Sub-Saharan Africa’s Orphan Legacy: Mosa’s Story

Well, things are getting back to normal. I am back at work full time looking after hemodialysis patients and writing research papers. The kids are back at school and seem to have settled in nicely. Hannah told me this morning that she made a card for Daddy that says 'Je t'aime Papa' and that 'It's for that special day that's coming on Sunday when all the dads have a birthday!' (So cute..I tried not to laugh..she is so sensitive with those things). Anyway, Happy Father's day to allyou dads out there. I have no further news on Malinga or when he will get to Canada. I do know he is doing well at the orphanage and at school.

I wanted to share the following article with you. I wrote it as another commentary for the Whig Standard (our Kingston paper). It was printed today (June 13th, 2007) and they gave me almost a full page! They also printed the accompanying photo of Mosa and his family. We have 'adopted' them too and I will bring clothes for them on my next visit.......Read on to hear Mosa's Story.

We met Mosa on our first day making rounds in Kilema Hospital. We didn’t know his story then, but we do now and I think it is worth telling. Mosa was quite sick when we first saw him. He was lying with a makeshift ‘burn frame’ over him. These wooden frames are primitive, but, keep the flies off and, allow the burn victim to be kept warm without the blanket touching their open wounds. This little hospital on the slopes of Kilimanjaro can get cold at night.
Mosa was in the Men’s ward and when my husband, Roman, and the other Canadian volunteer nurse, Sharm, first examined little Mosa his burns were in a bad state. He had been brought in to the hospital, near death, about a week before after he and a friend had accidentally pulled a bucket of boiling water onto themselves. Roman and Sharm worked as a ‘wound’ team throughout the duration of our 4-month stay in Kilema and performed hundreds of dressing changes in addition to teaching the local nursing staff about ways to maximize wound healing. Mosa, who we later learned was 11 years old (only slightly taller than my 9 year old son, Jack) received a much larger burn than his playmate with approximately 40% of his body affected, which, in a child, even in North America, can be fatal. His anterior chest, abdomen, upper and inner thighs, and, his groin had severe 2nd degree and in a few areas, 3rd degree burns. Once the damage was surveyed, Roman and Sharm went to work at trying to help this child heal. The daily dressing changes were not easy as the hospital has little in the way of pain medication. Mosa would wince and cry and occasionally, scream in agony as they tried to remove bits of dead tissue and clean the areas. Luckily, Canada-Africa Community Health Alliance (CACHA), the group we were volunteering with, had at some point in the last year, brought jars of the burn cream known as ‘flamazine’ as a donation to Kilema Hospital. Roman and Sharm knew the cream was available as they had been helping the sisters to organize the donated supplies and had labeled things that the nurses and sisters weren’t sure what to do with. The flamazine now had a purpose and I really believe that Roman and Sharm, and, the flamazine saved Mosa’s life.

For almost the entire duration of our stay in Kilema, Mosa was there. It was wonderful to see him heal. Initially, it was impossible to get a smile from him. He was in pain all the time, with every move. We learned through translators that he was one of many children in his family, an orphan, living with his grandparents near Himo Town (an area with a high prevalence of HIV/AIDS). As such, he never had family visits and therefore was expected to fend for himself in terms of bathing, finding clean clothes and food. Like many hospitals in developing countries, the staff-to-patient ratio is low and family members are expected to care for all the basic day-to-day needs of their loved ones. The hospital provides two small meals per day (porridge in the morning with tea and Ugali (cooked corn meal) with beans, at late midday. We were pleased to see that some of the families of the other men in that room seemed to help Mosa with basic things that he couldn’t do for himself as we were not always there to check on him.

After a number of weeks, we started to see his smile emerge when we entered that room. After about 6 weeks, he was finally up and walking around with a Kanga (traditional Tanzanian women’s body wrap) around his body. He limped to the front of the hospital steps and would sit there for hours to fill the time. Every time we came and went from the hospital we would wave and make a big deal out of the fact that he was our favorite patient. It wasn’t long before he would smile and then eventually wave, and then eventually wave emphatically and run after our car.

In many ways, Mosa was like a metaphor of our African experience…it gets better (and you love it more) with each passing day. Over the last few weeks Mosa has been able to wear clothes and he regularly came down to the house and would hang about with Jack or wait for Roman and Jack to go to the soccer field at the end of each day. To see him play soccer with the boys was Roman’s pay back for all those dressing changes. His legs were so badly burned that it really was a miracle.
On the day we left Kilema Hospital in preparation for our return trip to Canada we took Mosa home. Somehow his wounds had healed just in time, and we felt he was ready. We had learned through translators that Mosa was excited to go home and see his family. We, on the other hand, were anxious about leaving him.

Mosa directed our driver to his house. It was a cinder block dwelling with a metal roof and a wooden slat mud hut next to it. There were quite a few children there as we arrived. Out of the house ran an older man and a woman. The woman was quite hunched over but they were both shouting and smiling. The reunion of Mosa with his ‘Babu’ and ‘Bibi’(Swahili for grandfather and grandmother) brought me to tears.

They took us on a tour of their house and his grandfather apologized that the house wasn’t quite finished. You see, he used to have cows but each of his 5 grown children slowly got sick and died of ‘long illnesses’. The way he described the situation to my friend Agnes, our translator that day, was that as each adult child got sick he would sell a cow. By the time the money from the cow had run out (to pay for medicine), that child was dead. He raised his arms in the air and said in Swahili ‘Now all 5 are dead and I am left with 10 orphaned grandchildren…and no cows’. It was very emotional for us to leave Mosa there. We were unable to do any more for them that day but vowed to come back with some money, on our next visit, to help them out.

As you read this, we will be home from Africa. We have ‘moved out’ of our little house at Kilema Hospital but we will have left with hearts that are a little bit heavier than when we came. We have passed through and contributed what we could but we have left so much to still be done. I know that despite how painful it was to see Mosa’s reality, we needed to see it. His life and story is one of millions being played out across Africa. There is a continent of orphans (literally millions) who need the world to care about them. Who will raise this generation of children so that they can be educated, productive citizens? Who will love those children, who unlike Mosa don’t have a Bibi and a Babu to hug them? Is it the responsibility of their impoverished neighbors who may already be sharing what little food and resources they have? Is it the responsibility of African governments to step up and help the children orphaned by HIV? It is all of these things, but, for this generation of children to live and contribute to the world around then it will take a massive effort on the part of people just like us and our governments to say that these children are our responsibility and that we really do care.