Office call

The Clinic

She was clearly uneasy, no irritated--maybe that's a better word. She might well have been rolling her eyes--it wasn't bright inside the clinic and I didn't want to stare. I was an spectator just then, a surprise, I'm sure. Even though I was white and foreign, I seemed not to gather much of her attention. She was mad, really, and while I didn't know a word of the language she, her mother, or the professional were using, that she was exasperated was evident.

We were visiting a tiny medical clinic Niger, an office/hospital operated by a Christian man, a nurse, whose distinguishing facial scars made clear to display his clan or tribe. He was rarity, a Christian believer serving up medical care in the world overwhelmingly Muslim around him. But he was loved--that was clear. He was soft-spoken but firm--and he was busy. Outside the clinic, night had fallen.

We'd already learned enough about place and time. It was the season for malaria again, an annual plague, and the woman--she was pregnant--was worried about herself, her temperature, her headaches, her pains. She wasn't young. To my own Western sensitibilities, she seemed a bit too old to be with child. 

He spoke to her kindly, telling her that he thought she was just fine, that she shouldn't worry any more because he was quite sure she things were going well and so with the baby. The older woman, the pregnant one, sat; the girl stood behind her. She said nothing, but her face, even her clenched hands, communicated just as clearly as her voice might have. Something about all of this she didn't like. Not at all.

Once they'd left, I asked the medical worker about it--why the young woman seemed so exasperated. 

He smiled, as if to say I didn't need to be concerned. It was nothing. He said the girl who'd taken the pregnant woman in was probably another wife of the father of baby soon to make his or her place on the world stage. He smiled again, as if I might have some trouble understanding, and then told me that maybe the young wife thinks is somehow unseemly for the older one to be pregnant, at her age, a kind of jealousy maybe. She'd rather the man would pay more attention to her.

The medical man was right--what did I know about life with multiple wives? Nothing. 

It was incredible, fascinating. I was a long, long way from home. But startling and unforeseen revelations are always a blessing. Two wives--one young, one not so--were jealous of each other. Wow. 

But then he said there could be another reason. Maybe the two of them were quarreling on the way here. Maybe the pregnant one was the younger woman's mother, and she was angry at her mother for getting pregnant again. Maybe it was nothing more than a family spat--you know, her daughter's just plain tired of her mother.

One story was strange and unfamiliar, exotic like nothing I'd ever imagined. But the other, so ordinary it could have happened in New York or California or Iowa. One was African and peculiarly tribal; the other was just plain ordinary.

I loved the hubby envy, as foreign as the ID scars cut into the nurse's cheeks.

But then, maybe they argued on the way to the clinic. Maybe the girl was exasperated at her mother's getting herself all pregnant again, right then too, when malaria is just now lurking everywhere. Maybe it was just, "Oh, Mom, geez, really?"

One is rare and odd and foreign. The other, even here in Muslim Niger, is just plain human. 

You choose.

The office