172 pages

Last Monday morning, I printed, hole-punched, bound, and turned in to my advisor the 172 pages of my senior thesis.

I began thinking about this project five years ago,before I even committed to attend Kalamazoo College, as a prospective student excited and intrigued by its possibilities. I began to consider its subject four years ago when, as a seventeen year old, holding a terminally ill child in my arms, the ground beneath me shifted and my eyes saw the world from a different plane. I began to see this project’s shape when I declared an Anthropology and Sociology major, realizing what I wanted out of my education was not answers, but more questions toward understanding. I began planning for this project’s content over a year ago, in Senegal, as I dreamed of and communicated with Kenya about my potential return. I began delving into its depth eight months ago, when I read literature more hours than I slept, in an effort to decipher what questions I was asking. I began preparing for its adventure six months ago, when Kalamazoo College also believed in my curiosity and presented me with the means to explore it. I began living its beauty and its complexity, its pain and its heart, five months ago, when I stepped off the plane, onto the red of Kenyan earth, and into the hospital. I began to see the magnitude of this project’s story three months ago, when Kevin Otiende, a two-year-old living at Sally Test, died on August 15. I began to seek out the meaning of this project through interviews recorded, observations scribbled, and reflections poured over, ten weeks ago, as I read and read and re-read, thought, considered, wrote, re-wrote, wrote again, sat with it, and worked to learn from it.

And then, after these many years having contemplated, planned and prepared for, lost sleep over, cried, laughed, lived with and through, drank over 1032.75 cups of coffee to create this work of challenge and beauty and life, this project is complete. And the minute I relinquished its 172 pages from my hands, I knew: this, truly, is a project that will never be complete. And while that was a thought that, in the midst of writing draft number 77, word count number 33,154, and edit number 89 made my pulse race a little quicker, made my eyes grow wide and my desire to stress bake pie after pie increase, it is now a truth that comforts me. It is a truth that allowed me to turn in to my advisor those 172 pages, as they existed then, peacefully and without pause, for I know that not only will I return to these very words in the near future, but that these are stories and lessons that I will carry with me always and, having changed and grown and shaped me, this is a project that will remain a part of me forever.

The full, academic, title of my project is this: “Cultivating a Culture of Compassionate Caregiving Under Poverty’s Constraints: An Ethnography of Kenyan Child Life and Hospice Caregivers.” But as I wrote in my preface, “the story to be told, though thoroughly bound up in the foundation of my self, my spirituality, and my soul, is not my own. This is the story of the families and medical professionals. It is the story of the caregivers who willingly shared their lives and work and thoughts with me. And it is the story of the children whose voices, though not directly represented, inform the very core of this research and to whom I am most grateful, for teaching me to see the limitlessness of joy, to love as fully as possible in the moment that exists before you, and to find peace in what remains; watoto, katika maisha yenu na katika kifo vyenu, mnajambo.”

Truly, it is a project of love, and hope, and sacrifice, and compassion, and giving, and living, and letting go. About two weeks before my thesis deadline, I wrote a piece for my creative writing class that, I realized after, was another, shorter version of my thesis and all that I am taking away from it. It is this:

Things that Appear Broken But Upon Closer Inspection Are Beautiful

A slight glint of the equator peeks through the rust on the dilapidated gurney.

Soft eyelashes continuing to flicker, still embedded in eyelids stretched, pulled taught around the mass, as if a tennis ball was forced underneath the skin where his small, brown eye should have been.

The woman, at first labeled an escapee from the psychiatric ward, screaming, beating her fists onto the grass and digging into the mud with her sobbing face, yelling at a pitch louder and higher than the sun,“mtoto yangu, mtoto yangu, hapana, hapana, mtoto yangu”; my child, my child, no, no, my child.

A rickety, white Land Rover converted into an ambulance, twenty one people smashed onto its two side-facing benches, bracing bodies upright with hands clinging to the open window frames as the wheels bounce and cascade over the harsh, rainy season, mud road with the child jostling listlessly on your lap and next to you, the woman whimpering in pain.

The baby, found in a supermarket rubbish bin, covered in scabies and bite marks where the rats started to munch, scars on his neck that could be the scabies or could be the rats or could be strangulation.

A young girl, shaking on the ripped plastic of the hospital mattress that is covered aimlessly with an already-bloodied sheet, thrashing, pleading as the doctor peels away bandage after bandage, layers of charred skin coming with it, until she is there, naked without clothes, naked without flesh, red and raw and burning, burned; she clings to my gloved hands as I stand behind her, whispering “shh, wote iko sawa, wote iko sawa”.

The plastic IV bag, pierced through the top by the old, wire clothes hangar, hanging from the warn strip of twine tied around a crumbling cement rafter, it twists, rippling slowly, this way and that.

The little boy with abandonment in his eyes that sink for miles, who looks at you wondering, knowing, as you place him in his cage-like hospital bed that evening, saying only “ninapenda wewe, ninapenda wewe sana,” instead of the routine, “nitarudi kesho, utarudi kesho, tutaonana kesho”; I will return tomorrow, you will return tomorrow, we will see each other tomorrow.

A hospital ward full of children, two or three to a bed, cracking floors and ceilings, dirt on the walls and the perennial scent of screaming, followed by silence.

I thank you all for accompanying me along this journey, as it reached one milestone last Monday, and as it continues.  When my British brother found his name in the acknowledgments section of my thesis, he asked: why? All of the words written were my own, he had no physical contribution to their existence, he didn’t edit them, he hadn’t even read them all…why should he be thanked? I replied: you were here. And just like him, all of you who travel with me as I explore the world, who read my words as I wonder and reflect and process the beauty and the suffering I witness, who share in my dazzlement…you were here. And I am immensely grateful for that.