Two weeks before I was awoken by a Sunday morning phone call that my former homestay sister “Princesse” had died in the night, I had been living with the family and it was her little sister Poupette’s birthday. I had found some beaded bracelets at the corner store and bought each girl three to keep things even – I knew better than to leave this feisty eleven-year old out. Both girls were tickled, but even though they were elastic banded, the bracelets slipped right off of Princesse’s bony little wrists. That night we spent an hour by a lantern taking them apart and trying to restring and tie them, me spilling beads on the floor several times, and still having enough surplus beads left over to make another. Most of the bracelets were yanked and broken within a few days, but I still love that memory.
I also love thinking about the girl’s night we had the week before - after grandma was particularly harsh to my host sisters at dinner, I decided they needed some time to be little girls. I locked us inside my bedroom, much to the boy’s jealousy, and we played their favorites, Beyonce and Lady Gaga, dressed up in my clothes, sprayed perfume, and looked through my normally forbidden collection of mundane-yet-exotically-foreign bureau items – colored pens, a camera, scented deodorant. I got it in my head to paint their fingernails, then remembered something about such things being forbidden at school and told them I would just go and ask grandma first. When they pleaded me not to I smiled, knowing now for sure it was not allowed, and asked them if they could keep a secret. In a dash of mischievous sisterhood I painted just one pinky fingernail on each of them purple as their faces beamed with that smitten glee of sneaking into your mom’s bathroom and using her powder. At the breakfast table the next morning they both flashed me their little fingers as they sat eating in their school uniforms, excited to keep up their side of the bargain.
We had done little writing lessons – Princesse’s long-time illness had made her miss a lot of school and I was dismayed to realize that at age 11 she could not read or sound out words to write. So we started with “chat” (cat) which is when I realized that French words do not lend themselves to being sounded out – way too many silent letters. I’d read their palms for fortunes, telling Princesse she would learn to swim and marry a handsome man, which she told everyone she knew as if my word were gold. Even though she’d been sick with fever and weakness throughout my stay, we had many rambunctious dinners together, and she was getting quick at coming back at her witty older brother’s teasing with zingers of her own. I told them about our myth of the stork delivering babies and what we say sometimes if a kid’s a little slow; soon after, her brother got one of my trivia questions wrong (pretty cute – he thought Uruguay and Paraguay were the two non-continental US states) and she didn’t skip a beat: “Yeeah, the stork definitely dropped this one”. God bless her.
The experience of having Princesse die unexpectedly from an unknown illness that almost surely would have been identified and treated in the US has been an intense and valuable eye-opener for me as I start my work here. The low level of awareness around health conditions and preventative measures; the central role of religion and sorcery as the deciders of death; the lack of resources, infrastructure, and doctors; the resulting staggering health care inequities; and the statistics about how many millions of children die in Africa from preventable illnesses – having this little girl die made it all pop to life for me in numbing clarity. It certainly gives me new meaning, motivation and urgency in my role as a community health development worker.
And thank goodness for the circle of life – the very night I learned of Princesse’s death, I attended a traditional birth ceremony for a neighbor’s newborn. All the singing and dancing and general exaggerated joyfulness took on new meaning for me – the gift of life is a particularly fragile one here.
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