Abundance Read online

  Praise for

  Abundance

  “Much like Norman Maclean’s later-in-life masterpiece, A River Runs through It, Michael Fine’s Abundance, written after a distinguished career of medical practice here in the U.S. and in Africa, is a powerful first novel, an epic stretching from the civil wars of Liberia to the streets of Rhode Island. It’s about the violence we practice on each other and the power of humanity to overcome it. A joy to read.”

  —Paul J. Stekler, Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker

  “Abundance is a riveting, suspenseful tale of love, violence, adventure, idealism, sometimes-comic cynicism, class conflict, and crime—especially war crimes. Dr. Fine expertly moves his narrative back and forth between Liberia and America (mostly New England), using his medical experience—especially in serving the poor—psychological insight, and deep knowledge of West Africa to craft a story that displays both the deep disconnect between the First and Third Worlds and our commonalities. I should add that the rescue mission that’s at the heart of the story would make one hell of a movie.”

  —Robert Whitcomb, former finance editor of the International Herald Tribune and former editorial page editor of The Providence Journal

  “Michael Fine takes us into the heart of a country at war with itself. But our journey in battered Land Rovers along potholed red dirt roads is propelled by love not hate. That love offers hope for Liberia, our often forgotten sister country, and for anyone who confronts despair. Read Abundance. Reignite your own search for a life worth living.”

  —Martha Bebinger, WBUR

  “Michael Fine has eloquently captured the expanse of emotions as well as the variety of motivations of those volunteers working in Liberia. An excellent documentary.”

  —James Tomarken, MD

  “Michael Fine has brought his lifetime of experience as a doctor concerned with community health in our country and Africa and his considerable writing skills to bear on the great question of our time: How do we heal a broken world? He makes you care about what happens to the people living their answers.”

  —Bill Harley, author, two time Grammy Award–winning singer-storyteller, and NPR commentator

  Abundance

  Michael Fine © 2019

  This edition © 2019 PM Press

  ISBN: 978-1-62963-644-3

  LCCN: 2018948938

  PM Press

  P.O. Box 23912

  Oakland, CA 94623

  pmpress.org

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover: John Yates/Stealworks.com

  Layout: Jonathan Rowland

  In Memory of Adell Phyllis Gross Fine (1927–2014)

  To Gabriel Fine and Rosie Fine

  When you have eaten your fill, and have built fine houses to live in, and your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold have increased, and everything you own has prospered, beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget the Lord your God—who freed you from the land of Egypt, the house of bondage; who led you through the great and terrible wilderness with its seraph serpents and scorpions, a parched land with no water in it, who brought forth water for you from the flinty rock; who fed you in the wilderness with manna, which your fathers had never known, in order to test you by hardships only to benefit you in the end—and you say to yourselves, “My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.” Remember that it is the Lord your God who gives you the power to get wealth, in fulfillment of the covenant that He made on oath with your fathers, as is still the case.

  —Dvorim (Deuteronomy) 8:12–18

  Contents

  Preface

  Abundance

  Appendix

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  LIBERIA, A NATION OF FOUR TO FOUR AND A HALF MILLION PEOPLE IN WEST AFRICA, IS about the same size as the U.S. state of Tennessee. It is a place of many languages and many communities.

  Liberia was created in 1820, when a private organization called the American Colonization Society began transporting freed slaves from the U.S. to a small area of West Africa in an attempt to solve the problem of slavery for the United States without emancipating those slaves still held in bondage. Some of the settlers were from families that had lived as slaves in the United States for two hundred years. Other settlers were recently freed or had purchased their freedom themselves. Others came from families that had been free for generations. Few, if any, came from families that originated in the area they were coming to colonize. Few spoke the languages spoken by the people and communities then living in that place.

  The American Colonization Society counted among its members people we now regard as some of the most decent and forward-thinking Americans of their time: James Madison, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Paul Cuffee, and Francis Scott Key. Even Abraham Lincoln was a member for a time. Some of these people believed that African Americans would never be able to have free and equal lives in the United States. Others believed that it was impossible, or immoral, for people of different races to live together.

  The American Colonization Society brought about 13,000 free African Americans to West Africa between 1820 and 1847. (In 1820, the U.S. population was 9,638,453, of whom 1,538,022 were slaves.) The free African Americans created a colony of their own in Africa that was modeled on the United States. Plantations, schools, towns, language, culture, and even conservative politics were all copied from the southern United States the freed slaves had left behind—the only culture that the freed slaves themselves shared. Those people and their descendants, who would call themselves Americo-Liberians and are called Congo people by their compatriots, comprise a very small but politically and economically elite segment of the Liberian population.

  Most people in Liberia today are descended from the indigenous population. Although English is the official language in Liberia, most people grow up speaking another language, which is the language of their ethnic community. Many people also speak Liberian Kreyol, also called Liberian Pidgin, which is a trading language based on English and Portuguese that has been used for three hundred years. Trading languages are common on the coast of Africa. At first, trading languages allowed traders and indigenous people to speak to one another. Then those languages were used by indigenous people from different cultures and communities to speak among themselves.

