Sister Madeline

This week, we had the pleasure of meeting a Returned PCV from a few years ago who is here in Benin visiting old friends and colleagues on his way to do his Fulbright in Rwanda. We were riding our bikes to Katie’s house (our post mate), who lives in a small village just outside of Bohicon, when a car drove past us and this white man in the passenger seat said, “How’s it going?” as they passed and left us awe-struck as to who that yovo was. He bought us a round of drinks once we got into the village and by the end of our conversation, he invited us to go on a little day trip the next day to the even smaller and much more remote village of Toweto, where a fantastic nun was running a health center sans salary.
The following afternoon, we drove about half an hour to this tiny little village with a few mud huts and a pump water source that had the backdrop of beautiful lush green rolling hills all around it. I could kick myself for forgetting my camera. We met Sister Madeline (I changed her name to respect her privacy) right after she had just delivered a baby. And she was indeed, fantastic. She was incredibly happy to meet us and immediately welcomed us into her house where she had prepared a big lunch for us, complete with Californian wine. I instantly fell in love with this woman, especially after seeing all of the work that she has done, mostly on her own initiative. She has such a determination to help the people of this remote village who didn’t have access to any heath care before this health center was built.
When the RPCV was working in Benin with the PC, he met Katie’s homologue, Matthieu, who she works with now and who has land in this little village that he grows/farms on, where Sister Madeline now is. He saw the need that the villagers had for a health care center, and with the RPCV’s help, they raised money, got grants, funding, etc from different people and places to build a very basic structure that could function as a health care center. Sister Madeline had her own operation going on in the Nattitangou area, which is in the north of the country, and debatably, one of the best/prettiest parts of Benin. They asked her if she would come down to Toweto and run the new health center that they built. Now, keep in mind, it was very simple, nothing fancy and certainly nothing like what we have in the States. Cement floors, simple beds, no air conditioning, no electricity, no running water, tin roof, etc. She took the unpaid job of running this center and since then, which was sometime in 2006, she has expanded the building, added more rooms, gotten 10 times more medicine for the pharmacy, had a well put in, had showers built and installed for the patients to use, got solar panels, had a generator put in, and is constantly working at making the center better.
She is hands-down, the most incredible person that I have met so far in my life to date. A lot of projects that PCVs do often end or fall apart soon after the Volunteer leaves because there is no one who can run the project and keep it going that would care about it just as much and work as hard at it, unless another Volunteer took it over. She is what every Peace Corps Volunteer hopes to find in a work partner. She is honest, motivated, hard -working, passionate, and outgoing. She has love coming out of her ears. Even her pets are well loved, which is an incredibly rare thing here since pets are for utility and not company. But that’s a different story.
I asked her what her next plans were to see how and where I could get involved. Her future plans are to get a hold of some mosquito nets for the villagers as well as working on a nutrition program for kids who are malnourished, both of which I can do something to help. And not a second too soon either; as we were getting ready to leave, she was treating two very small children who came in; one who needed a blood transfusion because it was so anemic (and running a 106 fever at about 2 years old), and another child who was a year and a half old and was so malnourished that not only did he look like he was 6 months old, but he also had sores all over his face and his skin was peeling; both signs of severe malnutrition. The RPCV actually sent us back to Bohicon with the mother that had the child that needed a blood transfusion so that they could quickly get to a hospital that could accommodate that. As for the other child, Sister Madeline got him eating and gave the mother some medication and instructions to make a soy-porridge and will be doing house calls since the mother couldn’t stay at the hospital with her baby.
This day was a reality check and an abrupt reminder of why I joined the Peace Corps and why I’m here. The RPCV was an inspiration to the kind of PCV we hope to be by the time we leave and we plan on staying in contact with him while we’re here. In the meantime, we will definitely be visiting and working with Sister Madeline along with doing our normal work. We are incredibly moved by her and it’s all that we can do just to not move in with her in order to be around her all the time.