Ethiopia: The Boy with the Green Blanket (cont.)

Carefully, awkwardly, they carry him.  One at each of his elbows, two more with his legs. Ruth steps back, watching.  The men shout at each other, steering their way through the crowd, trying not to trip or pull their fragile cargo in too many different directions.

Weakly, the boy protests, mumbling incomprehensibly.  His ragged, filthy clothes are more holes than anything.  He struggles to cover himself, conscious of his nakedness and a crowd of curious, peering eyes; but his arms are being held by strong hands in latex gloves; and he can’t reach his blanket.  It falls to the ground.  His wild and vacant eyes roll loose and broken in their sockets.  He writhes, pitifully twisting and turning, desperately trying to free himself from these well-meaning strangers; but it is hopeless.  He long ago lost his strength to fight.  Delicate curtains of orange dust jostle loose from the folds of his rags and settle gently on the ground.  He closes his eyes.  

I stare in silence.

Gently the latex-covered don’t-get-too-close hands lay the boy on the red tile floor outside the clinic.  His body is deathly thin, all bony angles and hollows where there should not be hollows.  His cheeks are fallen in like slackened sails.  But his hands and feet and belly are swollen, clear signs of severe malnutrition.  His skin is not brown, but nearly gray, a sick looking dull color of gray, and peeling in great patches all over his body.  There is angry pink skin underneath.  It is difficult to tell how old he is.  Maybe as old as eighteen.  Maybe as young as twelve.

Again I search the crowd for Ruth and find her standing silently at the edge.  Her cheeks are flushed pink and a few damp fingers of hair have escaped her ponytail.  Her eyes pull away from the boy to meet mine.

She has brought him.

“I’ve got to teach a class in ten minutes.  I have to run.”

I nod.

“Will you be all right?”

“Yes, of course.  I’ll be fine.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.  Go.”

“I’ll come ‘round tomorrow then, first thing?”

“Okay.”

“Thanks, ya.”  Ruth disappears inside the mini bus, and her friends pull away. 

I turn back to the clinic and see that the crowd has gathered in a circle around the boy, safely two steps back.  But Sister Pia hobbles right up to the edge of his filthy blanket and gracelessly bends down to poke and prod him, pick aside his rags and make disapproving clucking sounds. 

“Ma signore,” she mutters.  “Ma signore pieta.  Si, si, pauverino.”   She shakes her head in disgust, her two-sizes-too-big veil threatening to slip down over her forehead and come to rest on the tops of her two-sizes-too-big glasses.

The boy twists away from her in protest, and more sounds come out of his blistered mouth, but he is powerless against Sister Pia’s relentless, bumbling goodness.

“Si, si.  Guarda, Sara.”  Without turning from the boy, she beckons me with one hand to come and look.  I obey.

“Gobez, Sara.  Guarda.”  Despite his weak protests, Sister Pia continues her systematic inspection, picking up and turning over his swollen hands and feet.  “Izi.”  She points to a series of open sores on the underside of one arm.  “Izi.”  She shows me where the jiggers have made a feast of the worn and dirty skin between his toes.  “Very seek, Sara.  Very seek.”  She brings the fingertips of one hand up to her mouth.  “No food.”  She shakes her head.  “No food.

“Si, Sister Pia,” I respond lamely.

Gradually the other onlookers lose interest in the boy and wander back into the hot afternoon.  Suffering they know.     

Beyene approaches, unraveling a stubborn green hose.  The boy drinks clumsily and greedily for long moments.  When Beyene turns his drink into an unexpected bath, the boy swats ridiculously at the water with sudden energy, wriggling to escape its cold and unwelcome touch.  Beyene throws the rags from the boy’s body into the clinic incinerator, picking up what is left of them with a stick and holding it aloft like a rotting flag.  He stabs the filthy cloth into the hot brick mouth full of dirty towels, band aids and used strips of foul-colored gauze.  The boy’s blanket is spared; Sister Pia will no doubt press a few birr into a hand of one of the village women so that she might wash it.  It will return to him as if given new life.  Bright green.  Cheerfully green.  Resurrected from the dust and stink and piss and mango peels of the side of the road.