  Bassa, Gao, Krahn, and Kpelle are four of the thirty languages spoken in Liberia. Kru is one of the four language groups.

  The music of Liberian Kreyol often sounds familiar to American ears, but Kreyol itself is difficult for most Americans to understand. Articles, conjunctives, and final consonants are often omitted; adjectives are repeated for emphasis and many words are used in archaic forms. Thus “na” means “not”, “ma” means “my” or “mother” depending on context. “Ga ca” means “good car”; “sma-sma (small-small)” means “very small”; and “De ro. I yaw wais’ ma’ ti, I weh sureleh blow yaw mouf o wais yaw fa” means “I’m the badass (a rouge). You are a waste of my time. I will surely slam your mouth and lay waste to your face.”

  In 1989, Liberia entered a period of brutal civil wars. The civil wars were fomented by Charles Taylor, who would become Liberia’s president, but Taylor was aided and abetted by many people and nations. The wars lasted until 2003. The years between 1989 and 2003 were filled with unimaginable cruelty in Liberia; years of murder, rape, dismemberments, and chaos.

  The recent history of Liberia is discussed in more detail in the appendix.

  Chapter One

  Julia Richmond. District #4 Health Center. Grand Bassa County, Liberia. July 15, 2003

  THE TOO SWEET CALLS OF THE PEPPER-BIRDS WOKE HER BEFORE DAWN. ASLEEP, JULIA HALF heard the chattering and whistling of the other birds, of course, but it w
as the fluty, chirping, melodic pepper-bird call that Julia recognized as she lay on her cot in the District #4 Health Center consulting room. She had come out with Sister Martha, her favorite nurse, and with her driver and guard, the previous day just before dark, twenty miles down a rutted one-track road into the middle of nowhere, across bridges that were unstable, and through miles of thick dark jungle. There was a war on, and although it was said to be far away, people like Julia moved about only during the daytime, and even then only with a driver and a guard, because of what was said to happen in the bush at night.

  Of all the places she loved and the ideas that moved her, the grand romantic notions about healing the world and making it a safe place for all its children, Julia Richmond loved the District #4 Health Center most. She had only just come to Liberia, after stints in Haiti, Rwanda, and Bangladesh. She came to Liberia when Bill Levin, her friend and mentor in the U.S., forwarded an e-mail describing the position and the need. Liberia, after fourteen years of civil war, was among the most desperate places Julia had been and its people the most distant and afraid. Julia loved desperate places, the places where there was nothing and where the people had no one, so they took her for who she was, as she was, and didn’t ask her the questions she couldn’t answer for herself.

  Julia also loved the softness of the light—the muddy browns, tans, and ochres of a place where you couldn’t really see the corners or down the halls, where you could hear and smell people and things before you saw them. There was no electricity in the health center, so the light filtered in through the larger windows, one per room. If you wanted to read or see clearly, you stood or sat by a window, even at midday. Inside, the hallways and the larger waiting rooms were shrouded and warm. When you walked from room to room, the hidden life of the place was revealed, so it felt like you were discovering an unknown truth just by moving about.

  The health center was in a village without a name. It was built on a rise. Rows of wooden benches lined its broad porch, benches that had been polished over many years by the bottoms of people who came shortly after sunrise and might sit there most of the day waiting for a doctor, a physician’s assistant, or a nurse. The red dirt road emerged out of the jungle on the far side of a field that lay next to the health center, which meant if you were sitting on the porch you could see who was coming down the road from the jungle and who was going away. There were two clusters of huts near the health center—one behind, a little further up and over the rise, and one further down the road. Julia heard voices among the huts, murmuring and indistinct except when a baby cried or a child called out. She heard the crowing of cocks and the clucking of chickens, and she smelled the warm bitter smell of wood and charcoal fires, which reminded her of Arab coffee and burnt toast.

  The first morning light fell on the health center before it came to the village on the other side of the rise.

  Julia had been awake for a moment in the middle of the night. She heard muffled moans and then a cry. A newborn. They hadn’t called her. The child must have been okay. The labor room was at the far end of the health center, and the nurse and the community health workers assisted at births.

  Torwon and Charles, her driver and guard, slept in the village. Sister Martha, a Carmelite nursing sister from Burundi, slept on a cot in the dispensary. Yesterday they did a vaccination clinic and the big belly clinic as soon as they arrived, working until they lost the light. Today there was a sick clinic. Then they would hurry home down twenty kilometers of one-track road that led to another twenty kilometers of county road that was wider but not better, scarred by potholes and ruts cut by runoff water from the evening rains. They would be back in Buchanan before dark. They had to be back in Buchanan before dark.

  The six-bed infirmary had four overnight patients—two malarias, a dehydration, and a typhoid. The nurses and community health workers cared for those people without Julia’s help. Some nights they awakened her when there was a crisis, but by the time they called her it was usually too late. So Julia had taken to seeing each patient just before dusk. It didn’t matter. There were still often empty beds in the morning where there had been a sick patient the night before.

