaluated. I do not understand why they can’t let them wait in their beds. Those are uncomfortable enough, why do we make them sit on painful incisions in this hallway for hours holding their new baby? There are so many things I would do differently. I so badly want this model ward to happen.

Friday is the postnatal clinic where mothers come back at one and six weeks after they deliver. Half the students stayed in the ward and half went to the clinic and I went with them. There the mothers sit for hours on cement benches instead of the soft wooden ones they have in the ward. Presumably they’re less sore by then, though, so it didn’t seem as inhumane. They’ve had to walk miles to get there, but are dressed to the nines and look quite smart, actually. These women are well off, city dwellers, with husbands who have good jobs. The villagers who’ve delivered here go to the clinic closer to their home for their follow up. Or they go home and never want to be seen by a health care worker ever again, not that I’d blame them.

I am amazed at what kind of outfits and undergarments the women with means wear. Underwire bras, girdles, layers of slips, skirts, and zithenje are common. Slinky skin-tight dresses with complicated closures are donned for this outing. It takes them forever to get it all off to be examined. The undergarments look like they are from the 50’s and 60’s and tremendously uncomfortable. When I was a week postpartum, I felt like a sweatsuit was dressed up. I found this experience exhausting. It’s not life-threatening as in the labor ward, but the care they get is so substandard, I was completely depressed by the end of the day. As each woman came into the exam room I asked the students how old the baby was, one week or six weeks? They immediately picked up the health passport to look for a birthdate. Each time I’d say, “The mother is right here, you can ask her!” I do not understand why they don’t do that. Half the time it isn’t even written in the health passport, and for a culture that is so focused on polite conversation, you’d think they’d address her directly, but no. Never. They act a little like she’s a mannequin. Many of these women were well educated and could speak English, so I could talk with them directly, trying to model to the students, but it wasn’t sinking in. When I found myself getting angry at them, I decided to give it a rest and plan a skills lab for this week. I’m going to role play with them a visit where the woman is actually treated like a living, breathing, human being and make them practice it until it comes more naturally. I don’t have any other ideas. The midwives who work at that clinic disappeared when they saw students had shown up, so there was no one teaching them anything and it was their first day. It was, like I said, depressing.

I’m frustrated that the hospital director cancelled our meeting this week to discuss the model ward project. His excuse was he needed more time to read our proposal (a two page document given to him months ago). It’s discouraging. I thought of the wise words of Dr. Yun, a Korean man who was the head of WHO in Malawi back in the early 80’s. He said, “Does the mosquito give up when you are under the net? No! The mosquito looks and looks for the one little hole until he gets in.” I’ve thought of that a lot this week. It seems any improvement we want for women is always a fight. I am so bloody sick of this. My colleagues here think we should consider an alternative location in case we can’t get this guy to agree to it, but my feeling is he’s just a hospital employee like everyone else. I’m not sure why we need his permission. I’ll keep looking for the hole in the net, but maybe we should look for someone else to bite in the meantime. I thought maybe sitting in his office until he agrees to at least listen to our idea would work. I need to follow my colleague’s cultural lead on this one though. It feels like the same crap we dealt with trying to get the new Women’s Center built in Bar Harbor. Uphill, all the way.

We’re also going a little crazy with cabin fever. Despite the fact that hardly anyone even remembers the violence related to the bloodsucker frenzy, we are STILL restricted from traveling in the region. It’s getting ridiculous and we’re starting to feel like teenagers whose parents are too strict. A few places have opened up, like Cape Maclear on the lake, and we are going to spend the weekend there next week. We really need to get away. It’s hard not to do work over the weekend when we stay home, though I have an easier time with that than George does. He sees horrific cases all week, emotional trauma, one worse than the next, and I think it’s getting to him. Last week he had to deal with a woman with postpartum psychosis who killed her baby in a most horrifying way. He medicated her with an antipsychotic, but when she recovers she’ll be at high risk for suicide when she realizes what she’s done. You don’t just come home after dealing with stuff like that and forget about it. Last year we would mentally regroup by weekends away at beautiful places, get grounded, and remind ourselves how remarkable this place is. Not being able to do that is getting hard. We are taking advantage of the weekends here as best we can, but it’s not the same as really getting away. Our holiday vacation got approved since we are going north to an unrestricted area, so that’s something to look forward to. We’ll leave here on the 21st and have two weeks to camp and relax in the gorgeous north. Hanging on…

The news from home is also depressing so I’m trying to find a lighter note to end on…let me think…we got some really good ripe pineapples and the mangos are abundant.  A woman’s book group started this week over at the international secondary school, and I went to that. That was fun. They are getting the books on their kindles, which I don’t have, but George said I could borrow his. So that’s nice. My sourdough starter worked like a charm and I made some fabulous bread with that….hmm, what else? We decided to treat ourselves and booked the last remaining available room at a luxury place in Cape Maclear, so will write next week from a tropical paradise where we’ll kayak on the lake and try to think of nothing else but how lucky we are to have found each other and have exotic weekends for R&R.

