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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253032386 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/05/2018 |
| Pages: | 222 |
| Sales rank: | 423,422 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Part I
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
T. S. Eliot
When at last they came for us, we were not there. There were over two hundred of them, dressed in baggy trousers and unbuttoned camouflage shirts over singlets smudged with dirt and drenched with sweat. They rode into town aboard white Toyota pickup trucks and Chinese motorcycles, and they brandished rocket launchers, RPGs, and AK47s. It was a predawn Sunday: July 27, 2014, the last day of the holy month of Ramadan.
Friends later described to us what happened. Screaming, "Allahu akbar!" over and over again and firing into the air, they shouted orders and demanded in Hausa, Kanuri, and broken English: "Where is Amadou Ali? Where are the American doctors?"
Myra and I, the American doctors (though Myra was neither American nor a doctor), had been living under military guard for fifteen months, going little more than from house to hospital, hospital to house, always with an armed escort. Boko Haram, the terrorist organization whose name in local parlance meant "Western education is sin," had been successively kidnapping foreigners from our part of northern Cameroon — a French family of seven, a French priest, a Canadian nun, two Italian priests, ten Chinese road workers — and we had known for a long time that we were on their list.
As it happened, Amadou Ali, a native son of Kolofata who by this time was Cameroon's vice prime minister, was still traveling up from the capital, Yaoundé, for the holiday. His wife, twenty-year-old son, and extended family members had preceded him and arrived in Kolofata the night before. Myra and I had recently departed for our biennial visit to our families in North America.
The attackers fired their automatic rifles into our Land Rover, our house, and the detached storeroom in which we had planned to hide should such a day ever come. Several of the men shouted that they should go to the hospital and look for us there. Others objected, and in the end they did not go. Instead they grabbed ten members of Amadou Ali's family and household, our canton chief, the chief's wife, and five of his six children, and they shoved their prey into pickups and other four-wheel-drive vehicles parked in the compound. Two soldiers, eight townspeople, and seven members of Ali's family and household who had tried to stop the abductions or who otherwise got in the way were killed. Bullets to the head, knives to the throat. The assailants then ransacked the rest of the compound's buildings before launching grenades into them and burning them and their remaining occupants to cinders.
Outside the compound the invaders gleefully sprayed rounds at random, pockmarking homes, electricity poles, schools, trees, signs, and people, and by the time they left, four hours after they had arrived, our peaceful little town was a bloody battlefield of smoldering buildings, dead bodies, and unspeakable grief.
*
You Will Also Require an Umbrella
What I remember most vividly about the first time I ducked out of a plane newly landed in Africa was the heat that clapped its arms around me in a grip tighter than a lover's embrace. The scent of burning wood, kerosene, palm oil, and sweat permeated the air, and with a mix of fear and gratitude I drew it in with deep breaths. I was in Niamey, Niger, and this was June 1974. A village called Gouré, a thousand barren kilometers east of Niamey, would be my eventual end point. I was a Peace Corps volunteer and at nineteen had come to teach English as a foreign language to secondary school students barely younger than I. I did not know it then, and I would have scoffed had anyone suggested it, but Africa would continue to be my home or destination for the next forty years.
The second child and first daughter of Frank and Cora Einterz, I grew up in a raucous household, one of thirteen children. My youngest sibling, Johanna, was born after I was already in Niger. My parents stressed the importance of discipline and education, and like most of my brothers and sisters I worked hard and did well in school, sports, and a medley of other activities. By the time I graduated from college, though, I was impatient for my efforts to yield something more meaningful than a grade on a test or a medal at a meet.
My Catholic upbringing contributed to that, but so had John F. Kennedy, handsome and eloquent, when he created the Peace Corps and said that volunteers would be sharing in the task of bringing freedom and peace to the world.
In Gouré I enjoyed teaching, but I sensed that I was not inventive or engaging enough to be an outstanding teacher, and the moments of fulfillment seemed too few and far between. I looked around my dusty, dingy village, at the skinny mothers, potbellied toddlers, and scrappy-haired children with running sores, and I thought about becoming a doctor. I would serve in this very place, or in some place much like it, where a little help might relieve a great deal of pain and every patient had a story to tell.
