And Then There Were FIVE!

Ta-da!  Baby Jos is now 6 months old!  The months since my last post have flown by in almost a blur – a busy, fun, stressful, joyful, painful, contented blur. 

Jos (full name: Josef) was born in Wisconsin on December 1, 2011.  The little sweetheart/stinker surprised us by being 3 weeks early (note to What to Expect: one’s water CAN break in the middle of the night while in bed) and by turning breech, which meant he was born via an unscheduled c-section without his father, who was stuck in Burundi with his brothers.  The biggest surprise, though, was that Jos was born with Down syndrome.  I wasn’t sure I was even going to share that in this blog since it feels at once so immensely personal and so superfluous.  It’s an important adjustment for our family, but not yet so important for him.  We love him just the same, and he coos and rolls and loves us back.

It’s hard to describe how heavy the shock of that news was so I’m not going to really try.  Not now, maybe in a different post.  We’re all immensely grateful that so far he doesn’t have any of the health issues that often accompany Down Syndrome, which is probably one reason it wasn’t noticed in any of my ultrasounds.  (They were done in Europe and the US, in case you’re wondering.)  He’s flourishing in Burundi, where he gets gobs of attention from his brothers, parents, friends, and our staff, who were over the moon with happiness when he came “home.”  Jan and I were especially touched that Roger, Francoise, Ignace, Christian and Adelin got together and surprised us with a bouquet of flowers and welcome banner for Jos.  Considering how hard it can sometimes be for them to pay school fees for all the kids they support, this went way beyond thoughtful.

"A new birth is a miracle.  It is a source of joy for his friends. - Ignace, Roger, Christian, Adelin, Francoise"

Welcome Home, Jos!  Sign made by our good friend Marieke.  

What's life like for Jos in Burundi?  

Well, for one, he loves the weather in Bujumbura – but who wouldn’t?  I get emails from home – “it’s so cold, we’re shoveling another foot of snow tonight” or “it’s so hot, they’re predicting over 100 degrees for three days this week” and meanwhile it stays a lovely 75 – 85 degrees here with very little humidity.  This must be the best climate ever - he never needs anything warmer than one layer and gets to nurse outside with the Congo mountains in the distance!  (Ok, he doesn't do that everyday - this was at an Easter Egg Hunt party...)

He has his own mosquito net, with his crib and nursing station under it.  It feels like our own private island and I love our conversations and cuddling under it.  (I also love all the reading I’ve managed to do during my hours in this tent – from The Hunger Games to the Economist.  I’m not going to say which I enjoyed more because that would be embarrassing.  Oh, wait.  I guess I just did…)

Brother Wim visiting Jos in his crib

Turns out that caring for a baby in Africa isn’t that different from caring for a baby elsewhere, except when it comes to really specific things like hiccups...

Burundian cure for the hiccups: lick a small piece of paper and put it on baby's forehead.  Yeah, it worked.

I think it's just adorable how Francoise carried him one day, but babies with Down Syndrome have very sensitive hips so she can't do this anymore and we're not using the Ergo for now (except for this one really fun walk with Papa, Bas and Wim in our neighborhood).

He likes hanging out with Bas and Wim and me on weekend mornings while we play games, like my new addiction: Blokus!

Reading with Wim is AWESOME.  

Especially on THE Wisconsin Blanket.

 All my boys love to hang on the couch.  It's fun until the big ones turn into cheetahs and start leaping around...

Being a FAMILY OF FIVE is great.  Yeah, it’s a bit hectic at times (imagine: one boy who desperately needs help folding a paper airplane, the other who needs to be wiped, and the third who urgently wants to nurse), but it’s mostly just sweeter than sweet.  Their little faces light up when the other ones smile, they genuinely like being together, and they don’t stop making us laugh (or roll our eyes, which usually also leads to laughing once everyone’s in bed). 

  

It’s all good.  Thank goodness.

Hunger on the Street (Journal: January 2011)

This is an excerpt from my January 2011 journal:

Lest my emails make it sound like Burundi is only fun and games (and good food and beaches) tonight’s email will bring us all back down to earth.  When I write about life here, I do not intentionally sugarcoat, just as I do not intentionally point out the hard, scary, bad things.  I figure that every place has things that make us nervous, bad situations, people who must make difficult choices, poverty.  Never once did it occur to me to tell people about the woman who lived (lives?) in the City Hall subway stop when they asked what it was like to live in NYC.  But a woman lived in the subway, near Pace University, and she slept on a cardboard box and did her business in a McDonald’s cup and I walked by her every time I went uptown on the 4/5/6. 

This afternoon my Dutch neighbor, Frederieke, and I went for a walk.  We’ve both been trying to exercise more and this is the third weekend that we got out for our power walk.  We only slightly modified our route today, heading down the mountain from the exclusive expat neighborhood of Kiriri into the equally exclusive next door neighborhood of Ruhero 1 for a lap at the public garden. 

