Kittens and Twins

This is the Maternity of the CSCOM (Centre de Santé Communautaire) where I work. There is an identical building acroos from it (where I took the picture from) about 50 feet away.
My homologue, Salimata, washes clothes at the well next to the Maternity.
This is what the kitty thought about not being allowed on my bed.
This is what she thought about not being allowed in my bedroom.
And this is what she thought about not being allowed on the counter!

I got a kitten! Here’s how it happened. One night last week I was sleeping very soundly, when I was suddenly awakened by a loud scratching sound directly under my head. I jumped out of bed and grabbed my headlamp to inspect. I saw nothing on the bed or on my pillow. Then a lifted the mattress and saw – a rodent. And it looked bigger than a mouse. I shrieked and dropped the mattress before I could look at it more closely. I have a traditional cotton mattress, and I was immediately convinced that there must be a nest of rats in the mattress itself. I was sleepy but nothing in the world coul dhave convinced me to get back in that bed. It was the middle of the night, so I didn’t want to wake anyone up to borrow a mattress or sleep at their house. After a few moments of reflection, I grabbed my sheet and blanket (it’s cold at night now!) and slept on a straw mat on my porch.

The next day I was too afraid to disturb the presumed rat’s nest, but luckily my language tutor, Lassina, was kind enough to come look into the situation. We found – nothing. He said it definitely couldn’t have been a rat because there were no holes in the house (we looked carefully), so if anything, it was a mouse. However, I think he privately believes it was actually nothing and I just freaked myself out. I know I saw a rodent, so I said I wanted a cat. And two days later, he showed up at my house with a kitten!

She’s adorable (he says it’s a she but I kind of hope he turns out to be wrong because I probably won’t be able to get her spayed here), but also quite the pain in the butt. When I get up in the morning, she keeps climbing on my feet and nibbling my toes while I fling her off with increasing force. After I was concerned she wasn’t eating, I obtained actual cow milk yesterday which she only drank a tiny bit of. I left milk (from powder) with some oatmeal in it for her yesterday morning, and came home to find that she hadn’t touched that but had ripped open the bag of powdered milk on the counter, and a bag of flour for good measure. When I plucked her off the counter (and by counter I mean high table that I use as a counter) and deposited her in front of the oatmeal, she finally ate some.

If I shut her out of my bedroom (since she’s too small to kill rodents yet, plus wants to play when I want to sleep, plus likes my mosquito net to sharpen her claws on), she climbs up the screen door and can’t get down, and mews pitifully till I rescue her. Luckily she’s cute. In fact, I feel really bad about leaving her to be in Sikasso, but Lassina is looking in on her for me.

On a much soberer note, two weeks ago I went to the baptism of twins. The mother was the woman at one of the two shops right near my house, owned by Bozos (ethnic minority from the Mopti region). I hang out with them quite a bit. Anyway, she had given birth at home and I was dismayed when I saw them – it was a boy and a girl. The girl was too small, but the boy was frighteningly so. On both of them you could see a diamond shaped indentation on the top of their heads where their skull hadn’t closed yet. But the girl looked healthy by comparison. I was there with Salimata (my homologue) and when we left, I asked her if she thought the boy could live. She said yes.

But about a week later, I was leaving my house in the morning and encountered a group of women leaving that house – they told me that the baby had died, and they had just been there giving their blessings (when someone dies here the family sits in a house for the following day and everyone comes and says blessings and sits with them for a few minutes). I went to do the same.

On Saturday night another set of twins was born, this time at the CSCOM. They are my djatigi’s grandchildren (or great-grandchildren, or related to him, I’m not a hundred percent sure of the exact relationship). Yesterday Salimata and I went to go visit them, because she said one of them (two girls) was too small. On our way over there, a man flagged us down to come into the Bozo woman’s house. The other twin, the girl, is now sick. Without the boy as a comparison, she looked very sickly to me, and her stomach is horribly swollen, which is what the problem was. The woman had gone to the CSCOM and the doctor gave her some medication, but she was concerned because the baby wasn’t better yet.

There wasn’t really anything for us to do. Salimata specified some further instructions about preparing the medication (this is a huge problem here – many of the medications for children are “oral suspensions,” which means that it is a bottle of powder and the woman has to mix water with it – and water here is like poison for babies if you don’t take extreme precautions in treating it). When we saw the other twins however, they were both fine. One was a little small, but seemed to be doing ok, and Salimata said it was much better now.

This really brings home how risky it is to have twins when more intense medical interventions aren't a possibility. The other set of twins that I saw at a baby weighing were severely malnourished -- they were a year old and still only drinking breast milk, which would be a problem for one baby but for two led to disaster. We talked to the mother about what she should give them, and she seemed extremely concerned and eager to improve their health. She even made the 8 km trek from her village to our CSCOM to show us some ingredients for their porridge. I hope that the next time we go to her village, we will find that they are doing better.