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"Teach me how to greet people in Efik," said Cecily, "so we can get into their houses."
Soon Cecily had all the Americans practicing the phrases. "Ndi owo ku ufok?" Is anybody home? And then: "Mme ono usobo edi-oh!" Medical workers are here!
Soon the university people—who were quickly christened "the varsity team"—were masked and gloved and taking full part among the caregivers out in the city.
Naturally, many sick people came to the university, but interpreters just outside the campus entrances explained to them that if they had any family to help, they should stay home and administer the medicine and plenty of water. If they truly had no one to help take care of them, then they were taken in to the university teaching hospital, whose staff had come back to duty now that there was actually something useful for them to do. The danger was that they would be overloaded, but most people understood how enormous the epidemic would be, and believed readily that the hospital offered no advantages over their own homes.
So Cecily spent her days out in the city, like any of the other caregivers. She refused to be turned into an administrator. She left the clerical and sorting tasks to those who seemed reluctant to deal with the sick and poor—and she refused to let anyone criticize them as slackers, at least in her presence. "We came here to do what we can. Everyone's a volunteer, and every job needs to be done." And if that didn't silence the complaints, she'd quote: "And the eye cannot say to the hand: I need not thy help; nor again the head to the feet: I have no need of you." Let them argue with Saint Paul if they wanted to find fault.
At night, she would return to the university and look for Mark and Chinma. She had expected that Mark would go out into the city with her, but that changed on that first night when she realized that Cole was sick and the whole base had been exposed. "You'll stay here and take care of the soldiers," she told Mark. At first he protested that he had come to help Nigerians, but she replied that he had come to help the sick, and the American soldiers would need him as much as the Nigerians. He spoke their language, he even knew some of them personally. They would be happier with him helping take care of them.
She did not say, though she knew he understood: It's safer here, surrounded by America's finest soldiers. Nobody will try to hurt you because they happen to hate Americans.
Soon she learned that there was no particular anti-Americanism among the people. Even those who believed that the disease was part of an American plot tended to blame the government—some of the very same people would announce their intention to get a visa and move to America someday. It was as if they held the wicked rumors in one part of their minds, and the image of America as a place of freedom and safety and prosperity in another. As she wrote in an email to Aunt Margaret: "The rumor mind and the television mind, and never the twain shall meet."
What she could not get the local people to stop doing was calling her "Obufa Mma Slessor." She would introduce herself but they would nod and instead of trying to say "Cecily Malich," they would say "Obufa Slessor" or "Mma Slessor."
"What does this mean, this 'Slessor'?" Cecily asked her interpreter of the day.
In reply, the young man—a medical student when the university was running—took her to a large statue near the entrance of the university. It was of a European woman hugging a pair of African twins. "Mary Slessor," the interpreter explained. "A hundred years ago she came here and made everybody stop killing twins."
"Killing twins?" The concept baffled her.
"They believed it was a bad witch mother who had two babies at once," said the interpreter. "Or a curse on the family. They killed the babies and the mother. Very bad thing, and Mary Slessor made them stop. So: This statue is her with the twins she saved."
"Why do they call me that?"
"Be happy for it, Mrs. Malich," said the interpreter. "They see you as a white woman coming to save them, so they call you 'Obufa Mma Slessor,' the New Mrs. Slessor. Because of that name, everyone treats you and your people with respect and you are safe in the city."
That was reason en
ough to let them keep using the name—though she made it a point to introduce herself as Mma Malich once she actually got in the door.
As for Chinma, Cecily quickly learned he was little help as an interpreter. He spoke only a little English, but he spoke Efik not at all—he had lived in a part of Nigeria where Yoruba was the dominant language, Hausa and Ibo were often spoken, and no one ever used Efik. So Chinma was more useful—and safer—working side by side with Mark in the soldiers' quarters. It would help Chinma improve his English, and since he was immune to the disease, he didn't need to wear the mask, though Cecily still insisted on gloves when handling the patients, because there were other diseases that could be spread by the constant exposure to fecal matter.
For when it came to actual care of patients, rather than passing out meds and instructional leaflets, there was no escaping the feces. As they moved through the city, everyone knew that it was the door where no one answered their knock that they were most urgently needed. Families tended to catch the disease in quick succession, since infected people would come home and live normally for several highly contagious days before the first symptoms appeared.
So it happened often—more and more, as time passed—that when they went into the house where no one answered their knock at the door, or hand-claps outside it, or their calls in English and in their memorized Erik phrases, that inside they would find the entire family desperately ill. The healthiest would be groaning in the agony of acute constipation and painful coughing and sneezing; the weakest would have little energy left to groan, for they were covered in the filth of their own dysentery and coping with high fever, dehydration, and agonizing headache.
Into these houses Cecily and her companion—a different person every day—would go, and instead of just handing out meds, they would first take water to everyone and help them drink. Then would come the medications, usually capsules and tablets, but liquids for the children and those too weak to swallow a pill.
And then, finally, would come the cleanup. Bottled water was too precious to use for this, so they would have to use whatever water was available in the house or could be borrowed from still-healthy neighbors. Every caregiver had quickly gotten used to the stench and no longer recoiled from touching what had to be touched and washing what had to be washed. It was impossible to make everything hospital-clean, but they left every house in better condition than they found it in.
They marked with orange tape the lintels of the houses where no one was able to get out of bed. The food crews would then know which houses to visit on their daily rounds. For the first few days, gas-masked American soldiers went with the food crews, but as the soldiers took sick, they were replaced by Nigerian students, armed only with sticks; but they, along with Cecily's reputation as the New Mrs. Slessor, were enough to deter brigands and pilferers.
As word of what the caregivers were doing spread through the city, order began to return. People with white breathing masks went back to their jobs; farmers from the hinterland began to bring food into the city again, so they could return with medications and knowledge of methods of treatment. Extended families formed a widespread network throughout the region—most people in the city still had many relatives in the hinterland, and that network began to keep the city alive.
All of this was gratifying—it was clear that the coming of the American caregivers was making a great difference. The city would not starve; people were far less likely to be robbed, raped, or murdered as they lay sick or tried to flee the city.
What Cecily was watching most closely, though, was the mortality rate. She could not measure any control group—they were not going to leave some portion of the city within their reach untended—but she could try to gather statistics on the recovery rate among those who were treated.
The best indicator would be the soldiers—they were all known by name, they were gathered in one place, and they could not move in and out of the countryside without anyone missing them. The reports from Lagos and other areas of early infection were of death rates as high as fifty percent in some areas, and never lower than thirty percent. If the soldiers died at the same rate, then all their effort was making no difference at all.
So part of Mark's work, Cecily decided, was to gather the stats as they came in—the number of soldiers who were sick, the number reaching each stage of the disease, and then, eventually, the number who died or who were still alive when the fever broke.
"I'm supposed to care about numbers?" he asked impatiently.
"Yes," she said. "This plague will probably reach the United States someday. We need to know if our treatment regime works, and if it does, how much difference it makes."
