“Ready,” she says, and allows herself now, when it’s necessary, to look at the crowd in front of them. It has doubled in size in the fifteen minutes since she arrived and she sees that today will be at least another five-hundred-person admission day. Already the camp facilities are stretched to the limit. If another load of tents doesn’t arrive soon, the newcomers will have to live in the open. Which means more pneumonia, more deaths from the nights which at this altitude are very cold.
She and Dawit move out into the crowd, urging and pushing them into a semblance of a line instead of a pressing, undisciplined gang. Too weak to stand for long, many of them sit down and wait quietly, the expressions on their faces unreadable. Her job now is to assist Dawit who will search the seated crowd for the sickest and take them out to be looked after immediately. Off to the edge of the crowd a young man squats beside an old man — at least he looks old — who lies on a rag in the dirt. She watches him for a moment and her heart sinks. This is triage. Behind her, as if to confirm her judgement, Dawit says, “No. It is too late. No food.” She turns to him, touches his arm lightly with her fingertips. He does not look at her, walks quickly away.
Dawit is speaking Amharic to the first family in the line, a woman and her two, shivering, half-naked children, one of whom lies on a bundle of rags on the ground, her head on her mother’s lap. She’s in an advanced stage of starvation, barely conscious. As Dawit translates the mother’s answers to Caroline’s questions, Lannie is there, ready to carry the weakest child to the scale, or to take the other by his hand to lead him wherever Caroline decrees he should go.
As she moves toward them, the woman opens her shamma and reveals a tiny infant nestled against her withered chest. Her expression doesn’t change as she looks down at her skeletal baby. Dawit, alarmed, snaps a question in Amharic to the mother as Lannie automatically reaches out to take the infant. The woman ignores Dawit, resists Lannie’s gesture for a moment, then lets Lannie take the child. As soon as she touches it, Lannie realizes it is dead.
At such moments, she relies on Caroline. Caroline has spent her life in the Third World. Over and over again she’s refused administrative jobs that would have taken her away from the front lines. Nothing surprises her, no emergency is too much for her.
“Over there!” Caroline snaps, the brusqueness of her voice is like a small jolt of electricity. Numbly, Lannie carrying the dead infant follows her pointing finger to where one of the Ethiopian women workers wraps the body gently in an admissions blanket so she’ll be covered — for dignity? so others won’t see? — as Lannie carries her to the laying-out tent. When the mother has been questioned and she and her living children tended to, if she wishes to see her dead baby again, someone will take her there. Lannie is sure the woman will not want to see the baby again.
The morning passes in a steady round of lifting, carrying, supporting, and sometimes leading children or their weakened mothers to the hospital or the feeding shelters. In between these trips, she carries messages from Caroline to the doctor, or to other nurses. Each time she returns the crowd of waiting people does not appear to have diminished.
At noon, instead of going back to the mud house she shares with the others, even knowing Caroline will scold her — You have to keep up your strength, you’ll get ill if you don’t eat, then you’re no good to anybody — she skips lunch to sit with Mariam in the feeding tent.
Often, holding her Oxfam cup to the little girl’s lips to make sure she drinks every drop, Lannie is reminded of being allowed to hold her baby sister Misty, when she was a little girl herself. The memory makes her want to cradle Mariam more firmly, rocking her, burying her nose in the child’s freshly shaved, prickly scalp. Even though she’s ashamed of using Mariam to fill a hole in her own life, Lannie still spends every spare second by the child’s side.
Yesterday Mariam pulled the cup out of Lannie’s hand to hold it herself. Seeing this, Belainesh, the social worker, said to Lannie, “I am trying to find her family, if she has any left.” If Belainesh can find an adult from Mariam’s village, she will send her home with that person. If not, Mariam will have to go to stay with the nuns who will try to find her a home. It is inconceivable to Lannie that no one would want her. She has toyed with the idea of raising her herself, but knows no one would allow it. She would have to kidnap her.
When she arrives at the feeding tent, Lannie scans the crowd of women and children squeezed into the small shelter for Mariam’s bright little face, but can’t see her anywhere. Almaz, who is helping dish out the faffa, says to Lannie in a sympathetic voice, “Some people from her village took her.”
