“Have you ever committed a crime?” I ask her.
“Crime? No, not really. Never stole anything from anyone. The only crime I committed is that I am not a better mother.”
“What were the streets like?”
“Been cut. Been punched. Been robbed. Been kicked. Haven’t been raped. Not yet, at least. That’s one good thing, I guess. I have to thank Pedro for that.”
“Who is Pedro?”
“Pedro is my marido.” Marido, she says, meaning “lover.”
“Lover,” I say. “That’s kind of a weird word to use.”
“I guess you would say he is my husband, the father of Natalia and Maria.” I suppose most street children don’t hold a traditional wedding ceremony.
“So Pedro protected you on the streets,” I say.
“Oh, yes.” She nods fervently. “He protected me from the other street boys, the adults, and the pimps.”
“Do all street girls have ‘lovers’?”
“If they are smart, they have one. Otherwise, they are going to get gang-raped.” She gives me a look that tells me it is important to understand this fact. “Without a lover, it is going to happen, sooner or later.”
“So, do you love Pedro?”
“Oh, yes.” She walks outside to see what Natalia is doing. I follow her. “Pedro and I met when we were first on the streets, and then we both ended up in the home I lived in before this one. I am one of the lucky ones who actually loves my lover, my protector. Other girls just find the strongest street boy and become his. I guess it is better to give it up to one person than to give it up to dozens. Besides, what’s love all about anyway? You need to survive first before anything else.” We look down at Natalia, who is looking down at Raquel, who swims in an imaginary river.
“Where is Pedro now?”
“Oh, he sells gum on the streets near the hospital and then goes to an adolescent boys’ home at night.”
“Do you miss him?”
“Oh, he visits me every day and gives me money.”
“Where is your sister?”
“She is staying at another street girls’ home uptown.”
“So how long are you going to stay here?”
“As long as they will let me. I try to do my chores and stay out of trouble. Hopefully Pedro and I can make enough money to rent a small room somewhere nearby.”
“Great. Maybe I can help you a little when you make that decision.”
“That would be good. Ummm. Dr. Chi, can you take a look at my baby? Her name is Maria. She has liquid poo-poo.”
“Oh, you mean she has diarrhea.”
“Yes, diarrhea.”
We enter into a dimly lit room on the first level. Posters of Latino pop singers with coiffed hair decorate the walls. In the far corner of the room lies a little ball of wrapped cloth. I unwrap the cloth and a tiny baby appears. She gives a small whimper. Dark grayish blue bags surround her eyes.
“When was the last time she cried for food?”
“She hasn’t cried in a day or so. She is not her usual self anymore.”
“Has she had a fever?”
“She has been warm and sweaty.”
“Warm and sweaty?”
“Yes. We don’t have a thermometer.”
I give Maria a thorough examination, and I tell Daniela that her baby daughter is suffering from gastroenteritis and mild dehydration.
“What’s that?” she asks me.
“It means she has too much diarrhea, causing her to lose too much liquid from her body.”
“Is that bad?”
“It could be if we do not treat her.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to take her to the hospital and run some tests.”
“No,” she says emphatically. “I don’t want her to go to the hospital.”
“I can’t take care of her here.” I don’t understand why Daniela wouldn’t want the best for her baby.
“I don’t like the hospital,” she says. “Because they don’t like us.”
“What? Who is ‘us’?”
“You know.” She tilts her head, frowns. “Us. They usually kick us out.”
“Well, I’ll go with you,” I assure her. “It won’t be a problem.” By the look on her face, I can tell she doesn’t believe me. “Listen, it will probably be fine, but she may die if I don’t take her to the hospital. I don’t know if she has an infection elsewhere, and we can only tell at the hospital.”
“Dr. Chi,” she pleads, “they may take my baby away and never give her back to me because . . . because I am a street girl. Is there any other way I can take care of her here?” Daniela holds her clasped hands to her chest. “I will stay up all night if I have to and watch her to make sure she is breathing.”
