Embedded in Africa

“Don’t take pictures of the people,” the driver orders. “They believe the camera robs them of their souls.”

We’ve arrived at the outskirts of a place called Hevier, which on a map of Benin, West Africa, is located some 15 or so miles northwest of the port city of Cotonou, although my sense of direction could be a little off. I call Hevier a “place”, as opposed to a town or a village since at first glance it appears to be a kind of crowded rural settlement. Or, in this case, a never-ending sprawl of scrap-wood shacks, thatched huts, abandoned concrete and masonry structures, roadside food stalls and gas stops (illegal, olive-oil colored gas smuggled in from Nigeria stored in empty Coke bottles and water cisterns). Technically speaking, however, Hevier is an ever-expanding, growing village. But the one thing that is not growing well here is food.

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RT Photo / Vincent Zandri (click to enlarge)

Enter Mercy Ships, the thirty-year-old global charity that is better known for performing surgery onboard its docked ships. I’ve been surprised to learn that the organization also performs operations “off-ship”, which explains the new agricultural center now being constructed in Hevier's interior jungle territory. It’s amidst the thick, almost impenetrable growth that a clearing has been made to accommodate the construction of a hostel that will house up to 35 farming students. This is also the territory where “biblical agricultural practices” are being taught to the Beninois who wish to cultivate vegetables, roots and fruits without spoiling the land for future generations.

My driver and fixer for the day is David Cherry, a tall, thin, quiet man in his late fifties who originates from Georgia in the U.S. He's been overseeing the “Ag project” since its inception some months ago. He is also a steadfast “convinced Christian” which, out in these parts, means he is as respectful of African voodoo as he is to Jesus. In a word, the man has his guard up, which also makes him a bit nervous, if not unsettled.

RT Photo / Vincent Zandri (click to enlarge)

Behind the wheel of the Nissan 4-wheel drive he speaks to me in his slow southern “good old boy” drawl about how easily many Beninois mix a belief in the Christian God with a steadfast belief in voodoo talismans, spirits and power. Some of the people mix the voodoo with a belief in Islam. In either case, it is strongly advised not to snap away with abandon like Robert Capa on steroids or else risk a Beninois tongue lashing or, far worse, some kind of powerful spell that might be cast upon me. I'm not sure about Cherry, but I wonder if it's the Beninois belief in voodoo that is causing them to have so much trouble raising crops without destroying the top-most layer of soil. Agricultural bad karma, as it were.

But then Africa is a land of extreme contradictions. For instance, in Benin (the capital of the voodoo world) as in many parts of Africa, it's perfectly acceptable to practice Islam or Catholicism in the morning. But at night, after the sun goes down, it's okay to focus your prayers on lesser Gods. You ask the spirits to give you the power to overcome your problems or to achieve something you desire. Problem is, however, the spirits don't give anything away for free.

This talisman is self explanatory (RT Photo / Vincent Zandri)

In extreme circumstances, such as in war-torn Liberia some fifteen years ago, a political leader ran and won on the roughly translated slogan “I killed your mother and I can kill your children.” Now if that's not a political agenda propped up by voodoo tradition and the bone chilling fear it harvests in many African souls, I don't know what is. Fear and loathing in the dark unknown can cause otherwise good Christians to do bad things, such as engage in ritual sacrifice. In many parts of Africa, an extreme example of sacrifice is the harvesting of the still beating heart of a little child. A tamer example is the consuming of the blood of a freshly killed rooster.

If you don't believe in spiritual hokus-pokus, you can get around Hevier's sun-baked villages and bush country without cause for fear or panic (that is, of course, if you're not bothered by spiders and snakes). But if you're the least bit superstitious and/or religious, you begin to see strange sets of eyes staring at you through the brush or from around a hut corner. You might feel a cold chill run up and down your backbone when an old shirtless man carrying a machete locks onto your eyes with his milky whites as you drive by. You can't help but wonder if a spell has already been cast upon your soul just by entering into a rural area rarely seen by westerners and almost never seen by tourists.

