by Ted Neill
“Would Jesus want you to hit one another? No, God wants us to love each other.”
Miriam and Frieda stuck together. If Frieda felt sick one day, Miriam would say she had a stomachache so they could stay in the cottage together. But one morning Miriam woke up and Frieda’s bed was empty. At breakfast she asked where Frieda had gone. Mum Amelia said that during the night she had become ill and they had taken her to the nursing room.
Miriam did not want to eat after that. She did not eat lunch either, but Mum Amelia made her eat dinner. Then Mum Amelia let her sleep in a bed on the little children’s side of the cottage, close to her room in case Miriam had nightmares. The next morning Miriam went back to her side of the cottage. Frieda’s bed was still empty. She asked Mum Amelia if she could visit Frieda in the sickroom. She said they would go later.
When they finally went they found Frieda in a bed with a needle in her arm connected to a bag of water. There was also a baby that was crying a lot. Miriam greeted Frieda and Frieda made a small smile. She was not in her usual clothes but in a long shirt that opened in the back. She was naked beneath it. Miriam wished she had brought her a picture. Mum Amelia told Frieda to be strong, to take her medicine, and come back to the cottage soon. She nodded.
Miriam did not want to go back to the cottage. She wandered to the front of the home where there were no children and sat down under a tree. After a while, Bonava come out of his office and walked over to her. He asked her if she was sad and if that was why she was sitting alone. She surprised herself by saying,
“I don’t want Frieda to die.”
“We can’t be selfish,” Bonava said to her. “If she dies she will be with Jesus in heaven, where she will never be sick again and where she will be happy forever.”
It did not seem like the children went to be with Jesus, Miriam said. It seemed like they all got buried behind the schoolhouse. Bonava explained that it was their spirit that went to heaven. Their body was just an imperfect shell.
Miriam felt angry that Frieda could be happy without her, but she did not want to be selfish as Bonava had said. Miriam tried wiping the tears off her face, but they kept falling. Bonava told her she should go make a picture for Frieda, a picture that would show Frieda how much Miriam loved her.
Harmony forgot how long she ran. She simply kept going until she could not take another step. But where she stopped it smelled like a toilet. There were street boys around, so she could not stay. She went a little further. She was on Aga Khan Way. She had been begging here before. She went around the corner and saw the old Kenya buses lumbering away from their stages. She walked to the stage and waited until one bus was pulling away. Then she did what she had seen street boys do—she ran after the bus and leapt on through the back door.
She was afraid that people would tell her to get off, but even though some looked at her, they said nothing. With her back against the stairwell, she buried her face in her arms and cried. She did not know where the bus was going, but soon the tall buildings disappeared and things began turning green all around her. She wondered if she stayed on the bus long enough, would she would reach Kericho?
Soon the road became very bumpy because it was made of dirt. Most of the seats on the bus were now empty. Harmony did not take one because she did not want the tout to see her. He did anyway and asked her where she was going.
She said she was going to Kericho. He laughed at her and told her she was on the wrong bus because this one was going to Kiserian.
That was what she meant, Harmony said.
He left her alone and did not ask her for money. He seemed to feel sorry for her because she had been crying. When they finally reached a town where there were cars and people, he told her she was in Kiserian, so she decided to get off.
Kiserian was a small town. It was dirty as well, with lots of trash in the gutters and lots of dirt swirling about because there was no pavement. There were not very many hawkers but there were large mountains behind the buildings. She was terribly hungry but there was such a lump of sadness in her chest she knew she would not be able to sing for spare change. Instead, when she walked by a hawker’s stall with a crate of papayas in it, Harmony took one.
The lady that owned the stall was not far away though, and she screamed “thief.” Harmony started to run but a man coming out of shop grabbed her. Harmony remembered what she saw the mob do to the street boy and she began to cry for mercy. She said she was sorry and asked that they please not beat her.
The man that had caught her laughed. The woman who had called her a thief asked her where she was from. Harmony told her she was from Nairobi. She asked where her mother was. Harmony told her she was dead. Her story tumbled out, in gasps, in cries of rage, and ended with her crying so much she was unsure if she could ever stop.
The woman told Harmony she could keep the papaya, then she led her down the street to a hotel. Inside the woman spoke to the chef, who was a woman that was younger than she was, but older than Harmony’s mother. They spoke in low voices until the older woman came over to Harmony with a bowl of beans and said,
“My friend Maureen will take care of you. In the meantime, eat.”
Chapter 24
Displacement
It’s Saturday and we’re doing activities with the kids in the schoolhouse. I have the children between the ages of seven and twelve. One of them, Tristan, begins to misbehave, jumping in and out of his seat, distracting the other children, and generally being disruptive enough that I decide to remove him from class. With my preschoolers I often pick them up from their seat and carry them to their cottage where their house moms will put them to bed or sometimes spank them.
