by Ted Neill
When we reach the cottage Miriam opens the door. She knows what Oliver has been through and tells him “pole,” sorry. Then she takes him in her arms and carries him to his bed.
Later that night I ask Mum Amelia about Oliver. She says that he is the smartest child in the cottage, perhaps in the whole home. He can read better than the teenagers, and she feels it is a shame that he is always too sick to go to school. She tells me that he came from a well off family. When he arrived he was notably more polite than the other children. He always said please and thank you. He asked to be excused from the table when he was finished eating. He also had been used to eating with a knife and fork and had to learn how to eat with his fingers.
I ask about his grandfather. He is dead, Amelia says. He brought Oliver to the home because he knew he did not have much time left. It was not long after Oliver arrived that he passed away. But no one has ever told Oliver this. They are afraid it might worsen his condition. But occasionally he still asks why his grandfather never visits him.
I get a chess set for Oliver and play him in a game. After only a few moves I realize that there will be no need to restrain myself—Oliver is as good as any adult I have played. In the end he makes a mistake. I take advantage of it and checkmate him, but I do so telling him how good he is and that I hope he will learn from his mistake.
He does. The next time he plays he beats me. He is a complete gentleman in victory. He does not celebrate, but rather asks me if I would like to play again.
There are days when I cringe when Judith, Sofie’s mother calls me. I feel helpless listening to her desperate pleading voice on my phone telling me that the doctor has prescribed an antifungal cream for the infection on her scalp—a cream that we just can’t afford. I am reminded of my powerlessness when she calls telling me that she has lived too long with her friend without paying rent and she must find a place of her own. I’m slowly realizing the burden of keeping someone alive who is, in so many ways, living just on the brink.
I was the one who took Judith to a lab to get blood work done. We found out that her CD4 count was sixty-eight—that low, anything could kill her. So I took her to an MSF clinic that provided free antiretrovirals. But first she had to prove that she could keep her appointments for three months. Three long months. During that time she received Bactrim in order to fight off any pneumocystis pneumonia. She kept every single appointment. I never doubted she would.
In the 1990s the then head of USAID infamously said that Africans would never be able to benefit from antiretrovirals since they did not own watches and therefore could not keep track of time. Since then, dozens of studies have shown that in many cases Africans have better rates of adherence to their ARV regimens than their counterparts in the west. One of the most common explanations for this phenomenon is the simple fact that Africans are much more likely to have witnessed the effects of untreated AIDS first hand. They are scared into taking their meds.
In Judith’s case she has actually experienced the untreated effects for herself. She does not want to again.
Judith finally starts the ARVs. They give her splitting headaches. She also has to eat with them otherwise the pills make her sick and she vomits them back up. But she cannot always afford food. That means more money from me.
“What do you do with yourself Judith, during the day?” I ask.
“Nothing,” she tells me. “I was once a seamstress but I sold my machine for food.”
So we go to town and I buy her a sewing machine. I am out of money myself—although I know Judith’s perception of me as a mzungu is that I am infinitely more wealthy than she. But I am spending my last cents on emails and phone calls home to ask for loans or to call in favors from friends, even with Eve giving me discounts at the internet cafe.
The sewing machine works. Judith begins to bring in some income on her own, even though she still needs infusions of cash from me for clothes and rent. Still I hate the fact that it is not easier to help her, that I don’t feel better about things, that I will never be able to say “happily ever after” or let go of Judith completely. I am bound by my promise and although I don’t regret it, I marvel at how I could never make it again, could never with my means take on anyone more than Judith.
Over time things do improve. Judith gets a contract with a nearby girls school to make uniforms. She also works there some days as a cleaner and once in a while even plays goalie when the primary classes play soccer.
But how long, I wonder, will this last? I watch Judith and Sofie sit together at the orphanage. Judith still keeps her head covered out of embarrassment for her rashes there—a stubborn reminder to me that she will never be quite healthy. I know that the rashes on her head most likely have spread to the rest of her body, producing scale-like scabs, usually concentrated in the places where skin folds, the armpits, the waist, the crotch. Sofie is on ARVs now as well, since her own CD4 count has plummeted and her viral load spiked. Sofie gets skin infections along her ears, not unlike her mother, and it is these similarities that haunt me and remind me that both Judith and Sofie will die of AIDS. We’ll all die though, I’ve told myself. That is not something exclusive to the mother and daughter sitting before me. So I realize I have bought them not life, but time, nothing else.
When it comes down to it, that is all they really want. It is all any of us deserve.
In Kiswahili there is no gender. So the children are constantly mixing up the gender of their English personal pronouns. It reveals Miriam’s progressive stance on gender identity when I am looking for Bonava one afternoon.
“Bonava, she went to the store,” she tells me.
“Miriam, Bonava is a man. It’s ‘He went to the store’.”
“He can be anything she wants to be,” she says.
The doctor who visits the orphanage a few times a week to check on the children decides to do a spinal tap on Anika, her almond-shaped eyes close tightly, tears at their corners as they force the needle between her vertebrae and into her spinal column. When the fluid comes out and is dark, one of the nurses tells me, “It’s too late.”
