Night Shift Nurse, Fasting Muslim

The alarm goes off at 2:30am. Not for fajr — for suhoor. I eat rice and beans standing over the kitchen sink in my scrubs, drink a litre of water so fast I nearly choke, pray two rakahs, and drive to Lagos Island General Hospital in the dark.

I am a nurse. I am fasting. The other nurses think this is medically inadvisable. They're probably right.

I reverted three years ago. Before Islam, I was a Sunday Catholic who hadn't been to mass in four years. I found Islam through a patient — a Hausa man named Alhaji Musa who was dying of liver cancer. He was in pain I cannot describe, but every time I entered his room, he said, 'Alhamdulillah.' Every single time.

I asked him once: how? How can you thank God when you're suffering like this? He said, 'Sister, I am thanking Him for you. He sent you to me.'

Alhaji Musa died on a Thursday. I took my shahada two months later.

Ramadan in a Lagos hospital is brutal. Twelve-hour night shifts. No food, no water, in a building where the air conditioning works maybe half the time. The heat in the wards is thick enough to swim through. My colleagues break for supper at midnight — jollof rice and fried plantain from the canteen — and I sit in the stairwell with my water bottle and my prayer mat, waiting for the clock to tick past Maghrib.

But there's something about fasting while caring for others that strips everything back to what matters. I have held the hands of people leaving this world while my own stomach growled. I have washed the wounds of strangers while my mouth was parched. There is no purer form of worship than service. I am sure of this.

The other nurses have started asking questions. Not mocking ones — curious ones. Why do I seem calmer during Ramadan? Why do I never complain about the overtime? One nurse, Chioma, asked if she could fast with me for a day. She lasted until 2pm and said, 'Your God asks a lot.' I told her He gives more.

Last Ramadan, on the night of the 27th, I was monitoring a premature baby in the NICU. Tiny thing, barely a kilogram. I made du'a over that incubator like it was a prayer mat. I whispered Ayat al-Kursi so quietly only Allah and that baby could hear.

The baby survived. She went home on Eid.

Her mother named her Baraka. My name. The name I chose when I became Muslim. It means blessing.

I don't know if my du'a saved that child. But I know that standing in a hospital at 3am, fasting and exhausted and speaking to God over an incubator — that is the closest I have ever been to understanding why I was put on this earth.