I fall into the same routine with Tristan, picking him up and carrying him out. But he is not four years old and before I reach the door, I realized I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. Tristan fights me every inch of the way, grabbing door frames, poles, flower pots, even the edge of the sidewalk. At nine years old, he is no match for me, but I still have to use more force than is appropriate, as I have put myself in a situation where as the adult, I “have” to prevail. I can’t lose, but by using force in the first place, I’ve lost the moral high ground.
Finally at the front stairs of Cottage Purple, Tristan makes his last stand, locking his fingers down on the pole supporting the portico. Pulling him off is nearly impossible, his body is stretched out, taught and sinewy, his fingers turning white where he has them wrapped around the metal support. I peel them free and wrestle him towards the door. I’m reaching the limit of my patience and I notice the door is ajar. I lift him up and push him against the door to open it. But I’ve miscalculated. The door only appeared open. It is actually warped and the bowing of the wood gives the illusion that the door is not latched in the frame. My attempt to push the door open, leaning in with Tristan’s body, turns into slamming him into a locked door. He is stunned and I see the fight go out of his eyes. While he is recovering from the shock, I realize the cruelty of what I’ve done and move to comfort him, but at this point his house mom, Ivy, opens the door. She is not surprised to see him back.
“Tristan, were you misbehaving?” she asks.
“Yes,” he mumbles. I try to tell her that he’s already learned his lesson but she calls him inside and orders him to bed—the equivalent of time out. My own words catch in my throat. I feel like I’ve betrayed him and all the children. While there are rules and guidelines for disciplining a child for the house moms and uncles, there are none for the volunteers, since it is assumed we would never be put into that role. I sit outside thinking about which point I went too far, what I could have done differently.
I never apologized to Tristan. That is a regret I will hold until the day I die.
After Anika dies I can’t concentrate. I’m angry, depressed, and snap at the staff, volunteers, and the kids. Small setbacks make me lose my composure completely. It all builds on me until I realize that I can go home and get away from it all. I change the return date on my tick
et, tell Bonava I’m leaving “for a few weeks,” and after a day and a half on planes and in the Amsterdam airport, I’m home, my mother waiting for me at the international gate. I explain to her why I’m home, but as a seasoned nurse she already understands and gives me the phone number of a doctor she knows at the hospital where she teaches.
“You should call and talk with him.”
His name is Edmund Pelligrino. He is in his eighties and has memories from attending to patients in iron lungs while he was a medical student in the 1940s. He has also written extensively on medical ethics and end of life care. Between his teaching rounds at Georgetown Hospital, he sits down with me to talk. He’s not a large man and reminds me vaguely of Frank Purdue in his old Purdue Chicken Farm commercials, but seated behind his desk he has a gravitas that Mr. Purdue never had. I tell him of my sense of hopelessness, impotence, even rage at the death of the children. “I’m just sick and tired of burying kids,” I finally say.
He is quiet for a time, his fingers forming a steeple on his desk. His silence prods me on. “There are so many kids growing sick and then dying. I don’t know how to put up with it. I feel so crushed inside when I’m standing next to one of those graves shoveling in dirt on an undersized coffin.”
He listens. I notice his fingers are gnarled but strong as he flexes them and lays his hands on his desk. In the gentlest voice possible he says, “I don’t mean any offense by this, but your pity is misplaced.”
I’m a little stunned. How could that be? I’m working in an orphanage, in Kenya, for children with HIV. I’ve done more with my pity and compassion for others than most do in a lifetime.
“Yes, but you keep talking about yourself and how you feel sorry, for yourself. You are not the one dying.”
I sit back in my chair and stare out through the window. I’m back in the North American cycle of seasons. It’s spring and the maple tree outside is covered with red buds of new growth. “I guess you are right,” I say.
Dr. Pelligrino, among other things, is a classicist, and he asks me if I remember my Latin from high school. I tell him I do. I also remember it from Georgetown where I took four additional semesters.
“Good,” he says. “Think of the roots of the word compassion. Cum patior, literally, to suffer with. That is the role of the doctor or nurse attending to the sick and dying, to suffer with them. I tell my med students that they are not truly doctors until they have their first incurable case. It is only then that they learn the difference between healing and curing.”
I tell him I’m not sure of the distinction myself.
“Anyone can cure,” he says with a wave at his bookcase full of books and teaching awards. “Anyone can throw pills at an infection and cure it. But to heal, that takes a relationship between one human being and another. To heal, to exhibit compassion, to suffer with a patient, that is the true role of service whether you are a doctor, a nurse, or nurse’s aide as you are serving. You can’t cure every infection, but you can heal even up to the point of death, even with a terminal patient.”
He smiles and for a moment I’m envious of students who get to study under him. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Call your airline. It’s time to go back.”
A boy has jumped the fence of the orphanage, not out but in. He made a slow but intelligent breach, taking his time to study his target before making an entry. I notice him in the late morning. The lot next to the orphanage belongs to a successful tourism operator who is building a home and office for his business. The work is slow because he is not taking out any loans to finance it, but is instead paying cash as he can. As a result the pond, trees, reeds, and rushes remain in view from the volunteer house while the cinderblock structure slowly takes form alongside.