They treat Anika for meningitis but she does not improve. The biting irony was that just a month ago she was responding so well to antiretroviral treatment that her viral load was nearly undetectable. The Canadian volunteers are gone and I’m left to sit with her during the night. When she is awake because of the pain, time is elastic, stretching out, without end. Analgesics have run low and all we have to make her more comfortable are paracetamol suppositories. They are inadequate and I feel the same: inadequate, unworthy, unqualified, to administer them to Anika. I yearn for the volunteers I know she likes more, but they are already back in Canada. I believe she is in renal failure because what little urine she can pass is dark and tea-colored and after some time, while she makes many efforts to use the bedpan, it remains dry the rest of the night.
The next evening she asks to return to her cottage. Mum Christine wraps her in blankets and carries her to the building that for all intents and purposes is her home. The children sing for her and pray before she leaves. When Mum Christine is done carrying Anika back to the sickroom, I see that she is wiping tears from her eyes. I ask her what is the matter and she says, “When the children ask to go back to the cottage, the end is always near. Anika wants to die there, not the nursing room.”
Later that night Anika loses the ability to speak. When I’m not sure whether or not she is coherent I ask her,
“Anika, it’s me Ted. Ted D. Bear. Umshumari. Do you remember me?”
She nods.
“Am I still stupid?”
She nods again, the faintest of grins turning the corner of her mouth upwards.
We make it through the night but in the morning when I’ve gone back to my room to catch some sleep there is a knock at my door.
“We’ve lost her,” Ruth, the nurse from the sickroom tells me.
I initially feel numb upon hearing it. But then I feel the need to dress in one of my best shirts
and go down to say good-bye. The sign on the sickroom door reads “No Admittance,” but it swings open without my knocking, Bahati, the orphanage receptionist, is waiting for me on the other side.
What claim do I have on Anika? Really? I lift the sheet that they have covered her with and there is nothing ghastly there, just the same face I had been looking into these past few days and the longest eight hours of my life the night before. It strikes me that with her face so emaciated, her features, the taught skin, the prominent cheek bones, the hollows under the eyes, the lips pulled back over her teeth, she now resembled Randolph.
I feel teary then, but I first ask what happened. Ruth tells me that Anika’s breathing became labored. They tried putting her on oxygen but while they were holding the mask to her face she, in Ruth’s words, “Left us.”
She is in a green dress now with cotton in her nose, ears, and mouth. I think of the pain she had been in and to be back in this body would only bring her more suffering. I am also angry. Angry that now in death there is no one to truly mourn her. The nurses are busy preparing the children’s medications. Bahati returns to the front desk. The people closest to Anika in life, the staff, all are paid to take care of her. Granted, I know they love the children, nearly as much as their own, and I know my thoughts are uncharitable, but the loneliness of her orphanhood bears down on me and I’m just spiteful. I write a good-bye letter to her in my room. Apologizing for not being as good a nurse or sweet a person as Monica, the German volunteer, or as cool as the Canadian ones; for erasing her picture on the digital camera, for the time I ripped a Band-Aid off her skin too hard, but also thanking her for making me smile and making a “stupid” guy feel useful. Then I fold it up and seal it to place it in her coffin.
Chapter 22
The Things We Carry
I’m not sure when the turning point came in my recovery. Just like I could not pinpoint where my tip downwards into depression began. I remembered the first impulse I had to kill myself, nearly a year before I was hospitalized. It terrified me, but I learned to live with it, for it only reoccurred in infrequent intervals, even if the intervals became shorter and shorter.
I remember in the hospital the intervals had shortened to nothing so that a broken record of a voice kept replaying in my head, “Justkillyourselfjustkillyourselfjustkillyourself.” Again, it was the drugs that blunted this impulse, I’m sure of it. I remember after going twelve hours without the impulse, my psychiatrist said I could be released from Cottage Green to the halfway house. I deferred, waiting until I had not heard the voice for 24 hours before I agreed to leave.
I improved. It was not without setbacks, but in general, the trajectory was upwards. I graduated to being an outpatient at the hospital and then to the point where I only needed to see my psychiatrist once a week.
He was a balding Indian man with rimless glasses like my own. I had disclosed to him, in the worst of my sessions while still in Cottage Green, the crushing guilt, shame, and remorse I had experienced for leaving the children behind. I blamed myself for abandoning them, for not doing more.
“I never even wrote the book I went there to write,” I said.
“Why don’t you now? You have the time.”
He was right, for although I was out of the hospital and working in my old research assistantship, I was still waiting for the next semester to begin in order to resume my classes. I shared with him my concerns and challenges of the past, my litany of stumbling blocks, not the least of which was my own character in my writing.
“I would like to make it more about the children,” I told him.
“Why not both? You’ve certainly done some healthy self-examination in your work with your friends in A.A.”
“Even if I wanted to write more about the children, I never had time to chase down all their stories. After a while, I was just too busy working. Writing seemed like a self-indulgent luxury in light of so many urgent needs. Plus, how could I share their stories while respecting their privacy?”
“Improvise.”
“I don’t want to be Greg Mortenson.”
