She had to be on the road by 7:30 if she had any hope of reaching the village by 10, when, in principle, the women would start gathering with their children. They, the nurses aide, Marie-Rose Kablan, the driver, Kouakou, and herself, had last bounced over the rutted back piste road 8 weeks ago, on schedule with her round of village visitations.  She recalled how marvelously the sun streamed through the canopy of upper branches dancing mottled light on their vehicle. She compared the effect to strobe lights in a disco, but Marie-Rose, having gone to a training school in the booming capital city, actually knew far more of discos than Adrian.

    The concrete block structure which housed the maternal and child care clinic stood apart from the U shaped two story hospital itself. The clinic stayed dank in dry and rainy seasons alike, the paint scabrous, the smells of antiseptic overwhelming, the hum of the vaccine freezer hopeful. The place served as her office, her prison, her laboratory on human regeneration, imperfection and death.

     Neither the driver nor Marie Rose were waiting for her even though she had reminded them repeatedly yesterday that they had to be on time. Angrily, she marched as quickly as possible to the row of bungalows, her rain hood up, her clumsy boots sucking at the thick red laterite mud of West Africa. Madame Aminatta Sidi Ya Ya, the younger of Dr. Honore Sidi Ya Ya’s two wives , waved enthusiastically as Adrian approached the most imposing of the compound’s  residences with its large terrazzo terrace and slatted widow shutters to shadow the dry season sun. The younger wife, no yam stuffed big mama, had the high cheek plains, the sharper features and the immense black eyes of the Sahelian Malenke. She could actually read and write French having miraculously finished the equivalence of the 6^th grade before being presented to Dr. Sidi Ya Ya  as a  much-prized literate wife. Adrian enjoyed the teas with Aminatta, giving her English lessons and listening to her secret wishes and dreams, which were mostly the same as those of young women everywhere before they became irreversibly caught in the rut of life.

     “It is your friend who preoccupies you,” Aminatta said in French putting emphasis on the masculine form of the noun.

     ”It is hardly that. I must go to Duekue village this morning for the vaccination day, and the driver has not showed up and neither has Marie Rose.”

     Her patron, the District Medical Director, still dressed in his morning bou bou, but shaved and well-cologned, showed little surprise to see her at this early hour. Adrian had often been in his house at all hours and was becoming almost like a third wife. In her first months with everything so new he guided her through the bureaucratic rituals of the French-styled public health department as well as the myths and realities of health problems in this forest area of West Africa. Before he left her on her own, they had worked closely together massaging bellies, assuaging hysteria, probing birth canals, wrestling with breech blocked deliveries, slicing into tortured abdomens .His cologne had drugged her while she and the mid wife, Madame Abouri, flooded sweat as they freed an infant alive or dead from the womb’s strangle hold.  In those beginning weeks, he had clogged her murky dreams, and. before finally letting go to sleep in the African darkness with the howls and cries of the night animals, she had wished herself incorporated into the warm security of his household.

      This morning she only needed his signature on the form before the unhelpful garagiste would give her the keys to the Peugeot bache. She had exhausted her patience with the driver, Kouakou, no longer caring about his weakness for palm wine nor his always dying relatives. She would drive herself. The District Medical Director lectured her like a wise elder, a big brother more appropriately for he was only 34, cautioning her gravely about the treachery of these back roads, and saying ‘What does it matter if you can’t reach Duekue Village today or even tomorrow. There will always be another time for the vaccinations, and there will always be the dying and those meant to die in spite of all our skill and all our medicines.’

     In the house, Madame  Fatou Sidi Ya Ya, the senior wife, readied  two children for primary school, while a third, a toddler, appeared at the door and tried to greet those on the terrace with unrecognizable words and gurgles. The servant girl, a poor relation as most were, scooped him up, and retreated into the house. No child ever seemed to cry in this corner of Africa. Someone was always there for comfort, or to provide closeness in a back pouch of swaddled cloth. Soon the District Medical Director would have four children running about his house, for Aminatta was six months gone, the fact being well disguised by her loose fitting caftan with its high collar of embroidered gold thread. Would he keep their bellies always full until they, the two wives were worn and old at 40? She saw them in their beds at night, he alternating fairly as he must do to keep the peace among wives. 

