The Mundele

By Sylvie Boivin

It is the true story of a nurse who worked for 10 years with humanitarian organizations .She was 45 years old when she decided to quit everything to live this adventure. She was dealing every day with death and life .Despite all her good wills, she found herself in dangerous situation, she became a war nurse. Her journey brought her to Azerbaijan , in the jungle of Sierra Leone and Congo, in the desert of Chad, in Thailand and in Timor Leste .She couldn't imagine how this adventure would change her life. This story is full of emotion,it will make you laugh and cry,however in some chapters it will disturb a little your feelings by the hardness of its contents.You have been warmed .....

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sylvie Boivin
• Release date: Dec 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370618361

Sylvie Boivin

Sylvie Boivin is a retired nurse who has worked for more than 40 years in various hospital.At the age of 45 she decided to leave everything behind and to work with humanitarian organization in different country abroad. She has a bachelor degree in nursing .This book started as a therapy based on her terrible experiences during these 10 years fighting to save lives ,dealing every day with disease and death .She is married with 2 daughters and lives in Canada with her husband.

Book preview

Chapter 1

It is too late to reconsider my decision. It is what I am thinking, sat on this plane which will bring me towards the man who has shared my life for now sixteen years. He left two months ago. He accepted this work in Azerbaijan as Financial Controller. It gave me time to sell the house, the car and the furniture before my departure. That was not an easy decision to take. My two daughters, now adults, were comfortably settled in their own life. I never left my country, except for two weeks vacation per year taken with my ex-husband .We ran away from the rigors of the winter and enjoyed a well deserved rest to regain some energy to survive another year.

So far, I was close to my family. I was the strongest link. I had regular contacts with my brothers and sisters. We usually met on Sunday at the parent’s house to eat together and to discuss. Now, it is different, I am leaving at least for a year, and it can be more, towards the unknown. I don’t know what will be my future. It is called jumping off the plane without parachute, to face the insecurity, uncertainty and leave everything behind for an adventure.

I was well installed, in a comfortable life with my daily routine, getting up in the morning, going to the office. In the evening, I was preparing the meal for the kids, then watching television and taking a hot bath before going to bed. What helped me to make this decision to leave, it was this impression of emptiness I was feeling continuously. I managed to do my work but without enthusiasm. However this job was interesting. I was working from Monday to Friday, from eight to four, and I wasn’t working during the week-end. However there was inside me this feeling of futility and a very great nostalgia which I couldn’t find the source. Finally after an intense introspection, I could discover what was wrong with me. I felt that it was not what I wanted to do with my life or what remained of it.

My objective in life was to help others, I knew very young that I wanted to become a nurse or a doctor. It was something that was clear in my head. I was dreaming of comforting the people in need and suffering from disease. I remember my first year as a nurse, I had a maximum of four patients to take care of, therefore much time for psychotherapy and for listening to these people affected by disease, frightened by the possibility of dying. I was reassuring them, giving them hope, providing them with quality health care. After sometimes, the government cut the budgets and the things worsened. Instead of four patients, a nurse had a whole section of patients to take care of, approximately twelve to fourteen patients, and so no time for psychotherapy, reassuring words and listening. The patients had become numbers and it was necessary to minimize hospitalization period for a better financial output. The patients had to recover as soon as possible. The patients were released almost invalid to do their convalescence at home, often alone with little assistance.

These events highly contributed to help me making up my mind. This was not what I was expecting from my profession. At the end of the day, I wasn’t feeling good, I didn’t have any longer this satisfaction of well done work but I was feeling powerless. I felt useless and exhausted, and often depression came to visit me. I was always sad, I wanted to give a purpose to my life and I wasn’t finding any more happiness and satisfaction with my job.

Sat on this plane which will bring me to destination, I wondered what was waiting for me. The plane is ready to take off, the noise of the engines increases, the anxiety grows inside me and I want to unbuckle my seat belt and rush out of this plane. Why running away? To do what? Return to this life of comfort and security but so much boring and empty? Live a life without challenge, without stimuli? I was affected by frustration of not being able to pose gestures of love and comfort which are there inside me, ready to be dispensed but imprisoned because of lack of time to achieve what I wished more. Should I continue in this routine, days after days, working like a robot without feeling? No, it is not what I want to do with my life. I need to open the barriers and release this love sleeping in my chest, this unconditional love that never dies. I need to relieve me from this suffering which chokes me in order to live with a lighter heart. Giving love is soothing. It is the cure to ease the pain and with this thought, I felt asleep to awake in Paris and to take my connecting flight Paris-Baku. I didn’t know at this time that my exile was going to last more than one year and how the events during this adventure were going to change my life and to change me, as human being.

Here I am in this adventure, the anxiety is always there, but on a more controllable level. I am daydreaming of my future and of what is waiting for me. The flight went well, without turbulence it was the shortest part of the trip, only five hours.

Upon my arrival at destination, I received my first cultural shock. Azeri don’t understand what the meaning of line up. It is a total mess, it is chaos, they are three of front and they are struggling to pass a head of everyone. They do not have respect for anybody, threading between the other passengers who are from different nationality and they are deaf to any unpleasant comment coming from the other passengers. They are in their native land; they gained their independence against URSS in 1991. Azerbaijan was a soviet republic. Nowadays, it is an independent country.

The Nagorno Karabakh territories were occupied by Armenians by the time I was there .The Azeri did not succeed in driving them out. This caused the displacement of eight hundred thousand persons from these occupied land (from where the name of displaced people) toward less dangerous areas. The Azerbaijani government granted plots of land to allow them to start again a new life and to rebuild what they have lost.

