FSC #105 Norway - November 2017 -
Ina Wroldsen -
St.
Peter
I just found the backstory behind this song, and it shooked my to tears.
This song has been playing in my head ever since, and it befits the situation in which the world is in today.
When Ina Wroldsen traveled to Rwanda with Plan, she was not prepared for all the fates she was going to meet. As a mother in a resource-rich country like Norway, it is difficult to imagine the despair and fear of parents with children who are so sick that they can hardly breathe anymore. Help is waiting. There is no space, time or resources to save everyone. One of the fates Ina met in Rwanda shook her so hard that it became a song. A song that tells a story so strong that it takes your breath away.
“My trip to Rwanda with Plan was tougher than I could have imagined, and that afternoon at the hospital with Little Bertie was so heartbreakingly surreal that it somehow felt like it wasn't happening at all.
A woman my age was sitting in the queue outside the "hospital" when we arrived, and for some reason our eyes met. I've never seen such sad and desperate eyes before ..
Her gaze joined me in the infirmary with Bertie, and after a little while, it began to bump into deadly sick kids with their parents.
Number three in line was a little boy named Peter. He was completely apathetic. His mother came in with a little baby tied in a towel on her back, she was the woman with her eyes from the queue.
When Peter's little body was about to give up, he wore on, and she began to panic. Her baby was screaming all the time, so I took him while she took Peter to the toilet to wash him.
I stood there in the sun in a beautiful country, working on my own tears (they help no one) as I feverishly tried to calm the child in my arms, with no luck, with "Mikkel reef" and "Bæ bæ little lamb".
I saw a mother who could have been me, without any kind of help or safety net; try washing his hot feverish boy with cold water on a soil floor ..
I'll never forget it.
When we had to leave, she took my hand, looked at me with that look again and said "God bless you". I thought that this is hell and that there is no God here, only demons in the form of mosquitoes, hunger and bacteria.
It couldn't be more unfair.
I had a line of text in my head, in the car on the way back and it was "In the middle of hell lies a little St. Peter" ..
I returned to the house and wrote the song. Right from the heart. And I prayed. Because there, in that situation, there was nothing else to do.
That's the most fucking thing I've been to. "
Ina Wroldsen