A Dire Situation

Sorry for the lengthy absence. Things are in a bad way and I’ve been remiss not to keep you up.

I spoke to Patrick a couple weeks ago. His sister Fatou has been keeping his phone while he’s recovering, but when circumstances allow she goes to the hospital to visit him. And so one day I received a call. He didn’t sound good. He sounded weak, but he was also bored and upset by the suffering he sees around him. And circumstances are much worse than I had known.

The surgery was successful—that was Patrick’s word. But, it turns out, he was involved in an accident on the way to the hospital. Gambians without much money often take motorcycle taxis, which is what Patrick was doing. From what I can gather there was a collision and he fell off the motorcycle, breaking either his hip or his femur—I couldn’t get a definitive answer which. He talked about his hip being the bigger problem now but he also refers to the “bone between the knee and the hip.” Patrick’s English tends to smear a lot of words together into a continuum of meaning that doesn’t match the borders we assign to them. Point is, he’s a mess.

Then there’s the matter of payment. Apparently, and this is in keeping with every stupid horror story about the way the medical business works in Gambia, the surgeon wouldn’t raise his scalpel until he had assurances he would be paid within a three-month period. 300,000 delasi, which is about 4,400 USD. It’s not an absurd number by American standards, but given that Patrick’s entire yearly salary—an amount barely sufficient to house and feed one person—accounts to a mere 18% of that sum, I think we can say it’s absurd by Gambian standards.

Since the alternative was certain death, Patrick put up his Chromebook and his phone¹ as collateral, but also—and this is where the story gets really bizarre—his landlord put up the deed to his land. It’s always a rare event for a Gambian to so much as cut Patrick a little slack, so this struck me as out of character, but Patrick said the whole family begged him and the man relented. It must have been a piteous scene.

So Patrick is alive. He is recovering, but in three days the doctor will presumably be ruining his landlord. Patrick is hopeless. He simply asked that I help his siblings move out before the 15th, which I did. They have returned to the tiny, destitute village of Jambala on the far side of the Gambia River. Patrick was concerned that his landlord might do something to them otherwise, which seems bizarre to me but I can only think that they must have convinced him that the debt would be paid.

I can’t see that it will be. The sum is not, as I say, huge in the relative sense, but it’s more than I have and it’s more than I can raise in such a short time. If I had some clear indication it could be raised I might be inclined to float it, but my network is too small and I’ve tapped it twice already with a large decline in the rate of return between the first and second occasions.

I’ve tried to contact the doctor, a Cuban currently in the United States. I found him on Facebook, and Patrick gave him my number and asked him to call when he was here, but to no avail. I don’t think the man cares.

My last ditch effort has been to write an op-ed for the New York Times. Successfully placing a piece there might provide the network expansion I’d need to raise the money. I’ve done this under the editorial direction of my good friend Ken, and sent it to the opinion page editor. But time is dreadfully short. I don’t know what’s going to happen to Patrick. He has told me that he’d been considering suicide, and the way in which his thoughts have turned away from his own struggle to his siblings seems telling. I don’t know how they’ll manage without him though—he was their best hope.

It’s especially galling that in a country where something under two percent of the population have a college degree, Gambia provides so little security for people that should be considered a priceless asset. I’m angry with the whole country.

Listen: I’ll try to be more conscientious about updates moving forward. I’ve been preoccupied with the Times piece, even though I know it’s an incredible long shot. But then, Patrick was an incredible long shot, and against those odds he actually reached his goal, only to have his success whisked away at the last moment but the most awful hand of fate. I just don’t even know what to do with the knowledge of it.

Take care, all.

1. Patrick and his family had two phones: a super cheap one for Fatou and his other siblings, and a fairly ancient iPhone I got him for his birthday last year. These can be got from Nigerian electronics shops, generally about 7 or 8 generations behind and at a tiny fraction the price of a new one in the U.S., though Patrick was beside himself at what he saw as an unimaginable luxury. Curiously, Gambia has one of the highest rates of phone ownership in Africa. But I digress…