A Quirky Memory of Village life

When I was expecting Michelle, we lived in a small African town.
After I had her, the neighbours saw me hanging nappies on the line and came over to introduce themselves and ask to see the baby.

It turned out that they had seen my pregnant tum when I took the bread dough to rise on the Verandah every morning. They thought I had a nasty husband if he was insisting I make bread every day while I was pregnant. (Actually, Andy had never insisted on any such thing. He wasn't unreasonable like that).
Then they noticed there was no more bread rising on the Verandah and realised I must have had the baby, and they couldn't contain themselves when they saw nappies on the line.

That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship with Ann and Christine. Christine's daughter Natalie was 6 weeks older than Michelle and she was living with Ann, her sister, and her husband Mark. Mark sadly died in his sleep of a massive heart attack when he was only in his early 40s.

There is no privacy in a Village, but there is the most wonderful support. You can count on your neighbours in a village the way you can't in a city.

Another memory is of Christine's daughter having serious diarrhoea, which is a killer for babies. They and the doctors tried everything but Natalie wasn't responding to treatment and people were very worried about her. Then the local La Leche League stepped in and donated expressed breast milk for her. Barbara and I were two of the donors. Thank God it worked! It was the only thing Natalie could keep down so we kept it up for about a week after she had recovered. She could well have died without it. We reasoned that she was a human baby and not a calf and we thought the milk of her own species would be best for her, and so it turned out.