RT Photo / Vincent Zandri (click to enlarge)

Coming upon the edge of the thick bush, we hook a quick right and continue with our bumpy and sometimes dangerously precarious drive along a rain-slicked dirt road. The hard-packed road is the color of pink cotton candy. Lining the sides of it are more wood huts and little shops. Native Beninois are scattered about along the side of the road, the men and boys dressed in loose shirts, slacks or shorts, their tough-soled feet bare, while the women dress in colorful wrap-arounds. Our white Nissan sticks out like a great white whale on wheels. People stop and stare. Most of them issue a suspicious scrunched brow, narrow-eyed expression. Through the years these people have seen western missionaries come and go, all too often abandoning the projects they started. Some leave because they run out of funds. Others get frustrated with this tough, unforgiving country. Still others become spooked by the voodoo (many missionaries, including some Mercy Ships volunteers, refuse to purchase souvenir ceremonial masks or jewelry because of the power they are believed to possess).

RT Photo / Vincent Zandri (click to enlarge)

But what takes me by surprise are the children. The children, very few of whom go to school, run up to the Nissan as Cherry slowly negotiates the deep ruts and tries to prevent us from sliding off the roadside into a ditch. The scantily dressed boys and girls assume wide smiles. They raise their hands and wave. They shout out “Bonjour” and laugh and get the biggest kick out of seeing us head into their jungle. I can't help but wonder: are they laughing with us? Or are they laughing at us? I stick my arm out the window, wave back, and hope for the former.

RT Photo / Vincent Zandri (click to enlarge)

We cross over a stream via a narrow bridge with no rails. Cherry's eyes widen as we pass huts with thatched roofs on one side and corn fields on the other. Further up the road, topless women pound corn or seeds in stone jars with heavy, blunt ended polls. Roosters and pigs scurry about along with the occasional underfed dog. Soon we pass a tower made from clay and wood. Mounted to the top of the tower is a crude airplane. I ask Cherry the significance of the airplane. But he doesn't know. But what he does know is that the tower is a talisman and it signifies that we are in the middle of voodoo territory.

When we pass by a wall-painted talisman that depicts a grass-skirted man whose mammoth-sized manhood is sticking out through the grass, I feel no need to inquire about its fertile meaning. Acting on instinct, however, I raise up my camera and catch a quick picture. Cherry doesn't have to tell me to put the camera down. I can feel his scream in the glare he gives me from behind the wheel. Clearly, the nervous Cherry seems to be getting more nervous.

RT Photo / Vincent Zandri (click to enlarge)

Now having gone beyond the final semblance of civilization, we continue on into the bush towards the Ag Center, where only jungle and dark spirits await us.

To be continued…

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Two adjoining surgical rooms contain two surgical tables each. Each table contains a patient. Each patient is being cared for by a team of nurses of both sexes and, judging by their accents, originating from all parts of the globe. Their ages range from early twenties to one Englishwoman I'm pegging for close to 70. Working beside them are two doctors and an anesthesiologist. The Chief surgeon, a green-scrubbed, 50-something, gray-bearded American by the name of Dr. Glenn Strauss, greets me with a warm smile. I'm aware that he plays guitar and, since I'm a punk rock drummer, I break the ice by saying, “I hear you play a mean axe.”

Ice officially broken.

Click to enlarge

His smile brightens. He positionss himself so that the patient's head rests as close to his lap as possible, without actually resting upon it. Lifting a tiny scalpel, he sets the blade-tip on his patient's eyeball.

“Yeah,” he says, “I love to play guitar. But I'm not giving up my day job.”

Pressing down on the blade, he cuts.

The patient whom Strauss is operating on is an elderly Beninois woman. Elderly in Benin is a relative term. I'm guessing she's maybe sixty (Benin men and women do not keep track of their ages). A local anesthetic is applied to the affected eye in order to mask the discomfort derived from the stretching of the eyelid and pressure on the socket. Other than that one injection, no other pain killers are required, since the eyeball itself feels no pain. But when Strauss begins to cut around the eyeball’s lens, she starts to squirm and shiver. She shouts something in French and a nurse standing nearby answers her; tries to comfort her. It goes on like that for what seems forever—Strauss cutting, the agitated woman moaning, moving; hoping for the cutting to end.