It’s so hot now I keep forgetting it is advent season except for when we sing Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel in church. The only presents I want this year are more indictments from Mueller and approval to start our model ward. Other than that, our lives are full.

Love to all,

Linda

Sunday Morning ~ Blantyre

Sunday Morning ~  Blantyre

December 3, 2017

Tentha tizime adapsetsa mnzace ~  Set fire to it, we will extinguish it.

~ Malawian proverb

Hi Everyone,

I had to search for the meaning of this proverb since we are not taking Chichewa classes anymore and don’t have our wise teacher for enlightenment. It’s a warning to be responsible. It’s a warning that sometimes when you plan to control the fun you are having it can get away from you. You can set your friend on fire, thinking you’ll be able to extinguish it, but the fire can get out of hand. When people take risks, others can suffer, is the gist.

I never really saw myself as a big risk taker, though others may see it differently. My endeavors, while not always successful, are planned with a fair amount of consideration. Sometimes I go with my gut, but most of the time I weigh pros and cons quite carefully before taking on something where I (or someone else) might get hurt. I’ve been lucky a lot. I think of the near misses; the times I felt like God was saying to me: “Next time I won’t be so nice.” and feel my work here isn’t finished.  A month before my wedding my future brother-in-law asked, “What will you do if it rains?” referring to our wedding plan of having an outside reception without a tent. My response was, “It won’t. I just know it won’t.” He shook his head silently, probably thinking his brother was marrying a crack pot. I’m not sure what private conversation ensued, but I finally caved. We rented a tent. The tent, (which cost more than the entire wedding), blew down during the wedding ceremony, it being windy that day. There was, however, no rain.

Not wanting to rent the tent was all about the money. I’m careful with money. I grew up with a father who ruled with an iron fist and God help you if you asked for money for anything. He had to “sell newspapers on the corner for fifteen cents a week to get through school!” We heard that line many times, accusingly, as if we, his children, were the cause of all that youthful misery. I wanted to explore the actual details. What paper? Who gave you the papers? Where was this “corner”? Was it always the same place? What did you do if you didn’t sell them all? How old were you? What did you do with the money?  Public school was free wasn’t it? But these questions I never asked. His delivery of that line was not a conversation-starter; it was a warning.  It’s a shame really, because he was an interesting character and if only the hardships he faced were told as a story instead of a threat, our relationship would have been much different. I always felt like I was some unwanted responsibility that cost him a lot of money. My mother, on the other hand, would reply with an air of lightheartedness when I asked her questions like, “Mom, what was it like growing up during the depression?” THE depression, because of course, there was only one. She’d reply, “Oh, we’d have to stand in line all day to get a loaf of bread or a few potatoes” as if she were referring to movie tickets or a fun afternoon with friends. Now, as I reflect, living with my father was probably much worse than growing up with no food. She probably did consider those afternoons more fun than her married life.

So, while I may have taken many physical risks in my day: riding my bike through Boston traffic, hiking alone in December in Scotland, binge drinking in college, I don’t ever take financial risks. I don’t ever buy anything on credit without the funds to pay for it. Never. I’m always afraid I’ll lose my source of income and be in debt. I couldn’t bear that. I need to have savings to back everything up. I worried that I’d pass this money anxiety on to my children, just like my fear of the dentist, which is why their father took them to their dental appointments. I didn’t want them picking up on my phobias. Joe, my ex, grew up much less financially secure than I did, but had none of the money issues. Go figure. He had no problem spending it, somehow thinking it’d all come back around, magically I guess. Consequently, after our initial discussions about how our money would be managed, we settled in to a routine. I’d make the money, he’d spend it. That led to some conflict, as you can imagine, and eventually, it was the end of us. When I finally got suspicious that something was amiss, I started checking the bank balances. He managed the money and paid the bills. I trusted him. I never believed he’d be careless with our family’s finances. We had kids to get through college. He saw how hard I worked. I just assumed he was being responsible.  But a lot of money was missing. A lot. I freaked. How could he do that to me? To us? Where did it go? Gambling? Blackmail? Drugs? Why didn’t I ever check before?

That’s just how I feel now. Our legislators have sold us out. I feel like we haven’t been watching carefully enough. We trusted our elected officials to be responsible and take care of our money for the good of us all. They are playing with fire and using our money as kindling. They somehow believe it won’t rain. Or don’t care anymore.  I look at the hard lives of people in Malawi and wonder how far down the same road my own country is heading. We’ve been sold out to Jabba the Hut. How could this have happened? Were Europeans saying this in the 30’s? It’s disorienting. Frightening.