      Her Frank, her bush ‘husband’, came down the 50 ‘klicks’  most every month from the Ag Station  where he advised  farmers and entrepreneurs on the debeaking, vaccination  and  cooping  of chickens.  Fueled by cheap Algerian wine, they tended to their needs repeatedly during the day and a half weekend. Each time, she saw a shriveled , dehydrated infant, its blackness turned white like the bellies of  geckoes. She could be its resurrection, and pleaded that each desperate release might just re-create a life. These fantasies faded quickly, however, with the smell of him, poultry, which persisted no matter how often he showered in her miniscule douche, no matter how intensely Blais washed and rewashed his jeans and T shirts, no matter how much air they let course through the small bungalow. If she had been bolder, she would have asked her patron for a bit of his cologne for her man. He would have understood in his silent, sphinx-like way.

       Today on the terrace with her determination fixed, Dr. Sidi Ya Ya, did not lecture her further as he signed the necessary form for the vehicle. He promised he would speak to Kouakou, himself, but he wouldn’t for it would bring shame on the chauffeur’s family to reprimand him. No, things would go one as usual. Schedules and the work ethic meant little here.

      Marie Rose appeared at 8, dropped off at the gate of the compound by her older ‘cousin’ of the national gendarmerie. “Cest absolutment impossible.  M’selle Adrian couldn’t be so foolish to think that she who has never driven on the muddy piste in the heavy rains will insist on going to Duekue Village today.”  The full bodied nurse’s aid wore her uniform a size too small on purpose, causing the appropriate stir among the men of the clinic and the town. With her perfectly lacquered fingernails gleaming through steam sterilizers, urinating infants, alcohol swabs, and with a  gold chain about an ankle, a gift from ‘cousin’ Sergeant Coulibaly, no doubt,  Marie Rose could be  frivolous, to say the least , but then she did have some training.

     With no chauffeur to help, it took over one half hour to load vaccines, cold boxes, syringes, medical kits, bed nets and all into the back of the Peugeot pick up. Marie Rose Abouri fussed continuously: “Americans are all crazy.” “I am sick myself, Mademoiselle Adrian. I shall not go.”

      “You will go, Mademoiselle Kablan. You are as healthy as they come.” 

      On the road at last, the rain miraculously stopped. Bulbous dark gray clouds hung low almost scraping the top branches of hundred foot tall mahogany trees like so many hippos lumbering past in their nocturnal grazing. Adrian skirted the mud holes, sometimes going off the dirt road itself.  Ruts left by the big trucks which gathered the coffee harvest were so deep that they trapped the tires of the Peugeot, forcing her to drive as if on rails confined to one inescapable course. The sun burned a path through the low clouds, warming pools of standing water. Butterflies by the hundreds rose in gratitude. ‘I will miss the unexpected beauty of this place,’ Adrian said to herself.

      Once stuck deep in the mud, Marie Rose yelled and ranted, while Adrian climbed from the truck and piled forest debris at the rear wheels as she had witnessed Kouakou do. With her uniform all spotted with  red laterite mud, looking diseased itself, she shifted the gears in first and in reverse several times before  they gained more solid ground and continued on. Ahead they met a slow-moving market truck over-ladened with manioc yams and bags of charcoal. It pulled off the road to let them pass. The driver and his two helpers waved and gave their greetings. A calmer, coquettish Marie Rose waved back. “It is best to always respond, not snub anyone. They might be some distant relative, you never know, and here in Africa word would surely come back to you.”

      Adrian had heard that often. “But get too close to those ‘cousins’, Mademoiselle, those who travel all the roads,  greeting  too many women , and  something horrible  will surely come back to you,” she said to herself

      In Duekue village, six women and their babies waited by the  two room primary school. Built of cement block and parged over with stucco, it represented the most substantial building among 30 ‘hard’ houses  and a dozen or so traditional mud brick structures in this comparatively prosperous village. The young mothers were dressed in their most colorful print cloth pagnas, and all wore their dowries of gold bracelets. As they shook each hand, Adrian wondered about the others.

      “More will come now,” Marie Rose said, and  almost as she spoke the women began  streaming from the houses and outdoor compounds not wanting to be uncounted in the gathering, as much social as  beneficial, and, with the coffee harvest in, having little excuse to be absent.

      While Adrian felt useful in administering the shots and dropping the oral polio into frozen little mouths, the record revealed that two children had died since their last visit of dehydration brought on by malarial fever, and one girl of 16, a lovely long-necked creature with wide, alert eyes had expired trying to give birth to her first child.

     Now, this one with the long fingers and the  smooth dark skin, this robust baby girl we’re saving from measles, polio ,diphtheria and the rest, she would  surely survive also  malaria,  snake bites,  blinding parasites. She would grow into a long, limbed beauty, but abruptly desert the abundance of her village, her promised dowry of gold bracelets, and follow the inviting road down to the city. Adrian shuddered for she saw the grown girl in the ward of no return, feverish, skeletal, her dreams having been shattered by the unrelenting demands of unfamiliar urban streets.