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By the end of the fifteen-minute procedure to replace the badly cataract-tainted lens with a new one, Strauss appears to be relieved. Raising himself from his chair, he removes his soiled scrubs like a bad habit and, once more, smiles at me.

“Grew me a few more gray hairs,” he says.

In the operating theater beside me, the second surgeon, Claudine Lee, a South African GP, isn't making the blind see. She's saving what little eye a 14-year-old girl has left, after a major trauma caused her left eyeball to infect and swell to four times its normal size. This surgery involves total extraction of the interior of the eyeball. I am encouraged to observe the surgery by the attending nurses. At the same time, I'm ordered to sit down if I begin to feel woozy or sick to my stomach. I can't help but begin to feel like the brunt of a cruel joke.

A chair is placed beside me, but I refuse to sit. I refuse to give in to the nausea. I'm not sure if I'm getting dizzy or if what I'm feeling is the ship listing beneath me. When Strauss loses his footing for just a brief second, I know it is the listing I'm feeling, and I can't help but feel a sense of relief, if not pride.

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In the one hour I spend in the operating room, the 14-year-old's eye innards will be removed and the organ's remaining outer shell filled with a prosthetic material that will make it appear as normal as possible. Strauss will perform three more cataract removals and oversee one from a Benenois surgical student who is learning her craft from him. All in all, Strauss will perform up to 30 surgeries on this day alone, and he will do them all for free. There is so much surgery going on, I feel like I'm on a military hospital ship immediately following a particularly brutal battle.

Strauss isn't afraid to tackle any surgery, no matter how complicated, no matter how spooky. Case in point: just days before my arrival, he performed the same cataract removal surgery on the Voodoo King of Benin. I wondered if he worried about being cast under a dark spell should he botch the operation. But his Christian beliefs prevent anything like that from happening. Or so I'm told. And botching surgeries is apparently foreign to the 30-year, ground-breaking, surgical veteran. In the end, when the Voodoo King entered post-op, he could see almost perfectly out of his bad eye. And he didn't owe his good fortune to the Voodoo spirits anymore than he did to Jesus. The Voodoo King owed his newfound eyesight to Dr. Strauss and the Africa Mercy team.

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I'm wiped out after my hour of observing surgery. The interior of my skull feels a lot like the ship's hold—a hollow steel shell - with a multitude of thoughts, emotions and sensations bouncing around inside it like little steel balls. I'm wondering how these Africans will react to their new surgery once their bandages are removed and, for the first time in years, or, in some cases, the first time ever, they will see their world. I'm wondering if they will be frightened, or if they will rejoice as happily as they did just moments before going under the knife. But at the same time, I can't help but wonder about the unlucky people who had to be turned away from surgery. I'm wondering how they will continue to cope with their own private darkness on the Dark Continent.

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Africa is long known as a dark, unforgiving continent.

“Blindwoman”: A blind woman, who has been operated on,
is assisted across a rain flooded lot (photo by Vincent Zandri)

Flying over the western nub of the vast land from its top-most point at Algiers, all the way down to the Slave Coast that runs along the Atlantic, I can see why. Looking out the window at 30 thousand feet, I witness endless miles of Saharan desert that gives way to seemingly impenetrable mountains and finally, lush, dark bush country veined by numerous rivers that snake their way through the growth. But the rugged landscape is not the only thing that makes this massive continent dark. Countless numbers of its native inhabitants suffer from a blindness that could have been prevented, had they been born a westerner.

A totally blind Beninois woman who's undergone surgery
to regain sight in one eye (photo by Vincent Zandri)

But in a developing West African country like Benin, which is sandwiched between Togo and Nigeria, a simple cataract can turn into a catastrophic loss of eyesight. Children in particular, who are born blind, become a terrible burden for their already-struggling-to-subsist parents. They don't know enough not to put their hands in a fire, or place them on a coal-burning stove or run out into the middle of a busy street. Their mothers can't afford to hire help to watch them. They also can't send them to a school for the blind, since no such school exists. In a country like Benin, where belief in voodoo can go hand in hand with a belief in Jesus Christ, a child born blind will often be looked upon as possessing an evil spirit. In many cases his or her parents will be accused of practicing witchcraft.