I started medical school at McGill University in 1978. Halfway through, I decided it would be smart to make sure that being a doctor in a poor, hot, underdeveloped setting was still what I wanted to do, so I arranged to spend three months with Our Lady's Missionaries, a Canadian community of nuns who ran a primary care clinic in rural Nigeria. It was a difficult summer, but the experience of living among and serving the poor only increased my desire exponentially.
After graduation and a twelve-month mixed internship in medicine and surgery at Montreal's Royal Victoria Hospital, I joined a Catholic parish run by an Irish Holy Ghost priest in Naka, Nigeria. For the next six years I directed and developed what would become the parish's fifty-bed clinic and orphanage.
The two superb Irish nurses with whom I worked in Naka returned home in 1986, and their departure left the clinic with no one to take charge of day-to-day administration. I asked a Canadian friend from college, Myra Bates, if she would consider taking the job. It was an outlandish proposal, and she treated it as such, but a little wrangling and cajoling convinced her to come for a visit. After that visit she took a leave of absence from her job in Montreal, signed on for a year, and then ended up staying for two more. We both left Naka in 1989 to pursue advanced degrees in public health at Tulane University's School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans.
While there, we searched the globe for a new posting, setting two criteria for determining our selection: the community had to have a real and unmet need for a doctor, and it had to be able to provide housing, since we knew we would not be making much money. We were offered jobs in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Sudan, but the first two sites seemed insufficiently needy and the last one too dangerous.
A Cameroonian classmate at Tulane, Dr. Kollo Basile, told us about a place called Kolofata in the Far North of his country. He explained that even Cameroonians thought Kolofata, isolated and exceedingly poor, was the back of beyond, and few wanted to work there. Civil servants who had caused trouble elsewhere were posted to Kolofata as punishment. Schools were generally scorned. Languages were multiple. Daytime temperatures during the three-month hot season hovered around 115 degrees in the shade. Children were unvaccinated. Exotic tropical diseases and the diseases of poverty were abundant. The district had no paved roads, no electricity or running water, no telephone or post office, no hospital, no doctor. I told Kollo it sounded great.
But, Kollo said, it is not enough to be in an area of need, even with the best intentions: you will also require an umbrella. He meant an umbrella of the political sort. You cannot go to Cameroon without an umbrella, he said, for the political climate there is prone to wayward, unpredictable storms.
As it happened, a man named Amadou Ali was from Kolofata, and Kollo felt he was just the person to ask. Head of Cameroon's Gendarmerie Nationale, Ali held the rank of minister in the government and, unlike other men from remote rural towns who had succeeded in school and happily shed the shackles of village life, Ali held his hometown close to his heart and worked constantly to improve the quality of life for the people there. Kollo knew him from his own time working as a young doctor in the Far North.
One morning Kollo arrived in class red-eyed and nubbly-haired, and I asked him what was wrong. He pulled out a single sheet of paper that he had filled with a letter written longhand. It began, "Excellence, bonjour!" and it described the offer made by two classmates, one a doctor, one a specialist in international health, to work in an underserved area in Africa or elsewhere, provided the destination was one of true need where housing could be offered by the community. He suggested that Kolofata might fulfill the requirements. He also mentioned the umbrella.
To get the wording right, Kollo said, he had been up all night. We checked the letter and found no fault. He folded it, placed it in a stamped envelope, and dropped it in the mail.
It took almost two months for a reply to come, also through the mail. Amadou Ali assured Kollo that he had a small guesthouse on his compound in Kolofata that could be put at the disposal of the medical team, and he would contact the minister of health in Yaoundé and the American ambassador to Cameroon to procure an official invitation and establish other formalities as needed. In other words, he would be happy to be our umbrella.
For our part, we contacted Brother Fred Sherrer, a missionary friend from Naka, who put us in touch with Father Dermot Doran, a Spiritan priest who had worked in Nigeria before returning to Canada to direct Volunteer International Christian Service, an ecumenical organization that sponsored volunteers in response to requests for help from parishes and institutions in Africa, Asia, and South America. We asked Father Doran if VICS would sponsor Myra and me in Cameroon and, on the strength of Brother Fred's recommendation and with little hesitation or fanfare, he said yes. We would be sent $250 a month to live on and a one-way ticket, the return of which would be provided after two years. That was the start.