  There was a latrine out back, built with Julia’s patient instruction over many months, but no one else in the health center or village ever used it. Water came from the village. Each day they filled two ten-gallon jugs and carried them up the rise from the village pump.

  Julia Richmond was thirty-two. She was from Mill Valley, and then Stanford and Brown, and could have worked anywhere, so God only knew why she loved this godforsaken place so much. She was trained in both Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine. She had green eyes, black hair, and pale skin that had tanned in the equatorial sun. In her own mind, Julia was awkward and insubstantial despite the letters after her name and what everyone said about her looks. Here she never had to judge herself against the standard of too many others like her, and here there wasn’t a crowd of people just like her, so she didn’t have to look at herself reflected in the hollowness of the culture that stamped out people who were all alike, again and again.

  Julia heard footsteps. Then she heard murmuring and the creaking of wood as people climbed the stairs and settled themselves on the polished half-log benches. They came from the village and from the bush, one or two at a time.

  She went into the clinic room to wash. The water jug was near empty.

  I’ll go to the village, she thought, to the pump, and wash myself properly. And check on Carl’s pump at the same time.

  She did not think about Carl himself but didn’t not think about him either. She thought about Carl’s pump and thought about how the water would gush from the spigot when she pushed down on the handle and about how she would splash the cool, clear water over her neck and face and use it to wash her eyes, and she thought about how alive she would feel as the water flowed over her and brought her from sleep to life.

  They started the sick clinic just after eight. Sister Martha, a short, proper woman with dark skin, who dressed every day in the same white blouse, brown jacket, and brown skirt despite the heat, came to the consulting room just after Julia arrived. Sister Martha walked out to the porch to see who was waiting for them and to see if any of the clinic staff were walking from the village to the health center. Julia sat at an old wooden desk with a window behind it.

  The first patient was a young man with a cut on his leg. He sat in front of the window in the pale yellow light of early morning. He was about nineteen, thin and wiry, with dark brown skin and brown eyes. Sister Martha stood next to the window.

  There was an open cut in the man’s calf the size of Julia’s hand that ran deep into the muscle and was covered with white-green pus.

  Julia held out her hand. “I’m Dr. Richmond. Let’s look at that leg.”

  “Halloo,” the young man said. He took Julia’s hand. His grasp was warm but weak. “Sundaygar,” he said.

  “When did you get that cut, Sundaygar?” Julia asked.

  Sister Martha waited a few moments. When Sundaygar did not reply, she began to speak in Kreyol. When Sundaygar did not look at her, Sister Martha switched to Bassa and began again.

  The man now looked at Sister Martha, not Julia, and answered her.

  “He got it in a palm tree. One week,” Sister Martha said.

  “How did you cut it?” Julia asked.

  Sister Martha translated the question. Sundaygar answered in several long sentences. Sister Martha asked more questions, which the young man answered as well.

  Julia dropped to one knee. She took Sundaygar’s leg in her hands and turned it from side to side in the light.

  “It cuts with machete. He is cutting palm nuts in the tree,” Sister Martha said.

  “When was your last tetanus shot?” Julia asked.

  “He has not tetanus. The clinic has not tetanus,” Sister Martha said, without translating the question.

  “Let’s get some Betadine and water and debride a little. I want to see the tissue,�
� Julia said.

  “The clinic has not Betadine today,” Sister Martha said. “He wants to sew, to make stitches.”

  “I can’t sew it. It needed to be sewn within twenty-four hours,” Julia said.

  “He is two days walk.”

  “Do we have Silvadene?”

  “The clinic has not Silvadene,” Sister Martha said.

  “Any antibiotic cream?”

  “Not cream today. Bottles amoxicillin liquid and pills, Bactrim.”

  Julia bit her bottom lip.

  “There is no indication for oral antibiotics,” Julia said. “He needs a tetanus shot and surgical debridement. Otherwise it’s going to leave a big scar. Or get infected, in which case he loses the leg or dies. Maybe he can get by with a good topical antibiotic and twice a day wound care. Maybe.”

  Sister Martha did not answer.

  Julia turned to the patient.

  “You should go to Buchanan, to the hospital. Otherwise big big scar or infection. Okay?”

  Sundaygar looked at Sister Martha, but Sister Martha did not speak.

  Julia bit her lip once more, and then continued. “Maybe it’s too late to sew,” Julia said. “You need good wound care. Dressing changes twice a day. Infection is starting to creep in. If this gets infected, you could lose the leg. Or you could die.”

  She paused, waiting for Sister Martha. Sister Martha still did not speak.

  “Let’s do this,” Julia said. “There are no signs of bad infection yet. Just surface infection. Take the pills that Sister Martha will give you. Keep the wound clean. Try to wait a few days before you walk far or work, and let it heal. It will take three or four weeks to heal—maybe longer. Come back if there are streaks of redness on the leg, if it gets more tender instead of less tender over time, or if you get a fever, the hotness of the body. Bactrim BID for ten days.”

  Sister Martha translated.