Easing the van to a stop I called out in my halting Swahili to a nearby urchin. I must have picked one of the forty other ethnic groups which inhabit the country because I might as well have been speaking, well ... Swahili, for all the good it did me. Fortunately another child understood, and ran up, and chinned himself on the van window. I repeated my request for directions to the health clinic.
"Sure, boss," he said. "Gimme a ride and I'll show you."
I nodded my assent, and he raced around, and clambered in the passenger side. From this position of moral and physical superiority he gazed down on his fellows. Now that he was closer I wasn't liking what I was seeing. His lymph nodes seemed enlarged, and there was a swelling in his joints.
"You sick, boss?" he asked after indicating the direction with an errant flip of the hand.
"No," I said.
"Yes, you are. You're a mwenye kombo."
My mind supplied the translation: crooked person, i.e., joker. "That doesn't mean I'm sick," I explained patiently. "It just means I'm different." My guide seemed unconvinced. "I'm a doctor," I added. That got him, but it wasn't the reaction I'd hoped for. His eyes became suspicious slits, he stiffened, yanked open the van door, and hopped out. I jammed on the brakes, terrified he'd fall, and my first act at Kilango would be squashing a hapless urchin.
Backing slowly away from the van he called out to me, "Just keep going that way, boss, you'll find it," and he was gone, vanishing in a twinkling of bare brown legs among the bare brown huts.
***
The clinic was what you'd expect from a public health facility in a joker village in the third world. It was a squat, ugly cinder block construction on the western outskirts of the village. Its position, huddled against the barb wire fence, seemed totally appropriate. It looked less like a place of healing than a sound proofed barracks where state enemies recant their sins. I parked, backed the length of the van until I could slide open the door, and jumped down. Medical bag firmly in hand, I pushed open the glass doors ready to begin my first stint as a real live doctor.
The tiny lobby was filled with squalling babies and their tired mothers. In one small corner a group of elderly jokers had carved out turf for themselves. There was one old guy with human faces covering his body. The sibilant whispers from all those mouths set an odd contrapuntal line to the soprano baby wails.
It's an odd quirk of the wild card virus, or maybe of the human psyche, that we end up with so many fuzzy animal jokers. I tease my mom occasionally that she shouldn't have had Dad take her to that re-release of Fantasia just before my birth, but I realize that ultimately my condition was selected and molded by me.
The next largest joker variety are the warping of normal human physiology. Finally, we have the monsters from the id - shapes so grotesque and disturbing that you have no idea where the fuck they came from. This room was mostly sporting the fuzzy animal variety, which wasn't surprising given the cultural importance of animal spirits in African mythology.
There was a Clairol red-head, crisp in nurse's whites, behind the desk. She looked up at the sound of my hooves on the stained linoleum floor. Once I got a good look at her face, and mentally scraped away a couple of hundred pounds of make-up, I put her around fifty-five. She still had a pretty good body, but this was clearly one of those beautiful women who cannot accept the judgment of nature, years and gravity.
"Yes?" she asked, and I was surprised to discover she was an American. I figured Faneuil would have a French staff. As a sub-species of humanity the French take the cake for arrogance and xenophobia. Then I realized Faneuil had hired me, and my mental French-bashing went by the wayside.
"Doctor Bradley Finn," I hurried to say. "I'm the new Peace Corps ..." There was something in her ironic smile that had the words dying in my throat.
"Ah, yes, we have been expecting you ... since yesterday."
I felt like a ten year old caught playing hooky. I shuffled my feet, which is a lot of shufflin', and muttered my excuse about needing a car.
"Of course, you are an American."
The tone in which that was said made me want to start singing the "Star Spangled Banner." I resisted the impulse because my singing voice sounds a lot like frogs fornicating.
"Uh, yeah, well, you might want to get home, get your passport punched, eat a cheeseburger, go to a ball game, remember what it's like." Her face had gone red in that mottled way that only true red-heads can achieve, which told me the color wasn't wishful thinking, it was just fond remembrance. "Now, could you tell Doctor Faneuil I'm here?" I added in my best Doctor Voice.
"I will inform Doctor," she replied in her best Great Man's Assistant Voice. I was pleased at my acuity, but depressed by the prospect. Great Men's Assistants are always unmarried ladies who have devoted their lives to "doctor," and always referred to him without the buffering article. They are always a pain in the ass to any other doctor who happens around. "Doctor is presently with a patient," she concluded as if fearful I'd think he was out on the links.
"Yeah, I sorta figured. Well, could I wait in ... Doctor's office? I'd like to get with a patient as soon as possible."
She didn't miss my hesitation before I said the word doctor. She gave me a look, and I had a feeling my smart mouth had just shoveled me out another hole, but she did lead me though the doors to the right of the desk, and down the hall lined with examination rooms. I conconcluded (correctly as I later found out), that the doors to the left led to the small fifty bed hospital.
As we walked I realized that what I'd taken for stains on the linoleum was actually dirt. It bugged me so I said, sharper than I should have, "Doesn't anybody know how to use a mop around here?"
"It is long rain season, we are understaffed, and Doctor thinks it best if we concentrate our energies on patient care."
"I didn't mean to imply that one of us health care professionals should sully our hands with menial labor. I was thinking about some kid. Pay him a little each week. That sort of thing." Her flat, implacable stare was starting to get to me. I shut up.
"You have a lot to learn about Africa, Dr. Finn," she said as she opened the door to Faneiul's office, and gestured me in.
She shut the door so fast and hard she almost caught my tail.
***
It took the French Schweitzer forty-five minutes to get around to me. By then I'd read all of his diplomas and citations three times, and perused the out of date medical journals twice, and decided I couldn't bear to look at pictures of him shaking hands with famous assholes again. Not that he didn't deserve all the kudos. His professional life had been an example of service and self-sacrifice spanning three continents. It was why I wanted to work with him. I'm just a typical American, and I hate to be kept waiting.
He wasn't what I'd expected even though I'd just finished looking at photos. He was much taller in person, an improbably long and lanky figure whose thin legs scissored along like a wading heron. A shaggy mop of grey brown hair, a small, receding chin that combined with thin, almost transparent eyebrows to give his face a naked look. That made the jutting beak of a nose all the more incongruous on that unfinished face.
His smile, however, was warmth itself. A big relief after the popsicle out front. He strode across the room with that sharp, jerking walk, his hand aggressively outthrust.
"Doctor Finn, how pleased I am to meet you at last."
"And I you, sir." He had a good shake, and there was none of that almost imperceptible withdrawal which you get from most nats.
"You have met Margaret?" I correctly gleaned that he meant the nurse, and nodded. "Invaluable, but terrifying woman. She keeps me straightly in line," he concluded with a laugh.