By Paul Bowers

A journalism student wins the trip of a lifetime and discovers the heartache and satisfaction of his true calling

In Guinea, in a village called Koundara, on a patch of dirt kicked bald by shuffling feet, there is a foosball table without a ball.

Weather has warped the playing surface, and the entire frame wobbles when a game is on. The children who gather around it substitute what they can for a ball: a rock, a bolt head, a plastic bottle cap.

Early this summer, I was there. It was part of a trip I took with Nicholas Kristof, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times. We spent two weeks traveling through five West African countries where we reported on health care issues and the personal side of development.

As I got soundly thrashed in foosball by a rotating lineup of boys, I tried to remember what summers were like when I was their age. Back then, I had the freedom to wrap myself up in simple pursuits—things like foosball. I could spend hours at a stretch catching crickets for my frogs or practicing my ping pong serve against my brother.

And then it hit me: This summer was no different.

Sure, my pursuit was a little bit more grown up. And the subject matter kept me from being carefree. But the same single-minded dedication was there. With no classes, no job, and no distractions, I was free to pursue one thing: journalism.

Of course, there were challenges. How do I get a handle on a country where I don’t know the language? How do I divorce myself from all my preconceived notions about Africa? How do I look a pregnant woman in the eyes and ask her how she lost her last baby?

And every day, I asked myself a question: How did I get here?

How I got there

I won a contest. That’s it. I never earned my chops. I went straight from writing for Carolina’s Daily Gamecock (with some freelance experience) to blogging and shooting video for The New York Times.

The contest was called Win-a-Trip, and the idea was that if I could convince Nick Kristof to take me with him, we’d fly to Africa and report together. So I spoke my piece, along with the other 900-plus entrants. I shot a video and wrote an essay and waited for months.

Later, when I asked Nick what he saw in me, he told me he liked the way I told stories. I was floored; Michael Jordan might as well have told me he liked my jumpshot.

On the ground

Several visas and a yellow fever vaccination later, I found myself in Dakar, Senegal, our first stop. I heard that Dakar is called the Paris of Africa, but there was no time to take in the culture. Instead, we did the same thing we did most days on the trip: We visited a hospital.

“We” meant Nick and me, along with Times videographer Patrick Farrell. The hospital was Hospital d’Enfants Albert Royer, the sort of place I had seen only in documentaries.

Despite the hopeful coats of purple and yellow paint on some of the interior walls, things looked bleak. Far removed from the clean efficiency of hospitals back home, this place had screen windows in lieu of air conditioning, and flies gathered on children who sat too still. There was only one oxygen mask in the room, and it was 18-month-old Ousseynou Thiam’s turn to use it.

Ousseynou, crumpled on a bed near the center of the room, arched his back and heaved his chest upward with each breath as he fought pneumonia for the second time. He was put on antibiotics after his first bout, but his parents couldn’t afford to finish the full course, so they discontinued it as soon as the symptoms stopped. Now they were spending about a month’s salary every day to keep him in the hospital.

Like many families we met on the trip, this one had the odds stacked against it. Ousseynou was born underweight, susceptible to infections from the start. In many West African hospitals, families are expected to bring their own food and to find and buy their own medicines. In other words, a trip to the hospital is in many ways a do-it-yourself ordeal.

The health care crisis

The health care systems we encountered on the trip were often like the foosball table without a ball. The playing surface was warped, and the basics were absent.

At one health center in Dára, Guinea Bissau, there was a sink but no running water, a solar panel but no electricity, awareness posters about the importance of iodine but no iodized salt. Pregnant women in many rural Sierra Leonean villages lack the transportation and passable roads to visit prenatal doctors in urban centers. Some doctors refuse to deliver babies unless they receive payment first.

The reasons for all this are legion: corrupt officials, inefficient bureaucracies, lack of infrastructure, global economic trends. One of the most frustrating things was that, while most of the deadly problems we encountered were both preventable and treatable, they were being neither prevented nor treated.

Pneumonia, as we have seen in the United States, can be controlled among the non-elderly and non-terminally ill. But in Dakar, a doctor said it was the No. 2 reason why children under age 5 were brought to his hospital. The No. 1 reason? Diarrhea.

This is not to say there was no good news in the field. We met qualified doctors who were reforming years of bad practice in the communities where they grew up, and we saw preventive iron supplements being added to the flour supply at a factory in Sierra Leone.

Lasting impressions

Still, it is impossible to think of the progress we saw without remembering the suffering. Months later, I am haunted by the sound of a woman wailing outside a clinic in Guinea. She had just had a stillbirth, and she was hunched low against the outside wall.

Nor will I forget the silence of the infants at a Doctors Without Borders feeding station in Sierra Leone. Malnourished and undernourished, they had glassy eyes and paper-frail skin. They did not cry.

On a brighter note, I can still taste the fibrous sweetness of the mangoes that friendly neighbors shook from their trees for us. I remember Mustapha Sonnie, the Helen Keller International worker from Sierra Leone who smiled his buoyant smile even after telling civil war stories. And I remember seeing the Milky Way for the first time on the night before we crossed into Liberia.

Stateside

Back home, everyday life took on a luxurious air: no bucket baths in the morning, no kidney-bruising truck rides during the day, no mosquito nets at night.

But in other ways, the remainder of my summer was a continuation of what I started in West Africa. I had a reporting internship in Charleston at the Post and Courier, and I got to keep trying journalism out on a daily basis.

I learned that it suits me. I learned that I can serve the disadvantaged with my work. I learned how to crawl into bed at the end of a workday and fall asleep immediately, exhausted and content.