that tuesday night in march

my last blog post was about the people i met in bonthe, and the town. my trip to bonthe was overshadowed by my father's accident, as i alluded to in my previous post. these are my memories of that night and the days that followed....

we arrived in bonthe in the late afternoon on that tuesday, after a day-long journey via car to yagoi and boat to bonthe (and several hours of waiting, for unknown reasons, for us to board the boat that was just sitting there). we walked around the town, my dad pointing out places he knew of, and we got a picture of him in front of a house he lived in.

i had a migraine.

if it were up to my dad, we probably would have walked around a lot more, but we were going to be in town for two more days, i said. if we see everything now, what are we going to do tomorrow, i said. i kind of regret saying that, knowing what would happen in the next several hours.

we ate dinner, and went to the hotel. bonthe doesn't have electricity, and we had to argue with the hotel worker to turn on the generator to our room. he didn't want to, but we struck a deal - he would let the generator (and thus the fan) run until 10.

my head was throbbing.

i took a tylenol pm and was ready to go to bed. my dad said he wanted to look at the stars. he took my flashlight, the key to the door, and locked me into the room. made sense - it was impossible to close the door without locking it and i might be deep asleep when he got back, locking him out.

i don't know how much time had passed, but i heard my dad saying, what i thought was, 'hello, hello'. great, i thought, he's been locked out of the outside fencing of the hotel, or the building - he sounded far away. i went to the window and shouted 'come to the window. come to the window and throw the keys up to me'. my thought was, being locked in, if i could get out of the room, i could get him into the building. he kept saying 'hello, hello'.

then, it all of a sudden hit me. he wasn't outside. he also wasn't shouting, he was speaking, and he was just down the hall from our room. and he wasn't saying 'hello', he was saying 'help'.

i went to the door, but i was locked in. i could hear him. he said he fell, he thought he had fainted. i shouted through the door 'you have the key. open the door'. he sounded confused, not sure why i would be locked into the room.

there was movement in the hall, as he made his way to our room. he unlocked the door and by the time i opened it, he was walking back down the hall. i didn't know why, and still am not sure why he turned around and walked away from a door he had just unlocked.

when i caught up to him, i could see he was holding his hand to his forehead. there was blood on his hand, his face, and on his shirt. he lay back on the floor where he must have been calling for help. his stuff was scattered around - his shoes, his glasses, his binoculars, and my flashlight.

my migraine didn't matter anymore.

i wanted to see his head and asked him to move his hand. there was more blood than i've ever seen in person - i should mention that i'm squeamish about blood. it freaks me out. he was far more injured than i would have guessed.

he said 'i was looking at the stars, and then i think i fell. i remember stairs. i think i fainted.' my response was to try and keep him calm, try to make sure his mental capacity was okay by asking him things like 'do you know where we are? how many fingers am i holding up?' he answered fine, then said 'i was looking at the stars, and then i think i fell'. he said that sentence, or some derivation of it, at least 15 times in the 10 minutes that followed, like he was telling me for the first time. i was scared.

as soon as i saw how bad he was, i called the only person i knew in town, alpha (yes, that is his name). he came over, saw the cut, gave one of those 'oh my god!' faces, then called someone else. eventually, there were 4 of us around my dad - me, alpha, the guy who worked at the hotel, and a guy who had been called to take my dad to the hospital - on his motorcycle. there are no cars in bonthe.

he was bleeding pretty heavily, throwing up, we were trying to clean him up, and he had didn't really want to try getting up to get him to the hospital. we were eventually able to pick him up, carry him down a very narrow spiral staircase, get him on the motorcycle, with me behind him, supporting him, and get him to the hospital which, of course, had no electricity or running water.

my dad was stitched up by flashlight, with about 8 people standing around him - most of whom were just interested in looking and not involved in the procedure. i stood back. it was like a war movie, the way it was done. i was amazed.

i walked back to the hotel in pitch black at about 1 am and woke up at 5 next morning.

the next day felt like four.

my dad was the grumpiest i've ever seen him because he didn't sleep well and he was in pain. he was certain he had somehow gotten appendicitis. the doctor waved that thought off, but my dad did have some sort of stomach bug, the doctor discovered. he was drugged up that morning and spent the day in and out of sleep.

i spent the day negotiating with people - to get my dad out of the hospital, to get my dad out of bonthe, to get my dad out of sierra leone. i talked to locals, i talked to people in freetown, i talked to the u.s. embassy - thank goodness i brought that phone with me.

very early on thursday morning, my dad left the hospital, on a motorcycle ambulance (one regret i have is not getting a picture of the motorcycle ambulance - it was awesome in a very weird way). we got on a speedboat, back to yagoi, where an 'ambulance' was waiting for us and took us back to freetown. it was a van, with nothing but a wooden bench in the back of it.

that day, i moved around with a very injured man in a speedboat, in an ambulance along very bumpy roads, to the u.s. embassy, to a travel agent in downtown freetown, argued with a taxi driver, and back to the school that was also our guest house.

on sunday, three days after leaving bonthe and less than five days after he fell, we left freetown - me to the edinburgh and him back to baltimore. i left him at the airport, looking back as i boarded. he looked awful. he hadn't shaved, his hair was disheveled, and he had a gigantic bandage over his right eyebrow. he said he would use the way he looked to get pity from all the airline people.

i was worried about him travelling alone. i called my sister multiple times the next day, prepping her for what she would see when she picked him up at the airport. he got home without incident.

i've seen my dad twice since that march night, when i boarded the plane in freetown. when i saw him in april, when i went to baltimore, he still didn't quite look himself. when i saw him in june, when he came to edinburgh, his face looked fine, but he had discovered (a couple of months after the fact) that he broke his wrist in the fall - he was wearing a cast, which has since come off.

we'll never know exactly what happened that night. my first thought was that he was looking at the stars, came upstairs, fainted from the heat and lack of food eaten that day, and hit his head as he was fainting. that's not what happened. 

the day after he fell, i spent a lot of time looking around the hotel and i think it happened like this: 

while outside, he turned off the flashlight (as he's admitted) to get a better look at the stars. he fell off of an unrailed walkway, about an 8 to 10-foot drop, into a basement entrance to the building, cutting his eyebrow on a metal thing that stuck out of the wall. he climbed the stairs out of the basement entrance, up the narrow spiral staircase, to the hallway where our room was. that's where he fainted, then started calling for help. I saw drops of blood and bloody hand prints through that entire path, with a small pool of dried blood, right next to the metal thing he hit his head on. i still don't know how he negotiated his way back to where i found him, in the state he was in, in complete darkness.

i learned a lot from that tuesday night. i learned that it's good to have a phone with you, because in this day and age, even villages with no electricity get mobile phone service. i learned that i am a good negotiator, even when there is a language barrier. i learned that evacuation insurance is a good thing (all our expenditures to get him out were reimbursed). i learned that doctors trained in cuba, who work in hospitals with very few resources are amazing. i learned that if you ever fall, or get injured in small town with no electricity, and you're with me, i'll get you out.

i learned more about my dad the person, in the days after, as he recovered in freetown, but most of all, i learned that my dad is one tough guy. 

 my dad and i in june, a little less than 3 months after he fell