Friday, December 4, 2009

And I walk away.....

All Italicized lyrics from "One"-U2

It is a difficult thing for me to attempt to describe my experiences in Seronga. I tell stories that I hope give glimpses, of the sorrow, of the joy, of the essence of the place. I try to make aspects of most of it seem a little funny, or I try to find the poignant moment or the lesson learned. I’ve come to believe I’ve got a pretty good understanding of life here, and the motivations of the people, the reasons for their actions.


We’re one but we’re not the same,
We hurt each other and we’re doin’ it again.


The one area I can’t quite get around is the dying children. It’s an easy enough situation to overlook. In some ways I’m ashamed to say I try to stay out of that aspect of life here. I don’t attend all the funerals. I don’t even attend most of them. When I’m honest with myself, I have to admit I actively try to avoid them. What can one’s response possibly be when death is no longer a tragedy? I mean it is. It’s still a tragedy. But what is the proper word for it? How does one name the continuous state or condition of tragedy that has become a way of life?

I’ve noticed that African children aren’t really big criers. They don’t really cry because they’re tired, because if they’re tired, they are strapped to their mom’s back, which serves as their crib, and so they just go to sleep. They don’t really cry because they’re hungry, perhaps this is because they quickly get used to the feeling, or because their moms will just swing them around to nurse anywhere and everywhere. They don’t cry for many other reasons that I’ve seen children from my own culture cry, and a small part of me can’t help but speculate that it’s because they learn so early on that it really does no good. They’ll get what they get when it’s given to them, and in this culture it tends to be whatever is left over. There’s no use whining for something else.

(Worth noting: I might be wrong about this whole crying thing, as I was previously wrong on my “African children don’t crawl” theory, developed in part because I had never really seen it happen. It appeared to me that babies went from their moms back, being carried around- to walking. I mentioned this to a woman at the clinic one day and she laughed at me, told all her friends, who then also laughed at me, looked around the waiting room for a child of the correct age, picked it up, and put it on the floor in the crawling stance. She moved away and called the child and he crawled right to her. Touché. Perhaps these babies are just smart enough (or their mothers are) to not do too much cruising around in the loose sand full of broken glass and thorns.

But generally it’s got to be an injection, a serious injury or some pretty dire straights to get a child this side to cry.

A few weeks back I was at the clinic, trying to write or read or count pills or some other menial task that had been interrupted for what was likely a crap reason. I was about to leave the clinic, as it has increasingly become a difficult place for me to try to be for long periods of time, day in and day out, when I realized there were children crying. I have to admit I was surprised to find that I was in some ways deaf to the sound of children crying.

It’s often a haunting sound here. It’s a cross between a painful yelp and a prolonged moan. Sometimes I’ve noticed the children get so sick they don’t even sound like children any more, but rather some sort of injured animal, a sort of hoarse howling sob.

Just the other day I realized a child had followed me crying down the dirt road in Seronga for nearly ten minutes without me noticing until a car pulled up in front of me and asked, “Lorato, is that child crying for you?”

I looked back. The village is so full of children whom all know my name and scream it at me at any given opportunity that past indulging their fervent greetings I had no idea why the child was crying but walked back and picked her up.

As I’ve said before, I tend to get extremely mixed reactions from children here, from them running full speed from anywhere within eyesight to greet me in the village to shirking away in terror. I never know what reaction I’ll get, and have to admit I was a bit surprised when this child held up her arms in the universal “pick me up” way that makes even muddy or food covered children seem endearing.

I carried her along with my heavy bags, overloaded with at least two and a half litres of boiled, filtered and frozen water which I have to bring with me around the village daily in an attempt to stave off dehydration. I looked at the child and asked her what was the matter (I think) and told her to “quiet down” (didimala), which other than the Setswanafied English word of “sorddy” (sorry) is the only word of comfort I’ve really heard here.

The child eventually stopped crying and seemed satisfied to just follow me around for a while longer, to the co-op, the hardware store. At some point I looked back and had a gang of them following me like lemmings, rushing and nearly knocking each other over to help show me where the dish soap was.


One love,
One blood
One life you’ve got to do what you should
One life with each other, sisters, brothers
We’re one but we’re not the same
We’ve got to carry each other, carry each other…..
One



The other day I was walking home and heard the sound that my brain has recently begun to recognize again. Again it was a child crying. Not the I’m hungry, or thirsty, or that kid stole my toy, but the I’m in serious pain and I’m going to just cry myself into a state of passing out. I sighed and walked toward the sound. I found a child leaned up against a doorway, her torn and dirty dress hanging off her thin frame and a spot of sand in the front of her hair where she must have put her head onto the ground. She was half heartedly moaning, while someone on the other side of the piece of corrugated iron that was the door shouted at her periodically to stop. The other children played obliviously nearby, and the mother greeted me smiling when I entered the yard.

“What’s wrong with this child?” I asked her sharply, forgoing the usual series of polite greetings.

Realizing this wasn’t a social call, she thrust her chin in the child’s direction and indicated that “her hand was hurting.” I glanced at the child’s hand and saw that it was a swollen paw dangling at the end of a skinny wrist. The baby finger of her right hand was jutted out so far that it was perpendicular to her wrist, with a few small cuts between the last two fingers. “What happened?” I demanded from the mother.

