random short stories

the other morning i was woken up at 2:30 by the squawk of my radio. the nurse tells me that one of my high-risk patients is at the hospital in labour, so i crawl sleepily out from under my mosquito net, pull on my msf t-shirt and go to find our on-call driver. awat stumbles out of his tukul and opens the car doors. we get in, we buckle up, i reach up to turn on the interior light as he plugs in the flashing red light on our roof (safety regulations for travelling after dark). we pull up to our gate and he stops as the guard reaches up and bends our huge antennae so we can make it out under the low gate. once we are outside of the gate he pauses, turns to me and says "hospital?". i say "no, mcdonalds. i really feel like french fries". he looks at me blankly and i sigh "yes, the hospital". seriously, where else would i be going in habillah at 2:30am?

gustavo once asked his driver in darfur why it was that you saw the women, not the men, carrying the loads here, and carrying those loads on their heads. the man gave him a lengthy explanation about how the girls were taught from a very young age to practice walking with things on their heads, and how women were more graceful and better able to balance things, etc etc etc (translation: the men here are lazy yahoos). they were driving as they spoke and they happened to drive by a man who was carrying a large load on his head. gustavo turned to his driver with a questioning look and the driver explains "that man surely has no wife".

milena "and then there are spiders, who have 6 legs..."
gustavo "how many legs?"
milena "6"
monica "well yeah, the handicapped ones"


gustavo, our fearless leader


monica

our new fieldco is gustavo, an argentinian doctor in his late 20's. i love him for 2 main reasons (ok, more than 2, he's laugh-out-loud funny so he is clearly my new best friend). one, he paces. when he is stressed out or thinking, he paces around the courtyard like a caged animal. i love this because any kind of pacing reminds me of arin, who i love to be reminded of. two, he walks around singing "true colours" all day long. when i tell him that it's a bit unmanly to be singing cindy lauper songs he insists that he is singing the phil colins version. the gustavo set comes complete with an amazing girlfriend, monica, a doctor from spain. together they make up one of the funniest couples i have ever met. they are both bosses of our team (gus is directly in charge of the team here and monica is in charge of all of our medical activities) without being each others boss. occasionally during a meeting they will disagree about something and gus will end it with "monica, not in front of the children!". other times they will talk to each other in spanish, leaving the rest of us feeling like you did when you were a child and adults spelled things to each other so you wouldn't understand. one of gus' favorite stories is about the time he was doing rounds in argentina with a doctor who was notoriously bad at his job. as they stopped at one patient, the patients daughter told them that the man was having pain of some sort. the doctor replies "well you need to move your legs!". the daughter says "but doctor, he doesn't have any legs. you amputated them". without missing a beat the doctor says "then move the rest of your body!". now whenever gus says or does something stupid he says "then move the rest of your body!"

alright, can't write about what i actually want to write about, so you got this instead....

"there is a work beside which all else strikes me as useless. that is the work that seeks to raise the status of childhood everywhere. that every child, from pole to pole, would come into the health and happiness that is their due. if everyone who had ever loved a child would but do their part, this would come to pass"