Eight Years Under The White Coat Poem by Martins Akhoeneto

For eight years, Sameco kept my footsteps
beneath its white and weathered roof
eight years of pulse and peril,
of blood arriving before morning,
of hope trembling beneath fluorescent light.

I have watched the night grow old
beside a patient's failing pulse,
counting each beat like borrowed coins,
while sleep waited outside the door.

I have stitched torn flesh
until wounds surrendered their red arguments;
immobilised broken limbs
and taught fractured bones the patience of healing.
I have held words like lamps
before a boy who lost a digit to an accident,
speaking courage into the darkness
where his missing finger used to be.

I remember the father
whose one-year-old child was taken by severe anaemia
a tiny life arriving too late
for medicine to bargain with death.
Some nights still carry that silence.

And the woman in labour
bent beneath a million pains,
her body a narrow bridge
between blood and birth,
between a cry and a new name.
I have stood near that threshold
and watched life enter the world screaming.

Sameco taught me that medicine
is not only the science of saving;
sometimes it is the courage
to remain when saving is no longer possible.

I remember the roads too
Auchi to Aviele,
morning dust rising like old prayers,
and that stubborn artery of traffic
from Polytechnic Gate to Zongo,
where the road itself seemed to forget
how to move.

Still, I went.

Day after day.
Night after night.
Shift after shift
the road carrying my body,
the hospital carrying my name,
and duty carrying whatever remained of me.

I deputised, administered,
stood where I was needed,
championed the work,
and gave the years their blood and breath.

Eight years
passed through my hands
like water I could not hold.

Now I ask no monument from them,
only that they remember me kindly.

For I am beginning to dream
of a door with my own name upon it,
a practice where my hands may labour
without the weight of another's command,
where my hours belong to purpose,
not merely to pressure.

May the road eventually open.
May my feet find their ground.

And when they do,
I will look back at Sameco
not merely as the place where I worked,
but as the difficult country
through which I became.