“Don’t be. Call it fiction, or metafiction, whatever the New Yorker literary critics are calling it these days. Be Tim O’Brien. Haven’t you read The Things They Carried?”
I hadn’t, but I ordered it on Amazon that afternoon.
He stayed on me about the writing, bringing it up in every session. I shared with him every fear as it came up.
“I don’t want to be Jason Russell.”
“Jason and Invisible Children have done a lot of good.”
“But maybe he is a narcissist.”
“You are not a narcissist. That is a professional opinion by the way.”
But I had more worries.
“I did not ask the kids for permission. Even if I use their stories in a novel, isn’t that a form of exploitation, another white westerner, taking advantage of a vulnerable African kid’s story to sell copy?”
He tapped his notebook with his pen. “Why don’t you ask them?”
Chapter 23
Kiserian
The next morning, they led Miriam to her new home: Cottage Yellow. It was nicer and larger than her old home, but she had to share it with fourteen other children. She was introduced to her new mother, Mum Amelia, who seemed nice but strict. Miriam was afraid of her and wanted to be good so that Mum Amelia would like her.
Miriam’s bed was on the other side of the cottage, where the older girls slept—the younger children, the babies, and toddlers slept on the side with the kitchen, where Mum Amelia’s bedroom was. The bunk underneath Miriam’s belonged to a girl named Frieda. Frieda was very thin, like Miriam, and had very light skin. She was pretty and told Miriam that they could be friends, which made Miriam very happy. From that day onward, where Frieda went, Miriam followed.
The other children in the home had lost their parents as well. Many of the children were sick. Frieda said they all had ukimwi, which was also called hacheyevee. Because of hacheyevee the older children had to go to a private school, no one wanted them in the public schools. The younger children went to the school at the orphanage. Miriam asked if she would be allowed to go to school. Frieda told her that as long as you were not sick you were supposed to. And if you were not sick you could also play on the playground. It was a huge playground full of sand and swings and plastic toys.
If you were sick, you had to stay in the cottage and if you did not get better you went to the death room. The death room was the one Miriam had gone to when she first arrived, it was where the nurses were. Frieda said they all had to go there if they got a cut or needed special medicine—besides the medicines they took each day in the cottages—but if they were so sick that they were spending nights there, then they would not be coming back.
“Where do the children go?” Miriam asked.
Frieda showed her. She led her to the back of the orphanage where there were a number of graves with flowers growing on them and large white crosses.
“They go to be with Jesus,” Frieda said. For a moment Miriam pictured Jesus as a man who lived underground—unearth each grave and at the bottom would be a door leading to his subterranean world.
At night some of the sick children would call out for their mothers. They did not mean Mum Amelia, Mum Christine, Mum Grace, Mum Teresia or any other of the moms of the home. They meant their real mothers. Miriam learned from the other children that if you remembered your real mother too much, you would get sick and die. The children who cried a lot and missed their old homes and were sad were always the ones who went to the death room the soonest and never came back.
On the days that the doctor came to see the children, Miriam would have to pass through the death room to see her. There were often wazungu there. They were actually all over the home. They did not dress like the wazungu Miriam had seen in Mombasa; they covered up their skin. Frieda called them volunteers. They were actually very nice to Miriam, although they spoke Kizungu funny and Kiswahili very badly.
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But for the first time in a very long time Miriam felt that she was happy. She tried not to think too much of her mother or father, since that might make her sick, but she and Frieda would draw pictures of their families. Frieda had had two younger sisters, but they were dead. Sometimes when they were drawing pictures of their families, they would shuffle the members so that Miriam and Frieda had the same families and they were sisters.
The best part of the home, however, was the schoolhouse. When Miriam had become well enough, she was allowed to go to school. There were many children there younger than her who could read, but the teacher, Teacher Margaret, told Miriam that she could learn at her own pace. Because Miriam was older, Margaret asked her to do a lot of things to help and to sometimes discipline the other children, which meant picking the children up and taking them to their cottages to get spanked if they were bad. In exchange, Margaret would let Miriam take books back to the cottage with her. Miriam had to make sure that they were books with pictures in case she could not read the words.
Every Sunday the schoolhouse became a church. Bonava would teach them in Sunday school, then a priest, an old fat mzungu that had founded the home, would come and say mass. The priest was also Father Christmas, so he loved children, and that was why he had started the home.
It seemed that every other week another child went to the death room and another died. Miriam wondered if it was the wazungu ladies killing them, but then why would they cry at the funerals, which were in the schoolhouse?
There were lots of clothes at the home. Miriam had clean clothes every day. The drawers with the clothes in them had many names that had been written on them, then scratched off because those children had died.
It did not take long for Miriam to meet Catherine. Catherine was the big sister to everyone. She had bumps all over her face, like Miriam and many other children. But it did not seem to bother Catherine. She read in church and all the adults loved her. She was always eager to answer Bonava’s questions in Sunday school. And if there was an argument on the playground, the children would find Catherine. She would listen then resolve the difference. The only exception was if one child had hit another, which was when Catherine would simply send them to their house mothers, with a reminder: