Two Years of Wonder

by Ted Neill

  Needless to say I was relieved when she finished her time with the home and I was distressed when she showed up a few weeks later just back from the airport, falling down drunk, insisting that she was back from Italy in order to volunteer indefinitely.

  I’d heard that one was never supposed to fire a drunk. But I also knew I could not let her live in the home again with her drinking problem. I told her she could work at the home but she had to live elsewhere until she sobered up.

  She found an apartment in Dagoretti living with some staff members from the home. For all intents and purposes she was a faithful volunteer.

  Then one weekend she went down to Mombasa. A few weeks after she returned, she fell ill with a fever and chills. She said her joints hurt. We told her she needed to be tested for malaria. She refused. On a Tuesday I visited her apartment. She said she was feeling better, although I didn’t believe her. I returned Thursday and no one answered her door. I tried to believe that she had gone to a doctor. The next day Eve called me and told me she had seen Rosa Maria in the internet café.

  “She is shaking and delirious,” she said to me. “She has malaria.”

  We went to Rosa Maria’s house after that but she had locked her door and would not let us in. She screamed that she wanted to be left alone. We had to break the door down. We found her on her bed with a pool of vomit beside her. A blood smear revealed that her parasite count—a measure of the organism that causes malaria in her blood—was nearly too high to count.

  We took her to a hospital and when that one was not good enough, we transferred her to another. On Sunday she went into a coma. She had to be placed in the ICU. Her hands and feet turned blue. She was curled up in a fetal position, a breathing tube down her throat. Her organs were failing one after another.

  Now as they carry her coffin towards her grave I vacillate between anger and guilt. Guilt because I know if I had let her live at the home we would have been able to monitor her more effectively. Anger because I feel like this is such a waste of a life.

  Then I reflect upon the fact that she had locked the door against us when we came for her. Perhaps she did not want to get better. Perhaps she feared we would send her back to Italy. Perhaps she preferred to die than go back. The picture we gained of her life in her home country was a sad one, no friends, one relative, a brother who when we called and informed him that she was dying said he wanted nothing to do with her and hung up.

  I go through her file and find out that she worked as a tour guide in Italy. I picture her giving tours to Americans decked out in shorts and T-shirts. In my mind I see her showing them around the countryside, eating dinner with them in the hotel restaurants then remaining a bit too long in the bar or at the table, getting so drunk that she causes a disruption and the staff send complaints to her supervisors. Her tours run behind because she is so slow to get up in the morning.

  From the myriad of tour agencies she worked for and for the brief amount of time at each one, I sense I might be on to some grain of the truth. So Rosa Maria turned to helping people. She went to Burundi, Rwanda, Kosovo. A closer look at her resume might have revealed the red flags that she should not be put in an unstable situation.

  But AIDS orphans and war refugees must settle for what help they can get.

  The refrigerators at the morgue were broken and the smell was horrifying. I did not see Rosa Maria’s body but the volunteer that did identify her said she looked terrible.

  The grave site was not much of an improvement. The graves are dug side by side each day with huge mounds of earth around them. The plot assigned to Rosa Maria was one in the middle of many, all empty, all open. Carrying the coffin was difficult since we had to negotiate between falling in holes and tumbling off the unstable mounds. The coffin itself was only closed with a hook and eye latch and my heart pounded with each slip we pall bearers made, afraid that one of us would fall in a grave, causing the coffin to drop and the lid to open revealing Rosa Maria’s restless, putrefying visage staring out at us. Forcing us wazungu to ask the question of why any of us are here.

  I look at the children and the adults all around us. Why are we drawn to a population of children that become dependent upon us? Children who readily give us affection because they have been deprived of it themselves? Why have we chosen to live among a population of citizens that look up to us as richer, smarter, in general, more influential?

  Here in Kenya, we wazungu are notable. Back home, we enjoy hero status for the work we do. What insecurities are we fleeing to be “saviors” and “saints” over here in Africa? We claim to be here helping others but really we are helping ourselves. I am an unpublished writer and journalist looking for a story. Another volunteer at the home is a recently widowed woman looking for a family. Rosa Maria was a lonely and pathetic drunk looking for anybody. Here we are treated with deference and respect, simply because of the color of our skin. Even me, with my pimples and thick glasses. We all go from zero to hero. And to some, they can never go back.

  “Why?” is a question few of us give much time to. Nobody really wants to look at how they are broken. We’d rather fix others, or claim to.

  I think a lot of us are looking for a purpose and meaning. The younger volunteers certainly are looking for a righteous cause. Maybe I am too. But the suffering one encounters, the poverty, the privation, has a way of playing a cruel trick on you. It makes you realize that perhaps there is no purpose here other than to simply survive. The country office director of CARE Kenya tells me that their mission is sort of along those lines. “We are not saving people, we’re building resilience to the next shock, be it economic or health.” As they lower Rosa Maria into the grave I wonder how much it is chance that decides, when the next shock comes, if you survive or not. Good intentions are no protection.

