Under the Milky Way

I am lucky: I have never before seen someone's life leave their body. That changed today. When I arrived at the clinic around mid morning, something seemed off. I didn't see any of the staff except our registrar who was busily registering our day's patients. I walked down the hallway of doors, peeking inside each one. When I reached the in-patient room, I saw three of our staff inside. They were crowding around a 10-month old girl child who was laying naked on the bed, her chest heaving up and down with labored breath. I asked what was happening. “She's dehydrated,” they told me. I stood in front of the bed, my coffee thermos in hand and still sweating from the walk down to the clinic from my house, trying to make sense of my surroundings. An array of needles in their packages were splayed across the table, and I overhead our CM (certified midwife) saying the baby was so fat that they couldn't find a vein. This was true; she was covere...

“Aaaa Amuchee, you gettin' fat oooo” my counterpart called to me as I walked up to her porch. “Tank you.....” I responded while smiling, pausing to pose, and laughing to myself. I get comments like this alllllll the time in Liberia. And I got comments like this all the time in Malawi too. When you live in a developing country where having enough food is a luxury, being 'fat' is a good thing. I remember learning about this same phenomenon in 9 th grade history class: that people judged your socioeconomic status based on your stature. Pleasantly plump people with extra meat on their bones were assumed to be rich and thin, feeble looking people were thought to be poor or struggling. At the time when I learned this, I thought this to be such a strange way of thinking. Then I lived in Malawi for two years, where at least 11% of the population in my district was living with HIV/AIDS. Over time, I began to view people through this same lens- naturally assuming that...