Back home

I’m back home now, back to normality, back to routine. But my heart is in Africa. I think about it all the time. I mostly think about the people I met. The women with AIDS. Those women in Uru. With nothing. No health care. No husband. No money. No food. Polluted water. 75% infant mortality rate. Dead babies. Goodluck’s mother haunts me, I see her face, her huge eyes welled up with silent tears as she looks at her 5-month-old baby. Her skeletal body covered in colourful clothes. I can’t and don’t want to imagine the desperation of looking at your beautiful child and knowing you will not be there to care for him. I don’t want to imagine the pain, sorrow and worry about the baby, who in all likelihood has ‘that disease’ too. I think about the young lawyer who came with her mother and sister. She looks just like a friend of mine in Finland, only one is blonde and one is black. Her mother got infected while giving birth to the sister; caesarian, loss of blood, she was given a blood transfusion; no sex, but still AIDS. The sister is now 21 and the ARVs have stopped working and she is loosing weight fast. Her CD4 is down to 39. But she’s a fighter and an optimist. She is not giving up. Her teeth are your classic Syphilinum teeth, pointed and crumbling. Jeremy gives her Fl-ac based on her buoyancy and aggravation from heat. Great prescription, wouldn’t have thought of it myself… After the mother’s case the lawyer sister stays; she’s been interpreting, and starts to cry silently. She’s just sitting there crying. I start to cry too, so we quickly get into her headaches. In my essence I’m already there. I tell the kids we’re going. Ikey, our 10-year-old is very excited. He watches our promotional DVD (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pExI8B9dJ7M) and at the end, where I say ‘we need your help’, Ike cries ‘I WILL HELP YOU! I will bake cookies for the market and make money, teach me homoeopathy mummy and I will come and give remedies’. He sees the photos. He sees Goodluck and asks if his mother is going to die. I say I don’t know. He says if yes, we will adopt him. My feelings exactly. 14 million children in Africa without parents. 14 million worse off than Goodluck. We need to rent our house out, pack up, but what to bring to Africa? Just clothes, a few toys and books? Or start shipping stuff? Should I sell my car? But what if the project runs out of money and we come back in a month… then we have no house, no car… These thoughts roll in my head all the time, day and night. In the meantime I’m trying to fundraise and get a new web site up and running, design a logo… all on zero budget but with the help of a lot of friends. People ask me ‘How was Africa’. In the beginning I tried to answer, but now I just say ‘We are moving’.