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.