I have witnessed suffering. I have seen horrible things. I have watched indescribable pain.
I turned around; there two babies lay next to one another on the bed, silenced by pain, save for slight mewing. Their bandages were removed and I glanced twice, three times, four before I could comprehend what was missing: their tiny feet, those just toddling to walk, those that crinkle and wrinkle as all baby feet seem to do, gone. Where there was once ten toes, soles, Achilles, bones and crinkling wrinkles, there was now nothing. The doctor said the fire was so strong, those tiny little toes and tiny little bones, those tiny little crinkles and wrinkles, those tiny little Achilles and those tiny little soles never stood a chance amidst all that burning.
I have witnessed suffering. I have seen horrible things. I have watched indescribable pain.
In the furthest corner of the furthest corner of the hospital ward, the boy, twelve, or thirteen, or fourteen, but tall for his age, sleeps squeezed into a hospital crib built for a toddler some many years before. His legs tuck to his chest to keep his feet inside the bed’s caging metal bars. His left arm tucks beneath his tucked head, a pillow against the thin, plastic mattress. His right arm suspends into the air, dangling from the IV branula, inserted into a vein in his hand, from which a tube runs up to the ceiling where the plastic bag of fluid, pierced through the top by a rusted coat hangar untwisted and reshaped, hooking around the crumbling cement rafter. Slowly, chemotherapy drips down the tube and into the boy’s hand, seeping through his bloodstream. All the while, with his arm forced at a straight right angle from his body, the boy sleeps, crumpled into that crib.
I have witnessed suffering. I have seen horrible things. I have watched indescribable pain.
Once: frozen, gazing at a two year old body wheeled out of the morgue, petrified on a shining silver gurney.
Once: laying my body against a girl with arms thrashing, keeping her still, saying over and over and over and over and over and over: “bas, bas, shh, bas, I’m so sorry, pole sana, I’m so sorry, pole, pole,” a plastic tube shoved down her nose, getting caught in her throat on its way to her lungs, while she coughed and sputtered foamy spit and blood out of her wailing mouth.
Once: waving goodbye to a little boy who was meant to be in kindergarten but was instead at home all day, standing guard outside the dilapidated mud hut where his sister, whose severe autism, gone untreated and harshly punished throughout her young six years, rendered her violent and volatile, sat tied by the wrist to the stick frame of a table. Their mother goes away looking for money, so the boy stays home to chase off the many men who come looking for his sister, an easy target unable to consent and unable to fight back.
I have witnessed suffering. I have seen horrible things. I have watched indescribable pain.
And yet there is one memory, only lasting five or ten minutes in reality, which has stayed with me still as the greatest agony to which I have ever been present.
The woman, at first labeled an escapee from the psychiatric ward, laying, screaming, beating her fists onto the grass and tearing at 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.
We were walking out of the hospital at the end of a long day. I was seventeen years old.
I had experienced the first death of a child I knew. I had gone, terrified, to visit a child in the ICU. I had held a boy I knew was soon to die in my arms, cradling him as his little body worked so hard to take in air.
I had witnessed suffering. I had seen horrible things. I had watched indescribable pain.
As we walked out of the pediatric wards into the covered, outdoor hallway of the hospital, we were stopped by a large crowd gathering around the grassy area where the patients often lay in the sun, where mothers often wash clothes in plastic buckets, where children often sit halfheartedly dragging sticks through the dirt. We peered through the surrounding circle to see what was the commotion, finding the woman there, on the weathered grass. She lay on her stomach, face down, throwing her arms and legs at the ground, screaming, creating a sound sadder than my ears had ever registered before. Amongst the crowd I heard ‘psychiatric ward,’ another said they had called the nurses, the woman must have escaped, she was so crazy.
I had witnessed suffering. I had seen horrible things. I had watched indescribable pain.
And so I thought to myself: yes, this woman seems to be sick and distressed and I hope she is able to find calm. But I have witnessed suffering, I have seen horrible things, I have watched indescribable pain. And this was not that.
The woman wailed: “mtoto yangu, mtoto yangu, hapana, hapana, mtoto yangu;” my child, my child, no, no, my child. Her hands, tightened into fists, pawed at the rust-colored soil, she beat her face again and again into the mud beneath her. Other women came to surround her, making feeble attempts to pull her from the earth before she wrenched her body away from them, crying louder still.
And then it came to me: we were just outside the pediatric wards. The woman was yelling for ‘her child’. She was sobbing, gasping, choking. This was not a psychiatric patient wandered off. This was a mama. And it was her child who had left.
I had witnessed suffering. I had seen horrible things. I had watched indescribable pain.
And this was that.
I looked to my right, seeing there a group of children whose names I knew, whose giggles I adored, whose spirits I held so close to my own. They stood staring, unflinching, at the woman. I called to them, tried to stand in front of them, wanted for them to look away. But they would not. Their fixed eyes, that seemed to be so much older than my own, showed it: they knew. They knew one day it might be their mamas, with dirt on their lips, hair torn out beside them, and hoarse, crackling voices, wheezing through tears, shrieking out: no, no, my child.
I heard my name called: the others had gone on, the car was leaving, it was time to go. I continued down the hallway, looking back to see her only once, but the mama’s crying following me all the way to the parking lot, into the car, down the road, back home, still today.
I have witnessed suffering. I have seen horrible things. I have watched indescribable pain.
And yet it is this memory, only lasting five or ten minutes in reality, which has stayed with me always as the greatest agony to which I have ever been present.
I could say a lot of things. I could make this poetic. I have made this poetic. I could talk of nuance and beauty and what lies beneath. I could say a lot of things. And there are days when I feel those things to be true. Every day, I want them to be true.
And then there are days when I can still hear her sobbing ‘no’, when I’ve come to love a child in a way that gives the memory of her tears a newly-torn layer of hurt within my heart, when I want the beauty beneath the anguish to be true, but the words I could say feel unholy on my tongue.
On those days, I return to what I know to be true: on that day, in that, the greatest agony to which I have ever been present, there was love. It was wailing and weeping and thrashing at the mud and pulling out hair and creating a noise that seemed to defy the definition of sorrow and it was there.
I have witnessed suffering. I have seen horrible things. I have watched indescribable pain.
And when the poetic things I could say seem distant to my aching soul, and on the days when I can still hear her howling, I look for the love. Sometimes it is there, laying on the ground, and sometimes it is only my own, and sometimes it requires looking twice, and sometimes the love is found in the simple act of continuing to look for it, but in all the suffering, in all the horrible things, in all the indescribable pain, in that greatest agony, still, it is there.
And that is something, isn’t it?
I have to believe that is something.
callie daniels-howell 