The Pain of Childbirth, Lost and Found

Marceline with her new baby Jaquin Darvarcy

This is Rebecca writing this week. Our cook Marceline has been expecting her first baby and she actually began her maternity leave in the beginning of April. Last Saturday night, she got very worried; the baby had stopped moving. She went into the private clinic where she had been receiving check ups.  The baby seemed OK, but they tried for 24 hours to induce labor. By Monday morning, they were ready to do a C-section. Surprise, surprise: this was Clinique Cesar.

I wasn’t able to be there because I was scheduled to drive up to Gitega on Monday morning. But I called when I got to Gitega and was so relieved to find that Marceline had given birth to a healthy baby boy. I have known of at least 4 women who have died in childbirth, including women of means. I know we’ve said it before, but having a baby in Burundi is nerve-wracking and dangerous, not a prospect filled with pure joy.

I had a good 24-hour visit with our two volunteers in Gitega, Sata and Melody. It was also time to sign new MOU’s for our projects this year. And there were some project issues to discuss with each of our 3 partners. So it was one of those packed visits going late into the night, and starting again at dawn.

I actually even enjoyed the drive up and back, from the perspective of having some alone time to listen to music and marvel at the beauty of Burundi at the end of the rainy season. However, it was awful to see the way the road has deteriorated this season. Part of that was due to the catastrophic flood near Bujumbura in February.  But further up the mountain, erosion is causing the road to subside in many places, and even washing away the dirt and rock support from under the road itself, so that it’s as if there’s just a bit of asphalt hanging out over an open drop. Burundi will need to recruit some very talented and honest engineers to fix that all-important road, as soon as things can move beyond the politics of power.

I finished in Gitega early enough to get back to Buja by mid-afternoon and so I went directly to visit Marceline. I was shocked to find her in so much pain that she could hardly speak. The baby was apparently not doing very well, on antibiotics and not nursing yet. We talked through the issues, and it seemed like there were some GI issues that take time to get resolved after a C-section. That’s normal and uncomfortable. But Marceline kept insisting that she felt like she was not simply bloated, but full of wounds. I started imagining all kinds of bad scenarios.

Proud father, David

I went to speak to the doctor personally, because I realize that having a Mzungu advocate can really improve patient care in this country. And I was paying for Marceline to have her baby at this private clinic because I couldn’t stand the thought of either of them losing their lives due to the all-too-common kinds of malpractice one finds here. The doctor was jolly and reassuring: She’s fine. She’s normal. I’ll take good care of her. I was doubtful, but went back to her room and prayed with her and her husband and the three other women hanging out with them.

I went back home to rejoin my family and on the way back, I went over the situation in Marceline’s room. Suddenly, it occurred to me: when I delivered my first son by C-section, I had morphine on demand for the first day and I still felt horrible. That certainly doesn’t exist in Burundi. But that wasn’t all. Marceline had no Percocet. No ibuprofen. Not even Tylenol. She felt like she was full of wounds because she WAS full of wounds, with no pain management whatsoever.

I found my David sick when I got home, so I couldn’t go back to the clinic in person for the next two days, but I tried to keep track of things by phone. Marceline was better in the evening after I left. But the doctors refused to prescribe pain medication until I finally insisted on it when helping to get her discharged on Friday. I was relieved to see the baby nursing before I paid the bill, but Marceline was still hardly able to walk across the room. It was a nice suite, with a salon and a bedroom with an extra bed for a helper (yes, you bring your sheets, towels and your own nurse), but the absence of pain killers (which is apparently typical in Burundian health care) made the experience really awful.

Yoga brunch with lots of MCCers

We had a fairly relaxing day on Saturday, with a big crowd at yoga in the morning. Then we took the kids to Pinnacle 19 in the afternoon to play with Avril the chimp. We adults spent time with one of our volunteers, Patrick, and his visiting father. But it was a super-windy day on the beach and the water was full of debris. So David and I elected to swim in the little pool there. It was fun to play together, and I’m glad I have a kid who loves to swim so much and take my mind off of the many constant stresses I’m dealing with these days.

Sunday morning was special, but not simply because of Mothers’ Day. (My impatient kids had to give me their gifts straight after school on Friday, so you could say we celebrated early.) Paul was preaching, and I was teaching Sunday school, so that added a dynamic to the morning already. 

early mother's day gifts

Also, our home bible study was sending off one of our members to a new job in South Sudan, so we wanted to seize the opportunity to share our experience with the congregation before he left. Really, it’s been an incredibly stabilizing and encouraging thing to meet with our international Anglophone group every Sunday afternoon. Our discussions on the bible are so helpful, especially because many members bring an African cultural perspective that is similar to the Hebrew perspective. But it’s the constancy in prayer that I’ve appreciated most. And we’ve seen some really amazing answers to prayer in the past two years. Yes, we are still waiting for answers to a lot of things, even now. But we’ve had a precious experience and we wanted to encourage other people in the church to be part of home cells, too. We even sang a few songs that we often sing together in our living room, including that oldie but goodie, “We are one in the Spirit.”

Paul, preaching for Mothers' Day
(sorry no synopsis, but I was with kids!)

Later in the service, when I went forward with David for the children’s prayer, I had a thrill of surprise: there was my bible in its velvet case, sitting on the shelf of the podium! I had lost track of my bible two weeks ago while in church. I asked the pastor about it last week, but it hadn’t turned up in the lost and found. I had to resign myself that someone probably had stolen it while I went to take the kids to Sunday school. Things like that happen in the context of poverty. But here it was! Returned to me! I was so happy and practically skipped down to the room where I was teaching Sunday school.