“Home?” Lannie asks, hearing the faint quaver in her own voice. She notices, in the instant she waits for Almaz’s reply, that the woman who had the dead baby at her breast early this morning is sitting on the ground in the corner of the enclosure, not bothering to bat away the flies resting on her cheeks and forehead, the food on her dish untouched, the skinny woman next to her reaching furtively for it. Her other children aren’t with her. Almaz, following her eyes, says in an undertone, “The second one died an hour ago. She brought her too late to save her. The other is in the hospital. Dr. Habte says he will die too. She refuses to sit with him.”
“Who will look after her when she gets there?” Lannie asks, meaning Mariam, as if Almaz hasn’t just told her about the woman sitting in listless silence in the midst of the hum of voices from all the people packed into the shelter.
“They say she has an aunt there. Belainesh says we must get her back to her home.” Moving away, she has to raise her voice over the buzz of voices, of children crying out.
Blinking, Lannie turns away, stepping over people and squeezing between them. At the entrance, she bumps hard into a male body. Each of them steps to the right and then to the left and then laughing, at least he is, he puts both of his hands on Lannie’s shoulders and says, “Hey, maybe I should put up some traffic lights here.” She recognizes him as the engineer who built the admissions building. He’s a true redhead, she can’t help but notice again. How strange we must look to everyone here; maybe they think we’re brother and sister. This whips through her mind as the heat from his hands penetrates her shoulders and spreads, causing an unexpected, answering flush in her abdomen. It’s a long time since a man has touched her. She’s about to pull away when he drops his hands.
“Rob Sargent,” he tells her. “I’m a Canadian.”
“Lannie Stone. Me too,” she responds automatically, smiling, not meeting his eyes. She shakes his hand, still smiling as if she’s glad to meet him.
“Actually we already met,” he tells her.
“What?” she says. Lucy pushes past them carrying a child wrapped in one of their admission blankets. Lannie hadn’t even noticed she was in the feeding shelter. As she passes Lucy mutters, “The hospital is overflowing.” Lannie makes a move as if to take the child from her, nurses are needed everywhere, this is something Lannie can do, but Lucy says, “No, I’m going there anyway. Caroline is going to see if we can send a few patients out so there’s more room.”
“We’d better move,” Lannie says to Rob. Dodging people, they step outside to one side of the entrance, searching for a little shade. Although it’s not terribly hot, the sun is directly overhead and has more power here so close to the equator than it has at home.
“I see I made an impression,” Rob says. He doesn’t seem embarrassed, more curious, almost tender over the fact that she doesn’t remember him.
“I — uh, meet a lot of people,” she says, drawing a line in the hard-packed, red-brown dirt with her toe.
“I’m not supposed to step over that?” he asks, looking down at the line, grinning and looking back up at her. In spite of herself, she laughs.
“I remember you now,” she says, opting for flirtatiousness, then thinking better of it, too late. It had been at one of the many evenings they’d all spent on the terrace of the one bearable café in town. “Much beer.” She tosses her head and
looks away to where the column of people are still descending the far slope, all sizes, all ages, the men walking with staffs, the women carrying babies, tramping through the dust toward the camp. She thinks, I’ve got to get back to work, they’ll be swamped at registration. “What are you doing here?” she asks him, then adds hastily, “I know you built the administration building, but I mean, now.”
“Water,” he says. “You’ve probably noticed there isn’t enough?” There’s a touch of sarcasm in his voice or maybe it’s irony at the whole situation, or that rage they all feel they have to keep tamped, so that she looks back at him, into his eyes which, unlike her yellow-brown ones, are a pale blue and clear, almost as clear as the cruelly cloudless sky. “We’ve found a bore, now we’re trenching and laying the pipes. Should soon have a good supply.” He looks over in the direction she has just been looking and says, “Well, it won’t be enough, but it’s better.”
“The formulas take a lot of water,” Lannie mutters, for want of anything better to say. She’s trying hard not to think of Mariam. At least she’s well, at least she didn’t die. This thought helps to dissolve the lump that formed in her throat when Almaz gave her the news of the child’s departure. “So do the showers and the hand-washing and the laundry and — everything.”
