On lessons learned in the Gambia

Eight years ago, I was sitting on a narrow wooden bench at the back of a small lecture theater at the University of Sydney when the lecturer on normative ethics mentioned a quote often misattributed to Joseph Stalin: "A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths are a statistic." I think of those words often. I thought of them a year ago, as I sat on a broken plastic chair beside a bare metal bed in a hospital without doctors, deep in the West African bush, while I manually ventilated a 3-month-old infant with pneumonia. Only minutes earlier, his mother, a young Fula woman with indigo ink facial markings and red-gold hoop earrings, had called out in a language I did not understand but with an urgency I did. Her son was still, too still to be sleeping.