Power Up Gambia Blog

Today was action packed. Mike, Lucy and I woke up early to meet Gia at her compound at 7am to start our lesson in preparing Power Porridge (this is what I’m calling it… the local name is impossibly hard to prounce!). Gia Colley, my surrogate Gambian grandmother since the first day I stepped foot on the hospital grounds in 2006, has many important jobs in the hospital and in the community. She is the head hospital laundress as well as a community health worker. Part of her healthcare training included learning to make Power Porridge to support malnourished children and pregnant mothers. Gia also recommends that all children 6 months to 1 year and 2 months old eat it six times a day – “to give the power!” The porridge is super healthy. Each cup contains corn (or the slightly less powerful cous which is cheaper), beans, morenga leaves (considered to have healing properties), and groundnut paste (peanut butter!!). After today, I have had to redefine what it means to make something from scratch. We watched Gia buy cous and proceed to pound, sift, wash, dry, mill, and redry the cous.

On the way to the water tap to wash our freshly pounded cous, we passed by the hospital’s Out Patient Department. A woman, a mother, walked out of the consultation room sobbing – her son had died moments earlier. She was followed by the patients’ sister who began to wail. Other female family members joined in until the wailing could be heard across the entire hospital complex. Later in the day, Lamin Sanyang, the night nurse explained what had happened. The boy, 20 years old, had come to the hospital on mule cart in the wee hours of the morning. He had a ballooning belly (ascites), trouble breathing (dyspnea), chest pain, and blood in his urine (hematuria). Lamin stabilized him until the morning when his condition turned for the worse – he began vomiting blood (hematamesis) and soon after died. After a year of medical school, I have no clue what this could be in such a young individual. If you have any idea please let me know. The entire situation was heartbreaking. Had he been in the USA I wonder if he would have survived… Later in the day we saw a tractor pass by towing a large trailer with the boy’s body and more than 30 relatives piled into the back heading back to his home village for the funeral.

We continued on our mission to make Power Porridge with a new feeling of importance. Tomorrow evening we will begin the cooking process. It looks like we will be making enough porridge to feed the family for a few months – Mike, Lucy and I left feeling good about this fact.