Death III

In recounting my near misses, I can't but think of how many other misses I am unaware of. As a child, I was the only one who was hospitalized a few times compared to my siblings and cousins. I cannot remember if I ever felt sick enough to be at deaths door, but I do know I disliked getting injections. During one of my trips to the hospital I was to receive a Novalgin injection, for those of you old enough to remember Novalgin, it was the most painful torturous injection ever. I screamed hell and blue murder as the nurse approached with a Novalgin shot. 'I don't take injections', I lamented in my most piteous voice, you would think anyone with a heart would see the tears and back down but those nurses were a special breed. After a few minutes of my temporary madness, my father was summoned, it took just one look from him and I accepted the drilling of the syringe through my marrow (that was what it felt like) without as much as a squeak.

The feeling Novalgin gave your buttocks afterwards was more than enough to render you meeker than a lamb taken to the slaughter. Thank God Novalgin no longer exists.

My last and third brush with death happened in a land far away from the land of my birth. To give you context, I'll start from the beginning. I had signed up to go on a mission with an NGO which will remain nameless (in this post and also my comments) and had been told it was a special mission yada yada yada.

The only thing that I was worried about and asked questions about was if there were snakes. The answer given mollified my fears but in reality if I had known what I was really getting into, I would never have gone on that assignment. The snakes were as numerous as the chickens that we bought from the villagers to cook. The place literally crawled with snakes. But God loves me, I tell you for I never saw a live one.

Once, I asked that a handwashing basin in our makeshift ward be moved and promptly stepped away after giving the order. A few minutes later, pandemonium broke out and the screams of the women and children in the ward filled the air. There was a huge snake living in the stones on which the basin had been mounted. I did not come out until it was killed.

On another occasion, our project manager went outside at night and thought that the cord of the generator was in the way, he stooped to pick it up and the cord decided it did not like being picked up and coiled to strike in a way that only snakes can.

On that mission, my bladder's storage capacity doubled by force for there was no way I was going to wake up and pee in the middle of the night. I was not venturing outdoors to use our 'shalanga' at any cost. The thought of a snake striking my rear was not one I ever wanted to experience. On the few occasions my bladder decided not to cooperate with my attempts to convert it to a GeePee tank, I would wake up Miriam my room mate to go with me. She was braver than me for I do not recall ever being woken up by her to escort her to the toilet. A doctor at a different mission post was bitten by a snake and was very ill for many days. So the danger was real and not imagined.

So this next adventure of mine happened in this snake ridden land. Unfortunately snakes were not the only danger that one needed to be wary of. On a tour of the compound, one of the structures we absolutely needed to be familiar with was a foxhole. The foxholes were not hastily built structures that concealed a man or two, ours were underground structures that could fit at least 15 persons reinforced with sand bags and concealed from the top with shrubbery. We were to run to the foxhole anytime we heard the sound of the antonov planes. These planes were not ordinary, they bore special presents that when deployed wreaked death and destruction where they fell. I am not an airplane expert so I cannot give you the exact specifications of this plane. All I know is that when I first got there, I could not recognize the sound of the antonov but by my last week there, I could hear it even if it was miles away.

The first time I jumped in the foxhole, I was in the middle of examining a patient. The gateman whose job it was to alert everyone to a sighted antonov had just banged his gong with such intensity that it sounded more like the final trumpet than two pieces of metal being clanged against each other. I forgot everything I was doing and ran for cover, my heart beat so loudly that I thought that I was going to pass out. Even after the antonov had passed and had not delivered its present, my knees shook and my every step was as if my legs had been turned to jelly. The first few times we ran for the foxhole, we were the object of mirth by the indigenes who swore they knew by the direction of flight where the antonov would drop its next load. I soon developed alarm fatigue like the indigenes, I began to behave like them in attitude but not in caution.