Burundian’s are unique with their love of exercise, going to such extremes that each day of the week one of the government ministries (ministry of interior, health, security, finance, etc.) closes at 3pm so the employees can go exercise.  As of 3pm everyday, people are jogging, walking, doing calisthenics on the street.   Lots of people.  For a few hours at a time, exercise works like a great equalizer.  Young, old, fat, thin, rich, poor, expat, Burundian – everyone is working out.  A smile, a thumbs up, and we’re all in it together.

I really like my walks with Frederieke.  Sometimes we talk about fluffy stuff like the various merits of Edward and Jake from the Twilight series and sometimes we talk about serious stuff, like what more can be done to stop the ongoing rape of Burundian and Congolese women in the countryside.  Today our walk took us to the public garden for the first time.

The jardin publique is just that.  A public garden, cut from the same concept as Central Park, but much, much, much smaller.  There’s a small playground, basketball courts, fields for Frisbee football, a pavilion where I’m hoping to go for step aerobics, and a track that runs around the outer edge.  Today there was a private wedding, attended by a government minister, and therefore many extra armed police standing around the perimeter. 

We finished our lap, enjoying the normalcy of walking in a city park, and had just headed back out to the street when she fell.  Eva? Francoise?  Euginie?  I don’t know her name but I saw her collapse on the street about 100 yards from where we walked.  My first reaction was puzzlement.  Did that woman really just fall down?  Why did she fall in the middle of the street?  Why is the security agent across the street from her not doing anything?  Frederieke and I hurried toward her, looking around to see who else had seen what had happened.  When I saw the little foot hanging from the side of her body, I broke into a run. 

A woman carrying a baby on her back had collapsed in the middle of the road about 200 yards from the entrance to the public garden.  She fell on her back, pinning the baby to the pavement.  When we reached her, I thought she was dead.  Her eyes and her mouth were wide open, unmoving, and she didn’t respond when we grabbed her arms and pulled her upright.  The baby was moving but did not make a sound.  We screamed for help as one passerby helped us pull her off the road.  Not knowing what to do in case of an emergency in Burundi, Frederieke stayed with her while I ran to find the police.

I stopped 2 passersby on the road, Burundians who had also come to exercise, explaining as quickly as I could what had happened and asking what we should do.  At one point I remember saying, “I’m a foreigner here.  What should we do in this type of situation?  Where do we get help?”  No one had a response.  The police wouldn’t leave their “posts,” where they hung out in a circle chatting.  By the time I got back to the woman, Frederieke had the baby in her arms and the woman was propped up by a tree, alive.  A group of onlookers had gathered, a gawker’s traffic jam as it may be called at home. 

I don’t know what we would have done if my friend Jasmin hadn’t pulled up in her car shortly thereafter.  Jasmin is Belgian and married to Boscoe, a Burundian.  They have two daughters the same ages as our boys and just moved to Burundi from Belgian so he could invest in his country.  The crowd that had gathered told us that the woman was hungry and Jasmin had several muffins in a box, which we fed her.  For the first time, I saw her child move to take the muffin away from his mother to feed himself. 

Collapsing from hunger is perhaps not as uncommon as we’d expect in the world.  What is shocking is to see it happen in front of you and to realize that NO ONE knows what should be done to help.  Until Boscoe arrived, no Burundian had made even any indication that he/she would take responsibility to find help.  There is absolutely no safety net at all in Burundi.  No 911 to call.  There are hospitals, but no ambulances and no treatment without money.  There’s no social security, no homeless shelters, no safe houses for women and children.  Even if the police would have reacted, they don’t have a protocol to follow, don’t know any first aid.  Besides driving her to a hospital, where she would be refused without payment, there isn’t anything they would or could have done.  Burundi has roads and restaurants and shops and people who exercise, but when a vulnerable woman collapses with her child due to hunger, there’s no net to catch her. 

Eventually she told us (in Kirundi) where she lives and Boscoe said he would give her a ride home and money for groceries.  Frederieke and I walked home, half stunned and half mad at it all.  How could this happen?  Why is it like this?  When will it change?  What will happen to that little boy?  Later I heard that she had fallen over again in the car so they took her to the hospital anyway.  The doctor said she had collapsed from hunger, not having eaten for over a day and with too much physical exertion.  While at the hospital, a nurse told Boscoe that it’s not a good idea for him to drive her home.  The neighborhood is too rough to take a car after dark and he could expect problems from her family and neighbors, who may accuse him of having harmed her.  Not wanting to get dragged into a situation he didn’t understand, he brought her to the bus stop, made sure she knew where she was headed and gave her money. 

And I sat on my couch and wrote about it on my MacBook Pro.  What chance does she, does her child have for a healthy life?  Could it have been an act?  A desperate step taken when she saw two white Mzungus walking toward her?  What could possibly be worse than intentionally falling to the ground, on top of your child, with the hopes that two strangers would be wiling to help?  No one with other options would do that.  No matter how I examine it, I am unsatisfied.  How quaint.  I’m unsatisfied and there’s a starving mother in Kanyosha trying to feed herself and her baby.