Where I stopped dead. My backpack was gone. Containing our Bluetooth speaker. And all the crafts and books for Sunday school for that week. My heart sank. I asked the other teacher, Lizzie, to look after my class while I tried to find the church guard. He didn’t know what had happened, but went to look for the other guard. I returned to our Sunday school, and when the singing was over, I told the kids that my backpack was gone. I asked one kid to pray about it, and just as she opened her mouth to pray, in comes the guard with a smile on his face! My bag had been moved for safekeeping apparently.

Mother's Day with mommy

I told my class this whole story, and one of the kids said, what are you going to lose next? Your glasses? Your earrings? Oren? I said, let’s not go there!

After church, we drove through town to drop off two church friends. As we were stopped to let them off, Oren suddenly yelled, “Hey, that guy took the iPod!” Sure enough, Paul had noticed a suspicious young man walking close to the car and had locked the doors, but didn’t realize that Oren’s window was down. He had been listening to an audiobook, and the iPod was snatched right out of his hands. Then the guy took off running around the corner.

After some moments of fury and impotent anger, Paul chased after him on foot and I took the wheel and tried to drive around the block to find the guy. We stopped to talk to a group of ne’er-do-wells ensconced nearby (clearly a gang of thieves). Yes, they saw the kid running away, they knew who he was. We promised a reward if they returned the iPod.

Next we went to the Bata store, where “vendors” lurk outside, happy to sell you cheap (stolen) electronics. Again, we contacted the guy in charge (chef des voleurs) and promised a reward. All these guys wanted an advance payment of 10,000 Francs for transport and communications to find the iPod. We laughed and said, it was an investment. If they found the iPod, they’d get money. Well, we did give the one guy 500 Francs. And then there was nothing else to do, so we went home and changed all our passwords. Argh.

One of the friends who had been with us is the daughter of a Burundian woman in our bible study. She’d contacted her mother right away, and it turns out that the mother had come into town and reported the theft to the police. By the time she came to bible study, the police had arrested two of the young men loitering near the theft area, the same guys we’d talked to. We were really uncomfortable with this – often the police just beat gangsters until they will give the name and address of their compatriots. But Goretti said it would be difficult to simply release these accomplices. We said, tell them to be gentle. By the end of bible study, these police had also detained the man who had taken 500 francs from us.  They certainly were skilled in following our tracks.

In the morning there was no new news. But at 3:30 in the afternoon, Goretti called to say that the iPod had been found. We should come to the station to pick it up. And here is where it really gets weird. We met in town and walked through the crowded, chaotic streets around the remains of the burned central market. Right up to the front gate. Shook hands with the cluster of uniformed police, who exuded a mixture of curiosity, hostility and lewdness. Went on through the barrier, right to this triangular bit of the market that sticks out in the front, part that wasn’t burned. There were a couple of guys milling around, in t-shirts and old track pants, mostly. They looked for all the world just like the chief of thieves right across the street at Bata.

We were apparently waiting for one of these guys. It was stinking hot. The air was filled with this odd, fermented smell which I finally realized was more related to the burned market debris still lying around, than to any beer-drinking which had been done by the guys who were chatting with us. No, apparently, the whole “team” had been working since dawn on my case, and hadn’t stopped to eat or drink all day. Finally we followed the guy in charge into a tiny room inside the apparent police station. The rough wooden door had to be held shut with a broken metal chair. The chief (still in t-shirt and track pants) explained to Goretti how they had pursued the case, from the thief to the vendor to the man who had purchased the iPod this morning. His assistant picked shreds of molten debris off of the slatted glass windows, facing right into the destroyed market behind. Really, if I had wanted to design a movie set of an extremely shady deal going down, I couldn’t have dreamed up anything this good.

Finally, for dramatic effect, the chief unzipped his pants pocket and pulled out…our very own iPod. I couldn’t believe it. In that sense, these guys were good at their job. There was a certain amount of haggling over how much “encouragement” this team of plainclothes police officers needed to cover the costs they had incurred in taking on our case. Really, looking around me, I was sure that there was no budget for phone calls or taxis, let alone a working chair (or door) in an office of the central market police station. The chief said he was a Christian and so he wouldn’t ask for more than was needed. So I ended up handing over to the police the exact sum I had promised as a reward to the chief of thieves across the street.  And walked away wondering to what extent they are really two sides of the same coin. But also elated to have our very personalized little piece of equipment back.

Bujumbura expat friends, if you get something stolen, you could certainly try to report it to the police at that market station. If you can find the place. If you can figure out which of the shifty guys in plainclothes is really in charge. And really able, not only to find your stolen goods, but to return them to you, rather than keeping them for profit. I am certain that a personal home-village link had a lot to do with the excellent service we received from the police. So it’s probably not worth wasting your time unless you have a really good, generous friend like my friend Goretti to lead you through.

Paul will be in Kigali all week, introducing yet another team from MCC to the complexities of the Great Lakes region. I'm here with the kids, trying to hold down the fort til Saturday. Hopefully, Paul will have all the interesting experiences for writing the blog next week!

Bonus photos: Oren with Boa at zoo

No photos of those snakes mentioned  above,
must make do with the much more enjoyable
snakes of musee vivante