If I were in Boston . . . but I am not. I am in Bolivia with no lab, no scanners. Just me and a tackle box of medicines. Without a hospital lab, I can’t take blood to rule out bacteremia, I can’t analyze urine to rule out a urinary tract infection, I can’t do a lumbar puncture to rule out meningitis, and I can’t do a chest radiograph to rule out pneumonia.
“Please, Dr. Chi.” She places baby Maria in my arms.
I measure Maria’s rectal temperature: 39° Celsius—too high. I walk to the pharmacy and spend my entire monthly food allowance on drugs for Maria. I’ll freeload lunches and dinners from the orphanages. When I return to Yassela, Daniela refuses to let me place an intravenous line in Maria, so I give Daniela specific instructions to feed her one liter of oral rehydration therapy solution every hour. I tell her that I will inject Maria with an antibiotic once a day for fourteen days. Daniela takes this all in earnestly.
“I will see you tomorrow then. Let me know if you want someone to look after Maria during the day while you work. I have a friend named Laura who likes to care for children. Don’t worry. She can’t take your baby away.”
“Why doesn’t she have her own baby?” Daniela asks.
“Because she is not married.”
She laughs a hard, deep laugh.
“Chi. Babies are not made from getting married.”
“Well, she doesn’t believe in having kids before marriage.”
“Oh. That’s weird. Why doesn’t she just get married?”
“She cannot find the right person.”
“Why? Is she ugly? Is she a bad cook?”
“No.”
“Hmmm. Then what is wrong with her?”
“Nothing is wrong with her. I met her at church and she was interested in my work on the street with all of you. She’s a good woman who’s willing to help. And she would probably adopt Maria, given the chance, but she’s willing to just help you in any way. So that’s just another option. Just to let you know, I think that keeping a mother and her child together is extremely important.”
“Okay, I will think about it.”
“Remember, call me if Maria doesn’t drink.”
“Okay, Dr. Chi.”
The next day, I step down onto the second level of Yassela to see Daniela washing clothes again, this time with Maria strapped to her back.
“How did Maria do?”
“Great, Dr. Chi. I gave the magic juice just like you told me every single hour, and she got back to her normal self.”
“What is her normal self?”
Daniela wrings out the baby clothes, takes Maria off her back. She holds Maria up before her. “Her smile. Look, she is smiling again. Look, she’s looking around. She knows her mommy.”
“That’s great, Daniela. I am proud of you.”
“Thank you.” She smiles at me.
“Okay, I need to give her a shot.”
“A shot? Why does she need a shot? The juice made her all better.”
“You don’t know that it was only the juice.”
“Sure I do.” Daniela holds Maria against her chest. “I gave her the juice, and she got all better in front of my eyes. I was up all night with her. It was the juice.”
“It
may have been the juice in part. But it may have also been the shot.”
“No shot,” says Daniela authoritatively.
“Daniela,” I say, matching her stern statement with doctorly seriousness, carefully enunciating my syllables, “I have to give the shot in order to prevent her from possibly getting sicker. Let me give her the shot.”
“Okay.”
I administer a shot to Maria every morning for fourteen days. “Daniela, we are finished with the shots.”
“Good. My poor little baby was like a pincushion.”
“Well, she is back to normal now.”
“Yes. Thanks to you.”
“No, actually it was you who saved her life.”
“Maybe . . . with your help.”
“Daniela, I am going on a vacation.”
“Good,” Daniela says. “You need a vacation.”
“Why do I need a vacation?”
“Because you work too hard,” she says.
“I work too hard. Umm, you are the ones who work too hard.” She does not respond. “I’m going to Peru, to Machu Picchu,” I say.
“So are you going to take the bus? There are bandits along the road. They stop the bus and rob each passenger.”
“Actually, I am going to fly. The ticket’s only a hundred dollars.”