“After work tonight, would you consider having a beer with me in town?” She can see a flush rising under that redhead’s freckled, translucent skin of his that mirrors her own, and now he’s the one to toy in the dust with the toe of his boot. She thinks, no, remembers she owes her Canadian churches a new story and should write it tonight. About Mariam? No, not Mariam. But always on the lookout for camouflage too, not wanting to be labelled as eccentric, too much a loner, after a short hesitation she says, “Okay, but it’ll be late. Eight, maybe?”
“I can pick you up at your house,” he offers, “We can walk together.” She nods again. The girls all tease her about being a recluse. Sometimes it isn’t a joke. She knows they find her strange, cold, not pleasant. This will help, make her seem more normal. Provided one of them doesn’t already have her eye on Rob — he’s a nice enough looking man and he isn’t a Russian or an Italian or an Ethiopian — but if somebody else is interested in him, there’ll be trouble. A loud cry comes from a tent off to their right, a wail of grief, and then another. “My husband is dead, my heart has pain. It is finished, my husband is dead.” Such open mourning is not the usual thing these days. With so many dying, eerie silence has become the pattern of grief.
“I have to go,” she says, urgent now, raising her voice to be heard over the noisy buzz of the feeding tents and the sounds of grief. Rob’s face has gone blank behind his freckles. It is a stoicism she recognizes: Don’t think about it, be strong, it says. Another infant in the feeding tent has begun to howl.
“Yeah, me too,” he says, giving her a solid, assessing look. Then he walks away carefully, firmly, only a slight jerkiness in his stride giving him away.
“We should go and check the tents,” Caroline says. They’ve closed registration for the day, in a half-hour it will be dark. “I’m starving,” Caroline goes on, “but with so many coming in and the hospital so full, I’m afraid there might be sick unaccompanied kids in the tents nobody’s noticed.”
“Okay,” Lannie replies. She’d just as soon work right through until eight and then go out with Rob directly from here, get something to eat in town. Caroline will drag her off to supper with the others though, she supposes. And if she isn’t hungry right now, she knows she will be as soon as she smells food cooking. She can’t remember for sure, but thinks that today she has eaten only a couple of cookies and some juice at the afternoon break.
Dawit has gone back to his family in the nearby town for the night, so Caroline calls Teodoris, who is still tidying the office behind them in preparation to locking up. Teodoris will interpret. They all go to Amharic lessons two or three times a week, but after a day’s work most of them have trouble concentrating.
They set out to walk through the tent city, unable to go ten feet before children healthy enough to walk about and play a little have begun to hurry along with them, the bolder ones taking their hands, the others giggling and running alongside. Even though it’s almost dark they want Lannie and Caroline to stop and play ball with them as the staff sometimes does. It amazes Lannie that children can still play in the midst of such devastation, and this makes her think of all the ones who can’t, of the dead baby at the woman’s breast. Of Mariam, gone away.
Even if Mariam’s aunt comes back in a month’s time for rations, she thinks, she doubts she’d bring Mariam with her. She finds herself wiping moisture from her eyes, glad of the night falling rapidly over the camp, the people retreating inside their shelters to huddle together for warmth.
Caroline, Teodoris, and Lannie split up and thrust their heads into tent after tent. Teodoris calls, “Caroline!” and comes to her where she’s paused down the alley beyond him. He’s carrying a tiny child in his arms. The child’s limbs and his head against Teodoris’s chest bob loosely with his long steps. Lannie comes up to them, the only one here with little Amharic, ready to take the child from Teodoris.
“He is seven years, they say,” he explains to Caroline. The boy can’t weigh more than twenty-five pounds and is the length of a three-year-old. Lannie can’t contain a gasp. Caroline, peering at him, says nothing, although for an instant she stands perfectly still. “He came in last night,” Teodoris goes on. “His mother died in the night. They have taken her away.” Caroline feels the child’s pulse gently, lifts one of his eyelids, says, “Lannie, take him to the hospital. We’ll finish up here and I’ll check on him before I go home.” Lannie had initially looked away at the sight of the child in Teodoris’s arms, then made herself look back again, feeling for a second that her face is acquiring the set of Caroline’s when she studies suffering: grave, gentle, clear-eyed.
