Hiccups and Language Lessons

Monday, March 9, 2009
First day of Clinic at Abundant Life Faith Center, Freetown, Sierra Leone

As the medical team arrived for the first day of seeing patients at Abundant Life Faith Center in Freetown, Sierra Leone, a slight breeze was blowing, making the clinic in the still-under-construction top floor of the church a very pleasant temperature to begin the day. The concrete posts were in place, but no ceiling had been poured and the church members had used the framework to hang tarps to shade the clinic area, which was several feet above the main level on what will eventually become the stage at the front of the sanctuary. As we got underway, the spectacular view across Freetown formed the backdrop to the patient waiting area. And things were heating up quickly in more ways than one.

Despite our partner’s best efforts to pre-register patients and allow the sickest patients to be seen, there were several heated discussions going on amongst those waiting. There were several hiccups in the organizational process, including the fact that, unbeknownst to us, all the kids who were supposed to be seen by the docs had been shuttled off under a shade tree and were happily listening to Dorothy Nelson’s songs and stories.

It wasn’t until much later that upset mothers clued us in that all those kids needed to be cycled through to be examined. I thought there was something missing—the kids! But judging by all their smiles, “Dr. Dorothy” wasn’t doing them any harm.

Things definitely smoothed out and improved in the afternoon. About 233 patients were seen and there were 175 already registered for the next day.

I spent my spare time at the pill-counting station getting helpers Mathew and Ruthy to give me lessons in the Krio language spoken in the area. It is a linguistic amalgamation of several languages, English being one of them. For instance, the equivalent of asking “How are you?” in Krio would be “How da body?” with the answer being, “Body fine.” Sheila Leech periodically entertained us with her exclamations claiming, “Listen to this! I can already speak Krio.” We all just laughed at her rookie efforts, but even the Sierra Leoneans had to admit she was a good mimic. We could catch a few things, but when several native speakers got into a conversation it was easy to see that we all had a lot of learning to do. Thank God for our translator helpers.