fierce attachments

a mother-daughter blog about the fierce attachments in our lives… title inspired by Vivian Gornick's wonderful memoir
September 25, 2012

what do I have in common with Julia Roberts? how being a dog owner is like being a celebrity

by nikki meredith

I have never been, nor will I ever be, a celebrity — not even for Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes.  But I maintain that having a dog shares some of the features of celebrityhood and if you walk around with two dogs, you’re on your way to being a super celebrity.

When our dog Alice was a puppy, I was astonished by how many people stopped to ask about her. And it wasn’t only people I encountered on the sidewalk or the hiking trail. People in cars would pull over, roll down their windows and shout out questions. Some actually parked and got out of their cars to ask about her.  Well, I thought, everyone loves a puppy. Read the rest of this entry »

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September 2, 2012

refugee camp outbreak: a father, his sick daughter and the tiniest baby

by caitlin meredith

jamal’s baby granddaughter

Jamal  is the Blue Nile grampa I never had. He is a slight figure, even in his size 42 gumboots. He wears an Islamic cap and always comes early to work, perching on a chair to my right. While there are many younger men on my team, none compete with Jamal’s vigilance. Most mornings at the outreach worker meeting he pulls me aside at the end to tell me of people he’s concerned about from the village he visited the previous day. One day he told me about a man who was killing many goats in the village of Ayouk, scaring the other refugees. Last week he brought out a tiny scrap of paper with his Arabic-scripted note: there was a sick woman in Soda Amol who hadn’t been able to walk because of swollen legs for two days. He wanted me to go find her because thought she should come to the hospital. He was right – she needed urgent care. Read the rest of this entry »

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August 26, 2012

shitty in pink, part two: lots of refugee ladies, no ladies’ rooms

by caitlin meredith

the ladies’ room in a new refugee camp

Easy enough for me to tell my latrine sob story, but let me give an even stronger piece of advice: really, really try to avoid being a refugee in a newly created camp that only has trench latrines. As an aid worker I’m supposed to encourage all refugees to use only the designated camp latrines. Getting, and keeping, human shit away from food and clean water is about as central a public health intervention as you can get.  If you can do nothing else for a bunch of displaced people living in the middle of nowhere, establish a shitting field and make sure the community leaders enforce it. As a human being, and fellow lady to many of them, however, it’s pretty hard to push the trench. Read the rest of this entry »

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August 22, 2012

the path not taken: a mother and her aid worker daughter

by nikki meredith

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, 

And sorry I could not travel both…

 Robert Frost

“Mom, please tell me….if it’s going to be too hard on you, I won’t go.”

Caitlin and I were sitting outside at Emporio Rulli, our neighborhood Italian Bakery drinking tea on a shimmering fall day. She was scheduled to leave soon for Darfur where she’d be working as an epidemiologist with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). The news from the region was dreadful.  In a pitched battled against settled farmers, an armed militia group known as the Janjaweed were on a rampage, burning down villages, killing men, raping women. Children were starving.  The year she was scheduled to go, the fighting had reached a peak and the conflict was then considered one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world.  I got a knot in my gut every time I thought of her embarking on that particular journey but there was more to the story. Read the rest of this entry »

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August 18, 2012

shitty in pink: lady aid worker conquers night time latrine visits

by caitlin meredith

My feet but NOT my pink Crocs!!! Borrowed from a friend!

I have one key piece of advice for female aid workers on their way to Africa: once you get there, get a potty. This might even be more important than my earlier advice about underwear. Displaying your undies  in full view of your boss only happens once a week – the potty issue comes up every night.

Nighttime elimination first became an issue when I worked in Darfur. Read the rest of this entry »

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August 12, 2012

four days of mamas and babies: photos of blanket feeding distribution in south sudan

by caitlin meredith

beautiful mama with her hungry baby

In my first semester of public health school I took a course on refugee health. One of the nutritional programs my instructor talked about was “blanket feeding.” Every time she said the word “blanket” I imagined a huge Iowa-sized quilt descending on a refugee camp in the night, stretching to cover each tent. This week, more than ten years later, I finally saw one in action.

There are feeding programs for kiddos in many (but not all) of our emergency medical programs. Most of the time they are targeted to malnourished children only; the rest of the kids rely on general food distributions done by the World Food Program (WFP.) Once in a while WFP can also offer blanket feeding, which is like a general distribution but only for kids in a specific age range (usually under five years old.) We don’t usually do them since food distribution is a specialty in and of itself, but we stepped in this time since no one else could do it. Read the rest of this entry »

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August 6, 2012

love triangle in south sudan

by caitlin meredith

Timoty belongs to the Maban tribe. When he was 15 one of his lower teeth was removed, as is the custom for teenaged boys in that community. He is not part of the love triangle.

Both of my translators were an hour late for my morning meeting with the 40 outreach workers. When Timoty and Anur  arrived – after I’d been desperately (and unsuccessfully) pantomiming a short message about which teams needed to fill out new HR forms for the past 45 minutes – I asked them where they had been. Anur explained that their friend had become sick in the night and they had to bring him to the traditional healer.  Had they gone to the hospital first? No.

This was more than a little defeating for a couple of reasons. The first, of course, was that I had lost an hour of my meeting. The second was that a large part of the training on Saturday was about how to convince the refugees to come use our health services before going to the traditional healers. We were all on board: Sick people should come to the hospital. Yes!

But that was Saturday. Read the rest of this entry »

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August 5, 2012

first days in jamam refugee camp, south sudan: a photo essay

by caitlin meredith

MSF plane that flew us from Juba, landed on Adan air strip

my tent is the third on the right – every morning I expect a bugle boy wake up but none so far

Stefanos, the Nigerian feeding center nurse in the forefront. Prominently displayed compound clothesline in background. Don’t look for my knickers. Haven’t tackled that project yet. 45 people, 2 “shower” cubicles, just to the right of the clotheslines. Make it quick. Read the rest of this entry »

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July 29, 2012

aid worker underwear

by caitlin meredith

underwear on washing line via jospaul.co.uk

I’m at it again. Packing. This time it’s for a one-month stint in South Sudan. The conditions will be tough, I’ve been warned. Shared sleeping tents, limited electricity, knee-deep mud, two latrines for forty people. I’ve already gotten much advice from the hardened colleagues already there: Bring vitamins, Ruby shared, because fruits and vegetables are thin on the ground. A good torch is extra necessary to navigate the snakes and scorpions in the night, Matt advised. And don’t forget the rain gear – have I heard that August is the height of the rainy season?

All of these tips are well-received. Ziploc bags full of my REI headlamp, Pepto Bismol, AA batteries, malaria pills, multivitamins and spare umbrella are piled atop my “go bag.” Unfortunately I’m still hung up on the most basic of provisions. Which underwear am I going to bring? Read the rest of this entry »

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July 23, 2012

was nora ephron right? does getting older suck?

by nikki meredith

In the last essay in her book “I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman,” the late Nora Ephron expressed unhappiness about being older.  The tone, which borders on the desolate, is quite different than the lightness of the other essays in the book.   ‘The honest truth is that it’s sad to be over 60,” she wrote. I assumed the despondency was due to the recent death of one of her closest friends. Now I wonder if perhaps she had already gotten her own bad diagnosis.  In any case, when I read, ”Why do people say it’s better to be older than to be younger? It’s not better.” I wanted to shout. “You’re wrong, Nora. There are many things about being older that are better.” Read the rest of this entry »

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