I notice the boy sitting on a eucalyptus stump, singing and talking to himself, kicking his legs and snapping his fingers, all the while facing the fence marking the property line between the orphanage and the adjacent lot. I don’t think much of him—seeing an unaccompanied child in Kenya is not an unusual thing. I simply go on my way.
Later in the afternoon, however, a ladder from the construction site is leaning up against the fence. I notice graffiti on the walls as I walk up the stairs of the volunteer house. Someone has written, “Thank you for not smoking.” When I climb to the top of the flight I see the boy sitting on the balcony, alone again, singing. One hand he uses to keep the beat, with the other he twirls a stick of charcoal. His feet are ashen with dust, his shirt and shorts faded and tattered at the edges. His hair is also longer and thicker than most of the children at the orphanage, but it is not a complete unruly mess; he has received haircuts, if infrequently.
He won’t look me in the eye and does not seem to know English when I try to speak with him. I ask in Kiswahili where he is from and he points to the lot next door. I introduce myself and ask him his name.
“Patrick,” he whispers.
I get Kevin, one of our Kenyan volunteers, who speaks with him in Kiswahili that is more fluent than mine. When Kevin asks him where he is from and he points at the adjacent lot, Kevin does not understand. I do and nod at the ladder leaning against the fence.
I ask him if he is hungry. He nods yes. We take him down to the kitchen. By now its dinner time and we are able to get him a bowl of rice and green grams. It’s a huge helping. I look away and back and it seems as if he has finished the entire serving in seconds, cleaning out the bowl completely. I get him water next, again he drains his cup with the efficiency of the parched. At this point one of the nuns comes by and recognizes him.
“Patrick, what are you doing here?” she asks him.
His story slowly comes out. We learn that he is a child in the orphanage’s outreach program—so he is HIV+. He lives with relatives but as sometimes happens with orphans inherited by extended family, he does not receive the love, attention, or food that the biological children receive. Our clinic in Kibera, where he goes to receive his antiretrovirals, is one of the few places he feels loved and receives any sort of affection. The sisters are a bright spot of consistency in his life. Somehow he memorized the address of the orphanage from reading paperwork or perhaps glancing at the side of one of our vehicles and made the journey from Kibera to here on foot.
The tone shifts. Sister Tiny—who is called such because she is, well, tiny—scolds Patrick for leaving home and jumping the fence. When Sister Tiny is finished, Kevin takes his time to explain all of his transgressions to him and all the rules Patrick has broken. Patrick sits with his hands in his lap, his head down, saying nothing.
I can’t help feeling torn as I stare at the cleaned out bowl on the bench next to him. Could you blame him for coming? Doesn’t life with the kind nuns, loving house mums, and the other clean, well-dressed children who have their own playground and school seem preferable to the unsanitary mazes of Kibera, clogged with people, sewage, and ashes from burning trash? To me it feels so arbitrary that our kids have food, shelter, even toys and Patrick does not, because he has “extended family” that he should be with.
On the one hand, the episode illustrates a criticism of orphanages: the “if you build it, they will come” problem. Aside from being expensive, orphanages act as magnets for unwanted children who get dropped off or wander in, their families often concluding that it is better to grow up in institutions with Gameboys and razor scooters than with connections to community and family (also called the lucky-orphan perception). In some cases this might be true, but most critics point out that it is difficult to meet the psycho-social needs of children in an institution, and ours, with its celebrity visitors and donors, is not representative of most orphanages—Malaika with its overcrowded rooms, poor sanitation, and inadequate staff is a better example. Gameboys and razor scooters can’t replace the love of a family, yet shiny toys draw more and more unwanted children into what many consider is an unhealthy, unsustainable form of childcare.
But all the debates aside, I feel for Patrick. He spends the night in Cottage Red with the othe
r boys, then is returned to Kibera in the morning.
A colleague at Feed the Children found a baby tossed in a trash pit in Dagoretti. The baby was a boy. His face had been mauled by dogs, the torn flesh covered in an oozing miasma of maggots. The staffers at Feed the Children named the baby Lazarus, in a reference to Lazarus from the Bible who Jesus raised from the dead. They felt that this Lazarus survived his own experience of death. When I meet him in the infirmary of the Abandoned Baby Center, he reaches up to be held by me. I do not pick him up.
Staring at Lazarus and the missing side of his head, my mind struggles to make sense of what appears to be an illusion, like the digital effects in a movie. The dogs tore away his ear, part of his jaw, his cheekbone, just up to the eye socket, sparing the eye but placing it just on the edge of what remains of his face. I stand before Lazarus with the feeling that all rules have been waived.
There is a part of me that searches inside myself for outrage, but I find none. I know the place where Lazarus was found: Dagoretti. To me it is one of the worst slums in Kenya. Kibera is the slum most people think of when they think of slums in Nairobi. Kibera has standing. It is the second or third largest slum in Africa (depending on whom you ask). Aid agencies fall over each other trying to get a foothold there. There were 133 different charities doing work there at last count. As an aid worker you have arrived, passed your trial of fire, whatever—when you have worked in Kibera.