seizures.

yesterday, i spent my last day with the kids at kamp.  i am grateful for my aunt and for the chance to meet these kids, although my heart wrenches with the sadness of it all.  yesterday i had an experience that will be seared in my memory, i am sure.  one of the little boys, who looked to us about eight years old but was about thirteen according to the other boys, looked clearly sick.  he was sipping his porridge, sitting on the concrete, looking about ten pounds thinner than when my aunt last saw him a couple weeks ago.  he couldn't focus, didn't talk, was clearly out of it.  the other boys informed us that, although he has medicine for epilepsy, he hadn't received the medicine for about two weeks.  on top of this, he had severe diarrhea for the last week, but no one had seen him or given him any medical attention.  once the little boy was finished with his porridge, he lost control of his bowels, then leaned back and started convulsing.  one of the older boys, who gained the nickname "doctor" for all his caring and love for the other kids who are sick, even in the midst of grieving his mother's death this past weekend, helped him to lay back so he didn't fall down and smack his head on the concrete.  i've experienced the helplessness of a seizure before, where all you can really do is hold someone so they don't hit themselves and let them shake, at joseph's house.  but seeing this little boy, dirty, covered in his own waste, so skinny, shaking and chattering, coughing from the phlegm in his mouth, breathing so quickly, as he lay on the concrete, abandoned by his mother and by the world, really, broke my heart.  that image is seared on my memory. 


all we could do was wait.  when the seizure was over, doctor took the little boy up to the medical clinic, where they refused to take him with dirty clothes.  so doctor and i brought him out back.  we got a pail of water, and doctor put on some gloves and stripped the boy, cleaning him off with his hands while i tried to help hold him up.  we found a clean pair of shorts in trish's car, but the clinic had no towels to dry him off.  we helped him back inside, where he could now lay down on a cot.  we used our msungu privilege to insist that he speedily get connected to IV fluids.  we sat with him as his breathing slowed a bit and he closed his eyes; whether or not he was sleeping, i don't know.  doctor told me that the other boys had beat him up the previous week because he smelled so bad.  i wanted to cry.  i don't know if this boy will survive, and quite honestly, i don't know if he wants to survive.  he has been abandoned by a mother who may have been told that he was possessed by evil spirits that caused his seizure or that it was her fault for being a witch or a bad parent; he has been neglected by the staff at kamp, by the other children; he can't consistently get the medicine he needs to stay relatively healthy.  


what i want, what the world desperately needs, is more people like doctor, more places like joseph's house, where in the midst of deep suffering, there is deep compassion, care, respect to meet it.  and what i need is to continue to challenge myself to get closer to that suffering, to move past my revulsion at the smells and fear at the sights of suffering, my tendency to want to stay clean, not to get dirty.  when this happens, when we really see and touch each other and allow it to move us, we are transformed and the world is changed.  i pray for that little boy, for healing and wholeness and love, somehow in his life.  may we all be a part of that movement of love in the world.