In the early 1980’s I was a visiting nurse in Holyoke, MA and some of the neighborhoods we visited were rough. I was pregnant with my second child, making one hundred and eighty dollars a week. and supporting my husband who was working on a degree in public health. Many of our patients were in apartment buildings, which, in their heyday, may have been nice living spaces but they’d become dangerous slums. Big stone steps led up to the heavy front doors with  beveled glass windows framing the vestibule where the mailboxes were. A similar door, directly  opposite, allowed a view of the hallway and heavy staircase that led to the upstairs apartments. The doors were crafted from beautiful wood and wore heavy, solid knobs. Some had pockmarks from gunshots.

Before my employment there, staff nurses complained to administration that they didn’t feel  safe in those neighborhoods. There was a lot of contention between the nurses and administration at the time. The nurses had recently unionized and there were a lot of hard feelings. It was tense. I was young, just back from Peace Corps, and very naive. Working conditions seemed fine to me compared with conditions in Malawi, so I went blithely about my job. It seemed as safe as riding my motorcycle through herds of cows to get to clinics and I needed the paycheck.

It was January and I was seven months pregnant. I visited a patient confined to a wheelchair, needing dressing changes on his legs three times a day. He’d been a carnival worker and spilled battery acid on his legs destroying his skin. He was obese and claimed he couldn’t bend over to change the dressings himself. He could be annoying and manipulative and we had a million conferences to discuss his care. He was on Medicaid and I thought it was a waste of money to be going in there three times a day when he was capable of doing this himself. I didn’t believe he couldn’t bend over, but I was fond of him, in a co-dependent way, and it was a pretty easy visit, soaking his legs in the bathtub and changing the dressing, so didn’t mind too much when he was on my schedule. I usually got some charting done while his legs soaked. On that January day I left his apartment and went down the stairway to leave. As I approached the bottom of the stairs I saw four young men in the vestibule, one against each wall. I slowed down, and wondered if I should go back up to Armand’s apartment. I had to open the first door in to the vestibule, then open the second door, also inward (stupid design!) in order to get outside. Why were they just standing in there? Had they watched me go in? Were they waiting for me? They were watching me descend the stairs and I didn’t want to look fearful, so continued head up with a confident stride, as confident as possible with my gravid belly, intending to pass through like I owned the place. I was nervous. I pushed the first door open and the guy leaning against it moved aside to let me in. The door closed and I was now surrounded by four men in this tiny vestibule. I looked at the guy to the right of me as he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a knife. He held it up to show me and I felt my heart stop, as I reached for the doorknob of the second door. The guy in front of that door stepped aside and let me out. I went down the icy steps in my wooden clogs, shaking, trying to focus on my brown car in front of me. Got the keys out somehow, unlocked the door, got in and prayed, PRAYED, the car would start. It was freezing cold and the car often didn’t start, but it did and I pealed out nearly causing an accident as I went through a stop sign without stopping.

I didn’t go to my next patient but drove back to the office, ran in and up the stairs to the nursing supervisor’s office. I was crying as I told her what happened. I said, “I don’t think they intended to kill me, just scare me because they easily could have killed me.”  She told me to sit down and went into the directors office to tell her what had happened. She wasn’t gone long and came back with the director.  I don’t know what I was expecting them to say, but it wasn’t what they actually did say.  They wanted to know if I really thought they were going to hurt me?  I said, “I don’t know! But I almost crashed the car! I almost fell down the stairs!” Then they asked me not to make a big issue out of this as some on the staff will “want us to do something.” I was speechless! A guy just pulled a knife out on me, and instead of discussing how we would make my life safer (escorts had been on the bargaining table) they wanted me to keep it quiet? Not warn everyone else that guys with knives were out there waiting for us as we visited patients? What the fuck?

I thought we’d made progress since those days. And now, here we are again, expecting the ones entrusted with our safety and security, to do the right thing. But they don’t. I can’t even imagine where we are heading right now. Every time I think that sanity will prevail, the madmen and madwomen light the matches, the fire gets out of control, and I see a vision of our future charred beyond recognition. I find myself imagining a fifth grader thirty years from now reading about this time in a history book, or tablet, or whatever they’ll be reading then. What will they think of it? Will my great grandchildren ask their mothers, “Mom, what was it like living through the depression?” Will there be some lighthearted story about waiting in line for potatoes?

My incident with the guys and the knife, which I did not keep to myself, ended up being a turning point. The union leaders grabbed on to that like a dog with a bone and it wasn’t long before we had escorts accompanying us to places we felt unsafe. It was the first time I saw activism in that context and watched it make a difference. Informed people. Fed up. Doing something about it.

I wonder what I’d be writing about if we had our real president in the White House right now.

Love to all,

Linda