Lannie takes the child from Teodoris and holds him carefully against her chest — a bundle of worn, chilled cloth. She shifts him so that his head rests against her neck as she walks carefully so as not to jostle him, down the row of shelters in the gathering darkness toward the lighted hospital. The child does not move or make a sound.
As she walks she remembers the first camp in Sidamo province where, not trusting the government who said there was no drought, no famine there, she’d managed to get a travel pass and gone to see for herself if this was true. She remembers lying awake listening to the drums celebrating the third day after the birth of a son. Sons, always sons, she thinks distantly, securing the child more firmly to her. Didn’t Iris say she’d once had a brother? One who’d died as a baby? She stumbles over a small rock, catches herself before she falls, and in that instant, her short time in Sidamo rushes back in …
When she’d seen blood pouring from the woman, her head lolling over the arm of the man carrying her, Lannie had instinctively run toward them, without remembering she wasn’t a nurse and couldn’t help. Abebe, the nurse on duty, appeared in the doorway of the examining room and shouted to her, “Here! Come!”
She moved toward him through the noise and too-bright light to the blood-soaked bundle of rags lying now on the examination table. The woman’s relatives, four or five of them, crowded around the table, looking down at her, one woman keening softly. “She must not bleed so much!” Abebe said, turning his back to the woman on the table, pulling open the cupboard where instruments, bandages, and medicines were kept. “Get her clothes off!” He handed her scissors over his shoulder and she began to straighten the limbs of the bundle on the table who she saw now was a thin girl of perhaps fifteen years, her eyes rolled back in her head. But as Lannie touched her ankles she felt warmth. She started to cut away the soggy fabric and saw, or already knew, the blood was pouring from the girl’s vagina, had already thought it a miscarriage, when she caught a glimpse of the flesh torn away, red and pulpy, and she would have fainted or vomited at that and the blood pouring out all over the table had not Abebe pu
shed her back, lifting the girl’s hips and sliding a sterile pad under her, and then the Swedish nurse Inge shouldering Lannie aside, taking in the situation at a glance.
“Take them out!” she commanded Lannie. Lannie, clenching her teeth to keep from throwing up into the puddles of blood, removed the relatives from the room, going with them herself, closing the door behind them. She leaned against the wall shaking so hard she was afraid she might fall. After a moment she got a basin of water and a brush and began to scrub the puddled trail of blood from the cement floor.
It was a botched genital mutilation, Inge had told her later. The woman who did it was drunk, the relatives said, had cut clumsily and too deep, had — God, she mustn’t think of it. She’s glad she’s not a nurse; she doesn’t have the courage. She’d finally written a piece about it, but is certain the church magazines she was writing for didn’t print it. Maybe they didn’t believe it, not that they’d think she was lying, but out of a sheer inability, born of their utter naivete, to assimilate the story. Like Iris, she thinks. She can’t imagine telling Iris such a thing either. It’s one of the reasons she doesn’t write.
Climbing the hospital steps now, she edges sideways through the door, letting it slap shut behind her. Rita, the nurse on duty, looks up from where she’s bending over one of the pallets, soothing a skeleton who whimpers softly, too weak to form words. She hurries over, takes the child from Lannie’s arms.
“Set up that camp bed,” she tells Lannie. Lannie runs to the bed leaning against the wall and pushes the legs down as quickly as she can while Rita waits, holding the child. She sets the boy gently down on it and Lannie waits as Rita takes his pulse. “It’s okay,” she says to Lannie, glancing at her over her shoulder as she crouches by the child. “I’ll take it from here.” Then she hesitates, staring up at her, and says, “You should go home now.” Home. For one instant Lannie sees the farm kitchen, its bright yellow walls — Iris loves colour so much. Before that they’d been turquoise and before that, hollyhock pink — Barney grinning a silent good morning at her over the paper, his eyes brightening at the sight of her, Iris turning from the toaster to say, Did you sleep well, dear? as if there were no horrors in the world lurking in the shadows just out of arm’s reach. “You look exhausted,” Rita tells her.
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