IN SIERRA LEONE we always had a doctor when we needed one, and that doctor was my father. When I was a baby, a measles outbreak in the country caused scores of children to die. We—my brother, sister, and I—all fell sick. The spots even covered the insides of our mouths. We could neither eat nor drink. My father was upcountry fighting the epidemic and beyond reach by telephone, for this was the 1960s. So my mother, remembering what he had taught her, shook a bottle of Fanta to release the gas and let us sip the flat beverage—to rehydrate us and as a replacement for sugar and salts. Finally, she reached a colleague of my father’s who came by, and after checking us, put my brother on a drip. When it seemed we were through the worst of it, my mother ran to the expensive store across the street and bought imported cherry ice cream, spooning it half melted down our raw throats.
The first few years of my childhood, my father took over from a colleague a clinic in Koidu, a remote outpost, best known for diamond mining. Despite its mineral riches, Sierra Leone was then, and still is, one of the world’s poorest countries in the world, a so-called “health care desert,” to use the terminology of the aid agencies. During those childhood years, I had the usual range of ailments that come with life in the tropics. Despite my father’s entreaties, I refused to wear my sandals when I played outdoors and thus contracted hookworm. I cuddled my dogs and ended up with a tick burrowed deep in my ear canal, which my father extracted with long tweezers. He lanced my tropical boils; the scar left by one intervention is still visible on my neck. Sundays, we stripped to our knickers and lined up in front of our mother, who sat by the window for inspection. Tumbu flies, sometimes called mango flies or flies, are a species of blowfly that lay their eggs in soil where the newly hatched larvae attach themselves to mammals: a reclining dog, say, or a child making mud pies. Then they burrow under the skin of their host and feed on blood until they hatch. My mother would scan our skin for evidence of the larvae in the form of a pimple, one with a pinprick-size hole in the top. She would reach into the tub of Vaseline petroleum jelly she kept by her side and place a dab upon the