I would tidy up things when the alarm sounded and walk to the foxhole, because I knew it would take several minutes before it finally came. At some point, everyone started jumping in the foxholes but I'll get to that point later. On another occasion, we had all gone to bed and this time, the gateman's alarm was strangely silent. Remember the verse that says 'Unless the Lord watches a city, the watchman watches in vain'. That verse was representative of our night watch man who did not watch but snoozed through the night. We woke up when a terrible tremor rocked our building and we spent the night too scared to go back to bed. We knew that we had had a narrow miss when a few casualties from that's night attack trickled in to our facility.

You can probably tell that I did not sleep much here, from watching my every step and imagining snakes crawling into bed with me, to keeping an ear out for antonovs in the middle of the night I was a nervous wreck. One night, I woke up to scratching sounds near the window close to my bed. There was a hole in the glass probably caused by shrapnel from times past and I was convinced that there were snakes outside my window having a conference on how to get in. If you think hard enough, your thoughts can come true and in this case, they did. I saw some heavy duty creatures jump from the crack in the glass unto my mosquito net and land with a thud on the floor. My screams were so loud, I most have woken up the whole village. I ran out of the room with my roommate on my tail. Our logistician was tasked with looking for these creatures that I was sure were snakes. To cut a long story short, the creatures were rats. I was the butt of jokes for days to come. I had woken up patients and patients relatives in our ward who were amused by this 'ajebutter' who screamed just because rats landed on her in the middle of the night. My horror was that it was considered normal for creatures to land on you in the middle of the night and the expected reaction was to just pick them off you and go right back to bed.

So the day came when I was convinced death had come calling. I had spent the night pretty much listening for antonovs and imagining the most dangerous snakes attacking so I finally fell asleep when the sun came over the horizon and that was when the angel of death was released. Imagine lying down in bed, one minute asleep and the next standing straight up knowing that the end was nigh. That was what happened that day. I heard the sound of the antonov like I had never heard it before, many times, it was a distant roar, this time it was right outside my window. Like me, Miriam had jumped straight out of bed and she turned to me asking what to do. When you are confused, you do pretty stupid things, my only suggestion was to say we should lie down on the floor of our room. Just before we proceeded to lie down, we heard our names being called.

Our project coordinator and logistician had rushed to the fox hole and seeing we were not there jumped out and started screaming our names 'Tomi, Miriam, Tomi, Miriam, run, run, run'. They were shouting at us to leave our room and run to the foxhole. Their voices sounded like the voice of angels, for if they were shouting for us to run to the foxhole, we still had time to make it before the bombs hit. We ran like the wind and in our bid to get out of the room, we both got to the door at the same time, we were stuck as we both wanted to run out. (Who wants to die?) We finally got unstuck and proceeded to run like the devil was chasing us, it was not a long distance, but it felt like I was running a marathon, at one point I fell and landed heavily on my right knee. (The knee hurt a lot for a very long period after that and on long flights it would trouble me unless I stood up to stretch it out.) We made it into the foxhole just before the barrel bomb dropped.

The only part of that day I remember is being woken up by the sound of the antonov closer than I could ever remember hearing it and the jokes that came after Miriam and I recounted how we got stuck in the door. I do not remember the sound of the bomb dropping and I do not remember climbing out of the foxhole. We were later told that the bomb killed a child who had been left at home alone while his parents went to the farm. The house had been set on fire by the bombs and we could see the smoke from the hospital.

Living like this every day is the experience of many people around the world who live in war zones. At the end of my five month mission, I was pretty much beat and when tales of hospitals and other aid agencies being attacked hit the news with people being killed, it hits close to home. More than a year after I left that mission, the hospital was hit by barrel bombs and destroyed, many people were hurt but thankfully no one was killed. Many people live in war zones and face death daily, it is their reality, a difficult one but one they face with more courage than I'll ever have.

One thing I learned living there was being aware of death on a daily basis. You don't pray for it, but when winged messengers of death are sent your way daily, you have a a new awareness of just how fragile life is. This life is finite, it too shall pass, what is coming is eternal and what matters is how you prepare for it. I'll end with the words of Jesus, For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? - King James Version