Sister Pia hands me some bananas and tells me to take them to him.  He sits slumped over, awkward in new clothes, gaudy and bright against his dull skin.  Water from the harsh scrubbing drips down his temples and elbows making gray pathways, like sweaty fingers drawn across a dusty chalkboard, through the delousing powder still stuck to his skin.

“Mus tefellegalleh?” I ask, holding out a banana.  He takes it without looking at me, immediately fumbling with the peel.  I stand there next to him, smiling stupidly.  He has trouble maneuvering his mouth around the banana at first.  I wonder when he last had something to eat.  Has it been days?  A week?

The boy pushes pieces of the fruit into his mouth.  He still doesn’t look at me.  He will never look at me.  He will never say another word.  And with the exception of the time Sister Pia will give him a piece of candy, he will never smile.  I will never touch him.  No one asks it of me.  My paleness makes me fragile.  I have been delivered to this place wrapped in cellophane, a dainty porcelain doll that must be fussed over and guided by the arm to the shade of a nearby tree when its cheeks flush pink like strawberries in the sun.   

When he finishes the banana, I hold out a second one.  He doesn’t take it.

Sister Pia comes to stand beside me.  First Beatricia will test the boy for malaria, TB, and AIDS, she explains, in order to rule out disease.  Perhaps he is only starving.  Only.  Then he will be moved to stay with one of the families down the path from the clinic.  It has all been arranged.

“Dilla hospital, bazoo chigger alle.  Teru idellum.”  There are many problems at the hospital, she says.  It is not good. 

In fact, the hospital in town is a nightmare.  Without enough beds, the sick and dying lie on homemade pallets on the dirty floor.  Without screens on the windows, the sick and dying weakly swat at the flies and mosquitoes boldly feasting on what is left of their flesh.  Without nearly enough medicine and supplies, the sick and dying will die simply because they are poor and Ethiopian.

“Ees no good, Sara,” Sister Pia assures me.  “Ees better thees way.”

“Eshi, Sister Pia.”

Weeks from now, when the boy has not improved, we will try taking him to this nightmarish place nevertheless, dreaming beyond our wits that they can somehow do a better job of saving him.

During our visits to the hospital to check on him, people will pull shyly at Sister Pia, with low murmurs and entreaties for blessings.  The women will uncover their starving babies with wide eyes, silent cries, and arms and legs like sticks.  Sister Pia will stop, lay a hand on each child’s forehead, and whisper her prayer, bobbing her head with the mother’s hope and with her grief.  The women will look at me, in my jeans and sandals, as if simply being near this saintly woman endows me with some similar power to heal.  Or is it my white skin in this nightmarish place?  My come-from-a-land-of-plenty-ness that might bless them somehow as well?  Might rub off?  During these visits to the hospital, it is the only time in all my six months with the sisters that I will wish I was closer to God.

Shortly after we take the boy to the nightmarish place of the sick and dying, we will take him away again. Without enough doctors and nurses, some among the sick and dying go entirely unnoticed – including our boy.  Not even the white women, one of them wearing God’s clothes and a cross around her neck, can pull enough medicine and doctors out of the clear blue sky.

Shortly after we bring him home again, we will discover that Ruth was right.  We should have taken him to a hospital in Addis Ababa as soon as she found him.  Perhaps then he would have lived.

But for now, a woman named Tamirnesh will care for him, and, in return, Ruth and I will pay her fifteen birr every week.  The money will buy food and medicine for the boy and help provide a little extra for the household in exchange for his care.  It has all been arranged.

On bad days, loneliness is as much a part of my life in Ethiopia as the pink of my cheeks and the blue of my eyes.  It is reflected in the worn and weary face of a lost boy who never even told us his name.

On good days, I imagine him released from his suffering, from his poor and ravaged body, set free from the dust and stink and hunger and hopelessness of the side of the road.

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