Daniela’s eyes widen with astonishment. “ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS! Wow, you are rich!”
“Well, I will see you in a week, okay?”
“Okay,” says Daniela. “Be safe.”
“I will. You just take care of your kids.”
I am on the plane to Peru. I will be gone for one week. I’d always dreamed of hiking to Machu Picchu, one of the seven wonders of the world. Now is my chance. I suppose I really am rich. But is money important in the big picture? Absolutely. Upon walking the streets of La Paz, I shed both my liberal leanings and the “blind faith” that God provides. Children die on my streets, babies cry for food every night. Does God provide for our needs? Yes, but money helps a whole lot.
A vacation might help even more. I’m snapping at the kids, losing patience. I’m burned out. Spent. I don’t have time to pray. Too many one-hundred-hour weeks in the orphanages, on the streets, writing reports back to Park Street Church, and holding Bible studies at church. I understand now how some doctors can be so inhumane to their patients. After spending one-hundred-plus hours in the hospital, the enemy suddenly becomes the ones you treat. It’s only been four months here in Bolivia; I have four more to go. I need to go away to replenish my soul and spirit. Yes, but I know already: There is a fine line between self-preservation and self-indulgence.
18
Not in Any Hurry
30°F, 2 a.m., November 23, 1997;
El Hueco
The graffiti on the wall reads:
Drugs and alcohol may kill me slowly
. . . oh, s—, but I’m not in any hurry.
The poets sign their verse with their bodies. Fifteen little children and teens slumber in a huddle beneath the words. One large sheet of blue plastic tarp is their blanket. Corrugated cardboard is their bedding of choice. I shine my flashlight on the ceiling, and the kids’ brown golden retriever–type mutt—balding, mangy, and emaciated—lifts his bony body and growls. I reach over to wake a boy, and the dog barks. The boy grumbles, peeks out at me from beneath the blue tarp, then jumps up and shakes the other children.
“Wake up! Wake up! Chi is here.”
The children begin to call my name—and their ailments. Three societies of street children are sleeping here tonight. I begin taking care of a group of kids on the left side of the alcove.
Alejandro walks around and talks to kids, seeing what medical problems they have, while I treat them. After cleaning and dressing a leg wound from a beating, I feel a tap on my back.
“Someone wants to talk to you,” Alejandro tells me, and leads me to a disheveled girl. She has the eyes and shoulders of a lost child, the anxious wrinkles of a thirty-year-old. She seems to wait for me to make an announcement about her future. And then her eyes topple some barrier in my brain. This girl is Daniela. My own stubborn hope wouldn’t let me recognize her.
I smile for her. “How’s it going, Daniela? I haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Oh, it’s going okay,” she says.
“Heard you were on the streets.”
“Yeah.”
“How come you’re on the streets? How come you left Yassela?”
“They kicked me out. I missed curfew on a Saturday. I had to go to my aunt’s birthday. It was very important to her and to me. And so I did not have a choice. I left at 1 p.m. and I hurried back at 3:30 p.m. And the door was locked. And Señora Lola would not let me back in. I really did not want to leave Yassela. She won’t even let me back in to wash my clothes in the basin.”
Daniela looks far away, into the wall, into the words: “Drugs and alcohol may kill me slowly” . . . Her matted hair looks like that of a cocker spaniel that has lived in the woods for a year. Drugs and alcohol may kill me slowly. . . . The words seem to draw her in, as if her soul were being suctioned into the letters themselves. “Daniela.” I try to make eye contact with eyes that simply are not there. “Daniela, what have you been doing?”
“I just walk and walk and walk.”
“Where are you going, Daniela?”
“I just feel like walking. I just walk all day. I walk everywhere.” Daniela’s eyes do not move; they do not twinkle, they do not blink. They try to hold in what her entire body—which is so dead, so much more like a pile of matter than an upright human being—despite its limp weight, screams out to release. Street kids don’t cry. No, it doesn’t matter if you are a boy or a girl, old or young. Four months on the streets and I haven’t seen a single kid cry. As if spontaneously generated, a tear grows from her unmoving eye; it grows and washes a path down her dirty face. “All I can think about all the time is . . .”
