sitting in the waiting room

I've stopped writing about the people who die, I realized. There was Helena, the mother-child who showed up at the clinic with a baby nobody in her family loved but her. They said he was cursed, and I think they believed she was too. They certainly acted that way. I could nearly hold her son with a single hand. The thing about kids like him - malnourished, shrinking little people - is that they end up looking like old men; wrinkled, with skin a size too big, tired eyes, a struggle gone underground, inside, silent, wheezy. It's the irony of receiving too little life, those jumping live cells of milk and broccoli and hot whole wheat bread steaming out of the oven: that you die looking exactly like somebody who's had too much life.

Helena had HIV, no one to help her at home, and probably tuberculosis. After a few weeks stay at Maforga, Jacqui sent her to the hospital for a confirmatory TB test and treatment. I visited a few times during the week she was there and it seemed good, that she'd be back to her baby soon, the little guy rapidly fattening under Jacqui and her workers' care. (The hospital doesn't allow infants to stay with their mothers and Helena's family refused to take him, which made Jacqui hopping mad). 

And then, just like that, Helena died, slipped away in the bustle of the women's ward. Which meant, of course, that in the same moment her son Isufo finally got a leg-up on life, he became less. Fatherless, motherless, belonging to no one in particular, because her family - his family - has never showed up to claim him. That was two months ago or so. They aren't coming. I was startled by Helena's death because there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, not overtly, but that's how disease goes in Mozambique.

Other patients have died in the meantime too, a twin, a mother, a baby from way out. It's not that common - DEATHDEATHDEATH - but simultaneously, is very common. I don't know. It's confusing.

I also don't know why I stopped writing about them.

The thing that killed me today was a new baby, a month-old twin weighing only 2.2 kg, or less than 5 pounds. Their mother was dead, and the father reported neither baby had eaten since the day before because the formula milk we'd given them had run out. I was cradling the one, so tiny, so hungry, and as I bent my head to kiss his cheek, I must have triggered a reflex because he jerked his head over to suck, mouth searching, giving me a sort of open-mouthed kiss of desperation. I can't get that feeling out of my head, like a phantom pain.

When I'm riding in the back of one of the wimpy, low-to-the-ground pickup trucks so common here (like a toy you might buy at the Dollar Store), loaded up with respectable Mozambican businessmen in ill-fitting suits, fat grannys hoisting ponderous baskets of sugarcane and bananas, and lanky teenage boys in torn yellow sandals (shoes wide and huge like their tremoring hormones); when we're all smashed in the back together, racing down the freeway, ducking our heads from the wind, making intermittent eye contact and chuckling together at the absurdity of life, our little transport a mere fluke on a horizon long and distant with hills and African living - I feel very happy. 

Oh, to be alive and unimportant and figuring out not much of anything in a place like Mozambique.

"Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius." (Mozart)