Azerbaijan or rather, the Republic of Azerbaijan is an important part of the Eurasian continent. It is the largest as well as the most populated region in South Caucasus. Located between Europe and Asia, its capital is Baku. The official language is Azeri and the currency is the Manat. This former Soviet Republic is bordered by Armenia and Turkey in the West, Georgia in the North-West, Russia in the North, and Iran in the South.

The formalities at the customs went fast and my bags arrived quickly. I went through the customs without any problem and there he was. The man who was going to become my companion of life in this adventure, the witness of my ups and downs, the supporter of my joys and my sorrows, was there, in all the splendor of his smile, with his brilliant eyes of happiness and with nice flowers in his hands. Despite the long journey and tiredness, I felt invaded by a huge sensation of tenderness and wellbeing. I tightened myself in his arms, my head resting on his chest. At this moment, my courage returned and my fears melt like snow under the sun. I had tears in my eyes but they were tears of happiness.

A vehicle with driver was expecting us and we left for the apartment located in the center of Baku. It was the evening and traffic was fluid. I was nevertheless impressed by how fast they drive, not taking into consideration the traffic lights. It was safer to stop at the green light to check if a car was coming from the other side since nobody was caring about the red light. What I did not know at this time, was how much driving a car in Baku was going to continue to impress me every day. I have seen just a tiny part of it.

Chapter 2

My first impression of the apartment was pleasant, it was well decorated, and the furniture was simple. It seemed well located, on the second floor of a building giving on a corner of a street with a park in front with lot of green and statues. Another park with fountains and a pedestrian area was right across the street, although it was quite a challenge to cross while remaining alive.

My first week was rather painful with the jet lag. I wasn’t able to sleep well at night because according to my biological rhythm, the night was the day for my body. I thus spent these first days sleeping during the day or at least drowsing. The first night, I felt asleep towards six o’clock to be awaked a few hours later by an infernal cacophony of horns coming from the street. While looking by the window, I noticed that a traffic light was just at the corner of the street right below our apartment. The noise was unbearable even with the windows closed. The Azeri men are obsessed with horns. It is like a pride for them. They won’t hesitate to invest $ 800 on a horn even if the vehicle is all rusted and not worth more than the value of the horn. Cacophony was especially caused when the traffic light changed from red to green. The drivers try to pass in front of the other vehicles by threading between the least free spaces in order to be the first on the front line. Nobody lets pass anybody, it is the race for who will be the first to take off. There are four vehicles in front where there was supposed to have two vehicles side by side only. As a result, congestion right below the traffic light occurred blocking the way in both directions. The same scenario was repeated around four o’clock in the afternoon up to seven o’clock in the evening.

By gradually decreasing my sleeping hours during the day, I regained a normal rhythm after one week and I finally could sleep my full nights alongside my husband.

I was spending my days reading and watching television. My husband spent his days at the office up to six or seven o’clock in the evening. Time slipped by slowly and I started to become bored. I finally decided to explore the vicinity and to leave my loneliness behind. I decided to go to the park across the street in front of the apartment. To do that, I should succeed first to cross the street, which was not an easy thing. In Baku, there are two kinds of pedestrians; the quick and the dead. The pedestrians do not have any priority for a driver .The only way of not being hit by a car is to cross at the traffic light and still, you should make sure that the cars are really stopped.

Having succeeded this first step, I was agreeably surprised to meet so many people on the pedestrian area. The majority of them were young men who seemed to wander without goal. They were looking at the girls dressed up like Parisian latest fashion models, wearing overdone make up, transparent blouses and jeans so tight not hiding anything of their forms. I was expecting more decency from Azeri women. I thought that the women were supposed to hide their hair under a veil, the majority being Muslim. I did not see any woman wearing veil. All of them expose their assets however they never look at the men. They hold hands and they stay together. The men look at them, pass some comments between them but they do not approach them.

The pedestrian zone is bordered with shops, mainly clothes for different budgets. There are also restaurants, including pizzerias. Every twenty meters, there is a florist stand. The flowers are very popular especially the roses which are very cheap compared to my country. I was buying regularly fresh bunch of roses.

The buildings are also very well maintained, and what is interesting in this pedestrian precinct, it is the style of the buildings well preserved compared to others that look like shoe boxes in gray cement; purely Soviet style. These buildings are mainly apartments with balconies.

This is when the idea of moving there came to me. I was sitting on a bench, reading and looking at people passing by when two young men approached me and came to sit down on my bench. They spoke to me with very limited English, asking whether I could converse with them so that they can practice their English. I explained to them with what little word I knew in English that I didn’t speak English, and that I spoke French only. That didn’t seem discouraging them because they told me that they would like to learn French as well and that if I was available they would like to converse with me. I agreed to teach them some concepts of basic informal talk, such as easy sentences. After some time, I understood that they wanted only to learn some phrase to approach foreigner like me, to learn how to say in French voulez vous coucher avec moi. I could understand in their basic English that the girls of Baku weren’t easy to approach. They found them beautiful and attractive and even if they got dressed in order to attract the stare of men, it was impossible to speak to them or to touch them. The obligation to remain virgin until the marriage was still very important. To have sexual relations before the marriage was considered a serious dirty mistake and the girl can be rejected or regarded as soiled if she was not virgin. The man can refuse to marry her. Some men can be very cruel towards their wife if they realize that she was not a virgin. They see