Sometimes it feels overwhelming. Sometimes you can’t get the memory of that boy out of your head, his small body, which in mind is not so young, limp and alone in that dark room. Sometimes you cry for the wonderful giggling and sweet little girls who you laughed with as you realize how much their mother, who died in the hospice, resembled her daughters and how much they have faced at such a young age, just as so many other children have also faced.
Sometimes it feels overwhelming and you wonder how you can just leave.
I had a lot of anxieties before I came here.
I worried that I had changed. I worried that I had never experienced Kenya on my own. I worried that I had romanticized my love for this place. I worried that in reality, I wouldn’t be able to handle working with ill and dying children as I say I want to. I worried It would be more like Senegal, a place that so challenged me, than I had painted it to be. I worried I would get here and find this isn’t where I want to be. I worried that my need for people in other places would trump my strength found from these people in this place. I worried my ambition was too great, worried I wanted this too much, that too much of myself was bound up in my desire to return to Kenya and to do this work. I worried I would get here and this home-place that I’ve built so much of my life and self upon would crumble beneath me.
And now I’m here. And I’m so happy, so fulfilled, so sure.
I will leave this place in two weeks fully knowing that I have given and lived love, that I have shared joy in some small measure. I will leave this place so enlivened by the good that exists within people and the compassion that I have learned.
But I will also leave with a heavy heart and I will leave desperate to return.
As I was preparing to depart for Kenya and would tell people of my plans to work with and learn about ill and dying children in Kenya, and any time I have told someone about my hopes to work in pediatric palliative care, I have been warned that it will be difficult, that it will be hard, that they can’t imagine being able to do this work.
As I prepared for my first day working in the burn unit with the Sally Test child life workers about one month ago, I wrote this:
“Everyone is so afraid for me. And I can’t help but feel like if they can handle it, if those children must live there every day, through the pain of their own and that of others, then I should be able too, also. And yes, it will tear me open. It should. If it doesn’t, then my heart isn’t open to compassion as it should be. So I’m afraid as well. But if I walk not with fear, but with compassion, then I am ready. I can do this.”
It is difficult. It is hard. It is exhausting in body, mind, and soul.
In my first interview with a Sally Test worker some weeks ago, I was told this: you try to be professional and to keep those boundaries between you and the child, between your time at work and your time at home, but it’s impossible. You carry each moment, each child, with you always. And you love them all so much. They never leave you.
When she said that, even then, only one or two weeks into my time here, I felt it. It deeply resonated with what was already on my heart. Now, with one week left at the hospice and one week left at the hospital before I return to the United States, her words seem to be playing on repeat at the places of my soul that feel like they are crumbling apart.
This is difficult. It is hard. It is exhausting in body, mind, and soul and I am carrying so many children with me. I will leave in two weeks with so many on my heavy heart.
I will leave carrying Elvis, an Umoja Project student who is slowly unable to go to school, slowly dying from sickle cell with no way for the few family members who have not abandoned him to give him comfort as he slips away. I will leave carrying Cleofas, an Umoja Project student wanting to take his exams that could send him to secondary school but who is weakening without food to support what is needed to keep his HIV positive immune system alive. I will leave carrying Moses, my smart and strong little boy who has found short refuge at Sally Test Pediatric Center, who may soon return to abuse and neglect, whose newly restored health will deteriorate if corruption and overwhelmed systems win out over needed love and compassion. I will leave carrying David, whose cancer is so advanced and whose life is lived at Moi Hospital with such small possibility of continuing longer than one or maybe two years on this earth. I will leave carrying Meshack and Julia, children who are visited and supported by the Tumaini na Afya outreach team of Living Room International, their disabilities rendering the quantity of care needed for their mothers to acquire impossible, their poverty forcing them to be completely alone for most of their lives. I will leave carrying Charles, a teenager staying at Kimbilio Hospice whose HIV and TB have ravaged his physical body, whose abusive and neglecting family have ravaged his joy and his heart. I will leave carrying Michelle and Naomi, Natasha, Jamal, Lydia and Sarah and Kevin, Naftali, Esther and Anan, Dorcas and Sharon and Evans and Chepchumba, Shadrack and Lynne and Caroline, so, so many.
And I suddenly realize how much I have witnessed in the past 6 weeks, what I will return to the US having been a part of this during summer of mine. It has torn me open, as it should have with my heart open to compassion. It has rendered me better, stronger, as it should have with my heart open to the beautiful that can exist in all places.
And suddenly I realize how much more anxious I am for this upcoming entry into the United States than I ever was for my entry to this place 6 weeks ago. Sometimes it feels overwhelming and you wonder how you can just return.
The challenge is to take that feeling of overwhelm, the weight of all I have seen, the anxiousness of living life far away from this, and to make it something, to use that to fuel good.
I will leave with a heavy heart. I will leave carrying so much. I will leave this place so enlivened by the good that exists within people and the compassion that I have learned. I will leave this place desperate to return.
callie daniels-howell 