  I notice Eve is different than any woman I have ever known. Our differences are not African vs. American. They are the difference from one of us being raised in a resource poor country and another (me) having been raised without giving a thought to resources as a result of their abundance.

  Eve does dishes by filling the sink and using the water there instead of leaving it running. She is so unused to running water that she hesitates before turning the spigot as she tries to remember which way turns the water on and off. A few times she turns it the wrong way and gives a playful yelp as it suddenly comes gushing forth.

  She is not “backwards”—Kenyan’s term for their own countrymen that are not modern or educated—although she often is concerned that she is, especially when we get into a debate over whether or not it is safe to eat an egg with a runny yolk. She says absolutely not. I say it is fine and make an insinuation that she simply does not know better. She yields to me simply because she is willing to believe that my education has been better then hers. I learn later that since there are not strict sanitary and health standards for poultry production in Kenya, eating an uncooked yolk can be very dangerous. Ironically it was illegal to serve one in restaurants in many US states until the 1970s.

  From then on I eat my yolks cooked well, with a slice of humble pie.

  Eve, like many twenty-something Kenyans, is an interesting mix of cultures. Kenyans her age may speak Kiswahili at home but their English is often better. Their grandmothers may dress traditionally, but the younger generation will wear basketball jerseys, baseball hats, and skull caps like their favorite American rappers. Eve may live in a house where she and her sisters must carry their water from a well to barrels in their kitchen, but she can disassemble and reassemble a computer with such confidence and competence that one would think she invented it. She can run software programs that I do not even know how to turn on. When the server in the café goes down, she falls to her hands and knees and manipulates the spaghetti plate of wires behind the CPUs until the correct lights blink in the correct sequence on the modem and the connection returns.

  She also unknowingly displays a level of equanimity that I find myself admiring—mainly because as a high-st
rung mzungu, it is something I lack entirely. It is a steadiness I have found in many African women but never in a mzungu one. The best example was when a matatu Eve was riding was hijacked by gunmen. One gunman leapt into the seat in front of her and pressed the barrel of his rifle into her chest. He told the passengers that he would shoot if the others did not give up their mobile phones and wallets.

  I met Eve at the police station where she and the other riders were making a report. She showed me the mark left between her breasts by the gun—a half-moon welt. Then, her mind already elsewhere, she asked me,

  “Would you like to come out with my sisters and me tonight?”

  Miriam is light-headed and weak. She’s unable to even stand. Mum Amelia sends her to the nursing room but she is unable to even walk. I pick her up and carry her in my arms. She is surprisingly light. She leans her head against me. Knowing what I know of the children and their time in the nursing room, to say I am worried is an understatement. I want to hold her against me and tell her, “Don’t die, not you, not ever you!”

  As scared as I am at this moment, I have an utter certainty of purpose, knowing what my life is for—helping children, helping this girl right now. I never wanted to experience this moment with this child of all children, and yet now that it is taking place, I know there is nowhere else I should be.

  Miriam recovers. Her symptoms a side effect to a cough suppressant she drank earlier in the afternoon. I am relieved. She is even able to walk back to the cottage and sleep in her own bed.

  I sleep a lot better knowing that.

  It’s 9:37 p.m. Judy, who has struggled so much with her cardiac conditions as a result of her HIV status, sits up in her bed in the nursing room. She has been laying half-conscious but now she is suddenly lucid and alert. She turns to Kate, a volunteer, who has been holding her.

  “Kate, I am cold.”

  “Do you want me to close the window?” Kate asks her.

  “Yes.” Kate gets up. As she places her hand on the window’s handle, Judy says, “I don’t want anybody to catch me,” then falls over onto the mattress. Kate asks her what she means. Judy does not answer. She’s dead.

  It’s Friday night when Father McLeod and another priest are carjacked while pulling into the Jesuit residence on Ngong road. A car pulls in behind them while they wait for the gate to open and men with guns jump out of the bushes demanding that they get out of the car and hand over their keys. Father McLeod and the other priest cooperate and the thieves drive off, Father quietly confident that the car will be returned because of the kill switch installed beneath the seat. In about a mile, the alarm will beep and if the thieves do not know where to find the switch within a few moments, the car will die.

  What concerns Father more is the premeditated nature of the robbery. The men lying in wait in the bushes, the car that pinned them in from behind, it all speaks of careful planning and preparation. He knows they had to be followed and he wonders if the other vehicles from the orphanage were as well.

  He places a call to Bonava who is out with the children at a Diwali celebration. I’ve passed, choosing to catch some precious time away from the kids, but being Indian herself, Weena has accompanied the children.

  It has been—by all accounts—a grand evening. There has been traditional Indian dancing, African dancing, and freestyle by the children, all accompanied by heaping plates of Indian food (more on this later). The children are in a merry mood as they ride home, that is until they are told that the bus must make a stop at the police station to get an escort because thieves are about.

