Dragonfly Photography

The Orphanage

The  orphanage must be the happiest place here. I know that sounds funny, but the babies there are happy, drooling infants that just want to be loved. They live here from newborn to one year. If the mother dies during delivery, the baby is considered unclean for a year and can not go home. This sounds unbelievable for us westerners but unfortunately this is the tradition/belief here. So this morning I was summoned out of my room by one of the other visitors and taken to feed and hold some babies. And it works. To get a smile from a child does wonders for the soul. One of the babies there will pose for you the moment she sees a camera. She is a little bit older than a year and still here because her family can not be located. Her name is Lucy and she is the cutest thing you will see. The orphanage used to be located in the hospital until not too long ago, when they restored an old house on the hospital compound and moved the babies away from the maternity ward. It looks like a nursery that could easily be somewhere at home. Bright colors, pictures on the wall. A bouncy seat or two in the corner. A baby crying somewhere and a baby being fed somewhere. The beds are bunk beds and look like little boxes with a screen in front of it, which is the mosquito net. There is a set of twin girls that sleep in the same ‘box’, they are almost three months old. I held one of them for a long time, she gave me one of those half smiles and finally fell asleep in my arms.

So I am doing somewhat better now. I had a long talk with one of the Norwegian researchers who is an anesthesiologist in an ICU in Norway. She told me that all these emotions are normal, that you walk into a situation where you do not know what the rules are and what the tradition is. And also, all by myself. She told me that I did the best I could do under these circumstances and that this situation (Tanzania, Africa, third world countries in general) is not my fault. That I did what I could with the equipment I had. I think sometimes we think we do good by donating equipment but not realizing that this may make it more difficult in the end. Because if we would not have had one of those anesthesia bags to give this baby CPAP he would not have survived the delivery. Now he lived for 24 hours, but not the best life you would wish for a newborn. So it makes you think a lot about what would benefit the hospital and the people it takes care of.

I still feel that we did too much for this baby and that we prolonged his suffering. And that goes against everything I believe in.

So meet Lucy…..