the blues are still blue

Car accidents are a big problem here. So is public drunkenness - even bigger, actually.

Today Jenny and I were walking together along the busy, crowded highway in Gondola to meet with some visiting Americans who wanted to talk HIV stuff with me. We stopped for a minute along the shoulder because had Jenny pointed out some sandals for sale that she thought I'd like, and she was right, I did like them. They had bright colorful beads sewn on, exactly the hippie shoe I go for. Jenny hates my current sandals because I've worn them into the ground and they are crusty and gross (they aggravate her soul).

I had just inserted my foot to see if it fit, turning it this way and that, when suddenly there was a loud THWAP. Jenny turned first and exclaimed, "Oh my gosh, look!" I glanced over. A man had just been hit on his bicycle by a chapa (minibus), just a few paces away from us, and was lying flat on his back in the middle of the road. I paused a few seconds, watching, but he didn't move.

We both ran over. Blood was pooling up out of his head onto the paved road. His face was slightly to one side with one eye partially open. I straddled him and waved my hand to see if he would flinch, asked if he could hear me - but there was nothing, no response. I touched my hand to his torso and could see feel that he was breathing.

The guilty chapa stopped briefly, indecisively, the driver and its passengers wide-eyed, then quickly accelerated away. I stood upright and shouted "stop the chapa!" but I think I conjugated the verb wrong so nobody responded. Or maybe they just didn't know how to do it.

A crowd had gathered. Some good folk forced a passing truck to stop and a few of us lifted the man together, scooting ourselves into the empty bed of the small truck. Jenny divested me of my heavy backpack. As we sped a few kilometers to the small local hospital (more like a clinic), two Mozambican men were with me: one, a kind, raggedy-looking older man who probably owns 2 sets of clothes total and is now down to only 1 because he cradled the man's body and there was blood everywhere. The injured guy's head was in my hands, lilmp and suprisingly heavy, his shaved hair feeling greasy and prickly.

Once we got him lying down on a cot in the clinic, he came to but was highly disoriented. Nothing he said made sense. I couldn't tell if that was because he'd just had a major head trauma or because he was absolutely reeking of alcohol, or both. Probably both. I held his head still while they gave him stitches beside his right eye (without anesthesia, without antiseptic). For some reason he wanted his shoes off pretty badly, a desire I obliged because I didn't want him falling of the bed trying to do it himself. He was pretty banged up.

The police came in, impressive in their crisp uniforms and earnest faces, and took down the details. The man - Jacinto is his name - was then moved to another room where he picked a fleeting, high octane fight with a squat, forbearing nurse who pushed him back down into his bed. "Boy," I thought, eyeing him warily. "For being the victim, he's sure not very likable."

But he was drunk. And had just been THWACKED by a moving van. Everything about the incident was pitiable.

Jenny sat faithfully waiting for me out in the hall. The chapa driver had headed straight to the police station, redeeming himself for what was certainly an accident and possibly the fault of the intoxicated man lying inside with bare feet and a bloodied skull. The driver stood, morose, hands folded, talking to the police outside. I could see Jacinto's bicycle there beside them, the unknown whereabouts of which had much panicked him. Bicycles are not taken for granted in Mozambique. That detail made me feel so sad.

Jenny and I had missed our appointment: the Americans were already gone. We turned on our heels and kicked our way back up the gravel road in the direction we'd originally come, discussing all that had transpired. I commented how I guessed the hippie sandals just weren't meant to be. Jenny eagerly offered to pick them up for me but I demurred. After a minute, another chapa pulled up and I jumped on, headed back home to Chimoio.

You can't be an HIV/AIDS program coordinator in a region where more than 1 out of every 3rd person is HIV-positive, in a country with a healthy life expectancy of 36, and not see things with HIV-colored lenses. I can't. Every cough is HIV-induced TB, every prolonged sickness is an opportunistic infection. This particularity doesn't scare me; I'm all about facts when it comes to AIDS. I remember once during an American Red Cross training to become an HIV instructor, the teacher was making the point that we all have different personal boundaries and asked who of us would theoretically be okay french-kissing an infected person. Saliva doesn't transmit HIV, so I raised my hand. Only a couple of us, in a room of people who now knew a lot about the disease, did though. It made me pause, consider.

Maybe an ability to detach is part of the grace given me for this job, being submersed in such a weird thing, a pandemic, a fatal disease. I don't think it is bad for people to be uncomfortable around AIDS. (A little more discomfort could be useful sometimes, frankly.) I just mean, that for me it's okay. Most of the time, my world can swim with this disease, so to speak, and I'm comfortable with my personal safety.

When I was holding that guy's head today, his blood flowed freely, covering my bare hands, up to my wrists. It dried there, like a faded brown glove, until a nurse noticed and wordlessly pointed me to a sink where I could wash it away with water (the clinic had no soap). Riding the chapa home from Gondola, 30 minutes of gazing out the window, I quietly replayed the afternoon's events. I saw I hadn't quite gotten all his blood off my forearm and noticed the dark gummy blood still drying on my jacket cuff and sleeve too.

Do you know what I found myself doing for several minutes of that chapa ride?

Inspecting my hands for hangnails. You know, just to be sure.

It was a smart thing to do. "We live in a time of HIV." My old refrain. It means: Live. in. reality. That's what I was doing. Peering down, turning my hands over, rubbing my palms, fingering the base of my nails, searching for tiny openings or cuts that - thank God - weren't there.

Inspecting my hands for hangnails.

Ah, but what a sad, silly world we live in.


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