The Andean wind sends her fleece jacket floating like a cape. The bags under her eyes look as if they are about to crack open and bleed.
“What’s wrong, Daniela?”
She looks around. She takes three steps away from everyone else. I follow. I whisper to her, “What’s wrong?”
“Maria’s dead,” she says.
Maria. Who’s Maria? For ten seconds I rack my brain to remember Maria. Two hundred and fifty kids I deal with. Which one is Maria? Maria, Maria, is she a girl at the orphanage? Maria is Natalia’s baby sister, Daniela’s youngest child. Five months old. She looked so healthy when I left. How could she die in two weeks? Was it because of the cold on the streets?
“How’d she die?” I ask.
“Maria got a lung infection while I was still at Yassela, and then I was kicked out. Then she choked on her milk,” says Daniela, “and had a worse infection in her lungs.”
“Wait. Start from the beginning.”
“A few days after you left for your vacation, Maria started to breathe really fast. Her chest went up and down. Sometimes I felt that she could not catch her breath. It all started when she was lying in bed and I was feeding her milk. All of a sudden this gush of milk spurted out of her mouth and shot across her body. I did not think she could spit that far. After that she was never the same. I wish you were here, Chi. You could have made her better.”
I want to kill myself for going to Machu Picchu. “Then what happened?” I ask.
“Well, then I remember that you said Maria was very sick last time and that she needed to go to the hospital. She looked sicker this time, so I knew she needed to see a doctor, even though I hate that place.”
“Which place?”
“The hospital. I took Maria up to the floor and they told me that I needed to get her some medicine to kill her lung infection. Of course, I did not have any money.”
“Did you go to Yassela?”
“Yes, Señora Lola started shouting at me and made me feel bad. I did not cry in front of her. I will never cry in front of her. She called me a bad mot
her. Yet she gave me money to buy the medicine that Maria needed. The doctors gave her the medicine, and she got better. I visited her every day.”
“And then what?”
“And then I got kicked out of Yassela because I missed getting back at 3:30 on a Saturday afternoon. I had to go to my aunt’s birthday party. You know she is very important to me. Señora Lola did not make an exception in my case.”
“So where did you go?”
“Where else do I go? I went to the streets to live and sleep.”
“Did you still visit Maria?”
“Yes. And then she died. She just died.”
“When did she die?”
“She died on Sunday morning, 2 a.m.”
“So it’s been two days. Where’s the baby?”
“She died in the hospital, and she’s still there.”
How can a baby die in two weeks in a hospital? “How come you didn’t get her body?”
“They won’t give me my baby until I pay all the bills.”
“So where’s your baby?”
“In the hospital, I suppose, in some dark room all alone. They won’t even let me see her.”
“Have you gone to Yassela to get some money from Señora Lola?” There has always been a silent tension between Señora Lola and Daniela. Maybe Señora Lola thought Daniela did not “rehabilitate” the right way. But people never fully heal from childhood trauma. You twirl around the life circles. On the last day of your life the wounds still hurt. Maybe Señora Lola does not like Daniela because of her strong will toward authority. That same fortitude has allowed her to care for two children on the streets, even as she herself grows up.
“I ring the doorbell and Señora Lola tells me to go away. My mother does not have any extra money either. Can you help me? There’s no one else who can help me.”
“I can help you. Meet me tomorrow morning at the hospital at 8:30. You should go to sleep. It’s already 3:15.”
“Okay,” she says.
“Okay, remember, 8:30. Don’t be late.”
“Chi,” she says, “there’s something else.”
“Where’s Natalia?” I ask her.
“She’s with my parents.”
“What is it you want to tell me?”
When Invisible Children Sing Page 15