“Baturiya,” said a little voice as I briskly walked through our critical care unit. I whipped around curiously to see who was calling me “white woman” in Hausa. To my surprise the voice belonged to a small boy of about two years, who was sitting on the floor and eating from a small bowl of rice with his right hand. He seemed unnerved by my presence as he glanced up at me and said baturiya again with a hint of tease in his eyes. Most kids around his age are extremely shy or frightened around white people, especially since they associate white people (or anyone in a white coat) in hospitals with vaccinations and needles. However, the boy seemed too innocent to even understand what was going on around him in the hospital with all the nurses and doctors bustling about and ill patients lying in their beds, more than half of them being children. The boy was sitting on a plastic woven mat between his grandmother’s hospital bed and another bed that was occupied by a baby girl. I continued onto the next unit while the boy nonchalantly licked the ball of rice off his hands.

The following few days I observed the boy while his father and tanti were taking care of his sick grandmother. He would run around the medical ward with just a shirt on and his yellow squeaky shoes, unashamedly go up to other patients and their caregivers and start chatting with them. Rather than being disturbed by this young wily intruder, patients and their caretakers were smitten with his toothy smile and his lively eyes. He started to take notice of me again after I playfully patted his bottom walking by. Before I knew it, I started to feel a little hand hit the back of my leg while trying to sort through medications at the nursing cart. Before turning around, I could hear his squeaky shoes and cackling laughter as he raced around the corner. We played this game as I worked through my shift. What a little stinker.

The critical care unit was heavy that week. One day in particular, another nurse and I were going from one bed to the next trying to provide respiratory support for some pediatric patients. As we were intervening for a baby girl in septic shock, I again felt a little hand hit my leg. I knew it was my small friend. Briefly, I turned around and saw that he was holding a large sewn blanket and pulling on my wrapped skirt while whining some words in Hausa. His tanti said that he wanted me to carry him on my back with the blanket, like the women normally do here with their babies. His little cries tugged at my heart and for a split second I almost abandoned my post with the baby girl who needed my immediate attention. Turning my back was a rejection to him and I heard him crying as his tanti picked him up and tried to distract him. His little tantrum flattered me–me, a baturiya.

The boy’s grandmother was well enough to go home that evening. The family packed up their things, expressed their gratitude to the team and I said farewell to my small friend. I did not realize it until the next day at work, with his presence greatly missing, that the squeaky sound of his yellow shoes was like a shout of joy throughout the medical ward.