  The children immediately are somber and scared. The word mwizi (thief) echoes in hushed tones among them, traveling like an electric current. Harvey, the assistant manager of the home who is the chaperone that night, reassures the children that a police escort is just a precaution, but it is too late. Every sound, every shadow outside the bus is taken for a thief. There is no levity left in the bunch. Some children are whimpering and crying.

  “Oh, we’re going to be fine!” Weena insists, trying to reassure the children with her unrelenting California optimism.

  “I wish Ted was here,” Humphrey, a teenage boys says.

  “Why is that? I am a doctor, if anyone gets hurt I can help them,” Weena says.

  “Ted knows Tae Kwon Do,” one of the girls points out while she huddles in a seat holding hands with two other girls.

  Some of the younger children mention that I am also Peter Parker and that I could save everyone with my superpowers. Some of the older children insist that I don’t really have powers, but the younger children disagree. “He does!” they insist.

  At this point Weena resigns herself to her second-class status, medical degree notwithstanding.

  The police take their time to locate a vehicle to use as an escort. In the meantime, the children grow restless. Their diet at the orphanage is rich in nutrients but kept very bland. The Indian food at the Diwali celebration was not. In reaction to the spicy food the children drank copious amounts of water. Only now are the consequences becoming clear.

  The kids hold out as long as they can, but once one child admits to their unfolding emergency, a chorus of “Me too” erupts. For any kids who did not have to go, all the sudden discussion ensures that they too now need to relieve themselves.

  It is decided that the children will go susu behind the bus. They are within the police station grounds, but the children insist on being escorted—the boys by Harvey, the girls by Weena.

  The bus holds around fifty children, fifty children who have drunk a great deal of water. The boys are quick with their business and even go out three at a time, sharing Harvey as their guardian. The girls are not so brave and are cajoled one at a time by Weena. Some would rather hold it than risk being snatched by mwizi. Weena escorts each one to the back of the bus where the girls squat. One of the children, who had voiced a preference for my superpowers, Isabella, is too terrified even to venture around the corner of the bus.

  “Weena, come with me,” she says.

  Weena steps around the corner of the bus but looks away to preserve Isabella’s modesty. It occurs to her that she does not hear the telltale tinkling of Isabella relieving her bladder.

  “Weena, come closer.”

  Weena takes a step closer. “Here?”

  “No closer,” Isabella insists.

  Finally, at Isabella’s request, Weena is squatting next to her, at which point Weena encounters the problem of finding a dry place to step as forty-nine other children have just relieved themselves in the same vicinity.

  It’s too late. She feels warm puddles splash over the soles of her flip-flops. Isabella finishes and runs back to the bus, leaving Weena to contemplate how unfortunate she is to have spent seven years studying medicine and yet still be without superpowers.

  Chapter 19

  My Name is Ted and I’m in Recovery

  So it was drugs that helped me: Seroquel, Trazadone, and that old stand-by, Prozac. The drugs stabilized me and I was able to be transferred to the halfway house, still at the hospital but no longer in the psych-ward, no longer in Cottage Green. What followed was rewiring, self-examination through group and individual therapy. The intense lectures on my thinking, my assumptions, my habits, obsessions, negative self-talk, all in an effort to strip these learned behaviors and assumptions away and to replace them with tools and healthy coping mechanisms.

  I was required to attend E.A. meetings. E.A. stood for Emotions Anonymous. It was a twelve-step program modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous. But for me, the meetings are only anxiety provoking—a bunch of people sitting in a circle venting about their lives did not exactly help me in my recovery. I actually just wanted to kill myself again. I told my psychiatrist and he urged me to attend A.A. meetings instead. “Some people don’t like E.A. They say it is too negative and it triggers their anxieties further. Go to A.A., they have more fun.”

  I did. He was right. I quickly fell in love with the meetings. The members there wel
comed me with a lack of judgment I had never experienced before. I was even allowed to share, disclosing that I was not an alcoholic but “in recovery,” was more than enough. Especially since there was so much co-morbidity of mental health disorders and alcoholism, I was with a community that knew what I had been through.

  The alcoholics and addicts in recovery were full of hope, love, acceptance, and support—not to mention humor. Despite myself, I even started to find some spirituality again, mainly due to the fact that the only thing keeping these people from drinking was their “higher power.” I have alcoholics in my family. I know how hard it is to kick. But these people seemed able to live with their addiction. If I asked them how, they would just tell me it was a miracle.

  They had phrases for everything. Let go and let God. Live and let God. Easy does it. Love lives here. One day at a time. If you want to be selfless, think about yourself less. When I take the “me” out of blame, all I have left is “bla . . . bla . . . bla. . . ." God always answers prayers, sometimes with “Yes,” sometimes with “No,” sometimes with, “You’ve got to be kidding.” I talked to some alcoholics with years of sobriety about my loss of faith. I challenged them. I told them about the kids I sat next to as they died. Their demeanor was kind, but their answers firm: we can’t control outcomes, that is just my ego wanting to tell God what to do.