Listen man, you're dur-ing.

Life is all about timing. You miss a train by 5 seconds; you make a train by 5 seconds. You get to the counter and grab the last chocolate croissant or someone else grabs it before you can get to it. You get to the pump before someone locks it up for the morning or you have to hope you have enough water in your water container to last you another 12 hours. To cite more examples would be slightly redundant, but you get the point. Timing is important.

And things that take a while often frustrate people or otherwise overly inconvenience those same people. When my brother was little he used to say, “But it takes too long, and you know how I hate that.”

So why do people procrastinate? Some people work better under pressure. Some people have more pressing needs to deal with (a job, money making opportunity, a family). Some people are just bad at prioritizing. And, some people just don’t want to pursue a course of action so they keep putting it off.

In the United States procrastination is seen as something to laugh about especially when you’re in college, high school, or something along those lines.

But sometimes, it’s not funny, and sometimes it can have dire consequences.

In French the verb durer means along the lines of “to take a long time”. You can say, “Man, I’ve really dured here” meaning “I’ve been here for a while”. “That meeting really dured” (Jeez, that meeting took a while). And while dur-ing isn’t always bad, the connotation certainly isn’t good.

The other day I was helping out with prenatal consultations and this pregnant woman comes in because she is having contractions. Gold star- seriously. Sometimes it’s incredibly difficult to get women to give birth at the health center because it’s either too far away from their home, they think it’s too expensive (which is ridiculous because it’s free- the state absorbs the cost), or something along those lines.

So then when we find out more information such as her previous birth had been with a c-section and that our midwives had actually told her to come in a week beforehand so they could discuss plans for giving birth in Koudougou (because of the danger of Uterine rupture after a C-section they like to refer women to the hospital for the birth immediately following the c-section. After that, it’s fine to give birth at the health center). 

Alright, so maybe a silver star at the moment but the woman is at the health center and that’s what’s important.

Now we have to get this woman to Koudougou quickly. And this seems like a job for the ambulance. But, ironically enough, the ambulance is actually in Koudougou picking up our supply of medications for the month of June. So we call the driver and explain that he should probably hurry back. As luck would have it, he was only about 10 minutes away so we waited for a bit and explained that we were going to refer the woman to Koudougou for her own health. So everything’s good the ambulance shows up we get the door open and…

Where’d the husband go? Apparently he went home to get something. What he went to get we don’t know but we’re all sitting around waiting for the husband and finally he shows up…with nothing. So while that was confusing we finally have the ambulance, pregnant woman, the husband, and their entourage. Awesome, go time. So we get the pregnant woman in the ambulance and what happens- she has the baby. Oops. Now it’s truly a debate as to which is more comfortable the birthing table in the maternity ward or the floor of the ambulance but there is definitely more room in the former.

As it turns out nothing ruptured and the mother and child were both fine. But we did speak to the father about how we were lucky and that he should not have spent as much time doing…whatever he was doing. And he just smiled at us and said that everything will work out, and we tried to impress upon him the importance of helping everything to work out.

Later that day all the midwives and I were sitting around just chatting and one of the midwives said something along the lines of, “People don’t like to go to Koudougou. So in the end they make up reasons not to go. They dure at the house, they just continually say no, or they say they don’t have money (again…for pregnant woman the state absorbs the cost (more or less)). And, the end result is dangerous”.

I guess now I’ve found another project to occupy my time here- convincing people about the benefits of care at a hospital and explaining that there are some things we cannot do here in the village and that you can’t really put a price on your health.