“Blindman” : A sightless man is processed for surgery
(photo by Vincent Zandri)

Take the case of Genevieve, a young mother of three blind children. When local villagers began to suspect her of practicing witchcraft, resulting in her children's blindness, she sought out the help of Mercy Ships, a global charity that has been providing ship-based medical care to the world's poor and impoverished for more than 30 years. The doctors aboard ship not only operated on her children but, for the first time ever, they were able to see their mother's face. Sight was so foreign to one of the children that he kept his eyes shut for a full day before mustering up the courage to finally open them.

Photos of the African Mercy's hold waiting area
(photo by Vincent Zandri)

It was moving stories like Genevieve's that drew me to Africa in the first place, and the hospital ship that cured her children's blindness. Having arrived in the Dark Continent however, I didn't want just to listen to the stories of the children and adults who have gained or regained their sight through shipboard surgery. I wanted to observe the miracle ship-board surgery firsthand.

Photos of the African Mercy's hold waiting area
(photo by Vincent Zandri)

It's aboard the Africa Mercy, a converted Danish train-ferry, presently docked at the busy Port of Cotonou for ten months, that I am led down into a surgical suite. Inside the narrow corridor, I'm brought to a waiting area that once served as the ship's hold. Now, it houses a few dozen partially or completely blind Beninois who, dressed in their traditional red, yellow, violet and green wrap-around skirts (for women) or loose pajama-like tops and bottoms (for men), anxiously await their turn at surgery.

Photos of the African Mercy's hold waiting area
(photo by Vincent Zandri)

The hold is not a pleasant place to be for a westerner like me, who is used to carpeted waiting rooms with soft Muzak filling the silent spaces, and glossy National Geographic Magazines to pass the time. The hold is a battleship-steel-enclosed hot and humid place. The acrid smell of diesel fuel and human sweat-laced with a rotting fish odor that blows in from the harbor - pervades the air. The consistency of the air is so thick it settles on the tongue and lips as a vapor. But the blind Beninois don't seem to mind the conditions one bit. In fact the Beninois seem at peace. Or happy to have been chosen as candidates for surgery aboard the Africa Mercy. In a land where blindness, disfiguring facial tumors, severe traumas and crippling polio can strike or occur without prejudice, Mercy Ships volunteers often find themselves in the precarious, if not sad position, of having to turn potential patients away.

“Colorsinline" ” A band of hopeful Beninois and Nigerians
wait for a full day and night in hopes of being accepted
for sugery... This photo was snapped jut minutes after
a riot was quelled (photo by Vincent Zandri)

I look at the faces of the waiting people caught inside the steel hold. Some of the faces are old, worn and wrinkled. Still others are young and beautiful, their skin a smooth, rich ebony, the whites of their eyes drawing me into them like two white lights emerging from parallel tunnels. An African woman who works for the ship is there to greet them. She holds a Bible in her right hand. She begins to lead the group in prayer in the Beninois’ native French. The praying starts off in a slow soft voice, but gradually builds into a roaring shout which reverberates against the steel walls. When the raucus prayer finally ends, the entire waiting room breaks out in a traditional song and dance.

“Blue Family”: A mother and her two small children await
the surgery verdict on a family member (photo by Vincent
Zandri)

Somehow a shirtless boy appears. He's carrying a drum or what's known as a djembe. He begins to pound out a kind of tribal rhythms to the song. After only a few moments, the hold is caught up in such a fevered frenzy of dancing, clapping, drumming and singing, that any semblance of medical facility has vanished.

Moments later comes my own moment of truth. I'm led back into the surgical suite, where I'm outfitted with scrubs. I'm given a pair of plastic booties to place over my trail boots. Quickly, I'm ushered to a place I've always known as strictly forbidden territory: the operating room.

Outside the closed steel door, I'm issued a strict warning. What I'm about to witness is gruesome. But despite my natural feeling of revulsion at the mere thought of a razor blade slicing into an eyeball, I know that the work occurring beyond that door is nothing short of miraculous. That bright notion in mind, I swallow a breath, and open the door.

I enter the operating room.

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