Every day my heart breaks. Not a day goes by for me without seeing a child suffering, and every day it breaks my heart. It’s something that is beyond my range of understanding, and I suffer as I mentally go back and forth between accepting it, as it is the reality that is happening, and wanting to stop it, prevent it, run and hide from it. I’m torn between wanting to hold these children and acknowledge all the suffering in their little bodies and wanting to erase the visions from my mind, from my world, from my dreams.
I see children starving, dehydrated, HIV positive, dying from diarrhea and the victims of the traditional healer’s medicine. They sometimes don’t even resemble humans, so small and limp, with their eyes bulging out of their tiny heads, the hair gone, looking like baby pigs or kittens. They are so dehydrated that the bumps on their heads are often sunken in, and their plaintive cries fill the air as the nurses pump their wiry arms, searching for a vein in which to insert a rehydration IV.
Sometimes their veins are too small and too dry, and the nurse must have the mother attempt to orally rehydrate the baby using the IV drip liquid, the baby’s immature digestive system fighting to reject the fluids that could save the child’s life. The gurgling from deep in the babies protruding stomach is interrupted by its attempts to wail, which are so subdued and sound like a kitten mewing if you close your eyes. When you open them again you see the drama of the baby trying to flail and attempting to squirm. None of this lasts long as the child quickly exhausts, and resigns itself to becoming limp in its mother’s arms, allowing the nurses and the mother and the fates to do their biding.
These scenes are juxtaposed with others, with those of hope. Scenes that quietly wash over my broken heart and soothe it a bit, like a cooling menthol. Moms quietly giving birth on a table with no stirrups in a room with no lights and later bringing back fat, healthy babies. Noticing a nurse slip one of the few candies I’ve given to her to a child crying after a vaccination injection. Seeing a toddler feeding an infant, sharing what little food they have as they sit on the dirt on the ground outside the clinic. Watching a young girl testing HIV negative, and taking the condoms offered to her. Hearing the children at the daycare singing and knowing they are dancing as well. Watching the nurses be so caring as they rebandage the boy’s leg who comes in every third day.
It is only these scenes of hope that can carry me on, for if I were to dwell on the sadness I could not manage. I must look for them and search for them, and observe the beauty of simple moments or I feel I could not stay. And even this seems ridiculous, because what would I do, where would I go? I’m not the one who is so inflicted. My leaving would not end the suffering here, it would only compound it in my mind. Seeing it and bearing witness to it, and watching and working for change to slowly creep in are the only ways to alleviate my own angst. Now that I’ve seen it, I must do what I can to help change it. I, like those surrounding me, am destined to be in this place, for better or for worse. I can only hope for better.
A broken heart is not the worst thing in the world. As it breaks it grows back stronger, or at least this is what I’ve heard to be true.
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