“I don’t know,” she shrugged. I asked for the card from the clinic and saw that the child had first been seen on Saturday. It was Wednesday. I read through the card, and asked why the child hadn’t gone with the water ambulance to Gumare, as she had been referred to do for an x-ray.

“I wasn’t there.” said the mother. “It was her grandmother, and there was no money.”

“No money for what?” I asked. (The water ambulance is free.)

“For lunch,” She answered.

Is it getting better?
Or do you feel the same?
Will it make it easier on you, now,
That you’ve got someone to blame?



I wanted to scream. Instead I indicated that the child should follow me to my house. Two of her sisters followed. Against any and all Peace Corps policies, I busted out my often self raided medical kit for some antibacterial ointment, band-aids, and grabbed an ice pack from my freezer. This would be a temporary solution as it was 105 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade today, and this family would have no freezer. I attempted to clean the small punctures in the skin where the flesh was beginning to pop out that suggested it might have been a bug bite gone terribly wrong, but also thought it might have been a puncture from rusty piece of something.

I don’t know. I’m not a doctor. And unlike many people who join the Peace Corps, this experience has done absolutely nothing to push me in that direction, as a matter of fact I am quite certain that is absolutely not what I would like to be when I grow up. I have seen and heard about more strange injuries here, including one of my favorite village kids, who somehow managed to get a boiling water burn on her vulva (her mother was ready to yank off the dressings to explain to me exactly what was going on but I deferred) than I could care to see or hear about for the entirety of the rest of my life.

I walked the child back to her yard and spoke to the mother again. I called a few of my co-workers, none of whom could remember this child that had apparently been consulted today (“Is it the one with the abscess between the thumb and forefinger?” one of my coworkers asked helpfully.) and asked them if the child showed a referral on her card for the hospital if she should go with the water ambulance tomorrow. There was of course no certain answer for this so I indicated to the mother that this injury was quite serious and the child needed to go to see the doctor at the hospital the next day. I have no idea if she will actually be able to go there, as their might be adults with more serious injuries…


Did I ask too Much?
More than a lot?
You give me nothing-now it’s
All I’ve got……



(Sidebar: I traveled to Gumare the next day, and at the hospital I saw that the child was there waiting with her mother to go to the hospital via the water ambulance. When I arrived at the hospital and I heard a tiny voice calling “Lorato” –which isn’t completely out of the ordinary in this village far from my own-what can I say, people know me ;-0. I looked over and saw the girl’s sister smiling and waving at me and the little girl with the hand injury right behind her, staring at me slightly suspiciously- she might be remembering the painful application of the bandaid… It was afternoon and her hand still hadn’t been looked at by the doctor. I later heard that the trip was a waste and that the doctor never saw her, but back at Seronga clinic they had lanced the wound and drained it, and the next time I saw the child she had a bandage on it and the finger was closer to straight. Later when I got to the clinic and again mentioned the case, the nurses again said that the mother was supposed to bring the child back again for re-bandaging as they were worried about the infection spreading. The next time I passed the house I told the mother she must bring the child in again- as it said, in English-so helpful- on her card. The child’s sister later brought her back to the clinic, I found the nurse on call and sort of dragged him out of his house (it was a holiday) and had him attend to it. I think it’s gonna make it….. Update: I saw the little girl the other day, she called my name from the school yard and waved at me, with her fully healed hand. I guess I’ve done something here;-)

You say:
Love is a temple, Love the higher law
Love is a temple, Love the higher law
You ask me to enter, and then you make me crawl,
I can’t keep holding on to what you’ve got,
when all you’ve got is hurt.




A few steps farther down the path to my house I saw my neighbor and greeted her.

I asked her where her child was and she looked at me curiously. “He died this year.”

“What?” I asked. “He couldn’t have died this year, he was only born this year and I saw you with him only a month or so back.”

Through much discussion and producing several points of reference from events in the village, and who had been here or at the cattle post we managed to pin it down to when I was gone in Gabs for training last month.

“He was veddy sick,” she said matter of factly, continuing on to list off diarrhea and vomiting (universal signs of dehydration, one of the most common causes of death amongst babies and small children in Seronga) as legitimate and worthy causes of death. I muttered how sorry I was, and continued on my way.

I ask myself, How many times can you walk away from these situations before you are classified as a monster? What can you do, to stay, to help, to solve? What does it mean to when I stop caring, or feeling?

When I came here because I wanted to DO something, what exactly was it that I thought I might do? I mean truly?

“Have you come here for forgiveness,
Have you come to raise the dead?
Have you come here to play Jesus,
To the Lepers in your head?”


Did I think I would really run around actively saving lives? I’m not the Doctor.

As I entered my house, hot tired, dehydrated, sad, I turned and shut both my doors to the world, to this day. One of my prayer flags got caught on the door in protest, as though reminding me to try to keep my heart open. I ignored it and walked to the bathtub where I turned on the tap to fill the tub with the murky brown water in which I bathe or just sit in to get relief from the heat. Much like I was surprised by the cries of the children this day, I was startled to find myself suddenly sobbing. The tears began pouring down my face like the African rains that had been refusing to come. My heart melted and burned, and I sobbed, trying to release this sadness inside of me.

Did I disappoint you,
or leave a bad taste in your mouth
you act like you never had love,
so you won't need to go without...

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