To the End of the Earth
Myra and I arrived in Yaoundé on October 6, 1990, and reached Kolofata, a thousand kilometers to the north, three days after that. We made the trip upcountry by plane to Maroua, the capital of the Far North, which was as far as a plane could take us, and then overland to Kolofata by way of Mora in the company of Dr. Baba Malloum Ousman, a veterinarian who worked in the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries in Maroua. A native of Kolofata and a cousin of Amadou Ali, Dr. Baba was short and spry, with the dark skin and deep facial scars of the Kanuri tribe. We found his ready smile appealing and reassuring.
The landscape in the Far North was breathtaking. Night was falling fast when we left Maroua for Mora, but there was still enough crepuscular glow for us to see the geologic eruptions that flanked the road on either side. It was as if we were riding along the bottom of a sea after all the water had evaporated. Some of the hills were terraced and farmed in variegated patches. Others were just rocks, smooth giant boulders mounded one on top of the other and reaching up a hundred meters or more to the sky. They looked precarious, as though a simple nudge could set off an avalanche and boulder after boulder would come tumbling down. Against the base of the hills, small villages were nestled, their inhabitants evidently convinced that the rocks towering above them would never budge.
The road leading northwest from Mora to Kolofata was only twenty miles long, but it took us an hour to get from one end to the other. The rainy season had cut deep gashes along its tracks, and trucks lumbering back and forth had deepened the ruts, widened them, and mounded up their edges. The going was slow, the night black, the air stiflingly hot, and Myra and I wondered aloud how much farther away the end of the earth could possibly be.
Not much, as it turned out at last. "This is Kolofata!" Dr. Baba exclaimed joyfully, and we had to take his word for it, for we could make out nothing in the night outside the Peugeot's windows. It was not until we entered Amadou Ali's compound that we realized Kolofata, or this compound at least, had some sort of electricity. No other house in town had been lit.
Dr. Baba took us directly to the house made available for our use, and we settled in the sitting room around a wooden coffee table. Myra and I sat on the couch. Dr. Baba sat opposite us in an armchair, and half an hour after our arrival, a young man in blue jeans and a red sleeveless t-shirt appeared at the door. Dr. Baba stood up, extended his hand in greeting, and ushered Dr. Marc into the room. This was the freshly graduated Cameroonian doctor we had learned about only after our arrival in Yaoundé. He was from the South and had not asked to be posted to Kolofata. No one asked to be posted to Kolofata. We shook hands, expressed mutual delight. He welcomed us, inquired about our journey, told us we would be a breath of fresh air as he was swamped, there was much work to be done, and the people here were not easy. I thanked him for his cordiality. We talked weather, roads, food. I asked him which of Kolofata's languages he thought we should start learning first. "Oh no," he replied, "no need for that. You can always get someone to translate for you."
A man dressed in white pants and white safari shirt came into the sitting room from the back door and set a tray holding two enamel pots, a pile of glass plates, and soup spoons on the coffee table. Dr. Baba introduced him as Moussa, Monsieur Ali's housekeeper and cook. A small boy came behind him with a second tray holding glasses and bottles of Fanta Orange and Coca-Cola. Moussa pulled a bottle opener from his pocket and served each of us a drink while we helped ourselves to plates of steaming rice and spicy red sauce laden with onions and chunks of beef.
It was hot enough in the enclosed little house for sweat to be trickling down our cheeks and arms. Crickets — hundreds of them — bounced off floors, walls, and furniture. The smell of fresh paint hovered above the stew.
Conversation remained perfunctory — the heat, our journey, the hospital such as it was. Dr. Marc said he would be showing us around in the morning, but then he would be leaving for a few days to visit friends on the other side of Maroua.
After the men left, Myra and I did our best to wash the dust of the road off our bodies before falling into our beds and sweating through the night. In the morning Dr. Marc met us at the front gate and accompanied us on the walk up to the hospital.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Life and Death in Kolofata"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Ellen Einterz.
Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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