Jameson -- Preventable Tragedy

Today we took a little boy home. He led us down the alley, sidestepping the gray puddles and dodging the little dog with its ferocious bark. He turned right at the end of the row of concrete and tin houses and stopped with his hand on a tall pink door, wooden and crooked.

“Bonswa,” Beverly called out as Madanm Rose knocked on the door. There was no welcoming response.

“Anyone home?” Beverly asked.

Madanm Rose translated. “Gen moun nan kay la?”

Jameson, our seven-year old friend, shook his head.

Rose took hold of the door and pulled, then reached up and tugged at the latch at the top where the door was held back. It gave way and Jameson stepped inside, his orange shirt disappearing behind the fuchsia gold-trimmed curtain hanging in the doorway.

I followed him, if only to put down the carry-out box of food I was holding.

Inside the floor was stone, a compilation of concrete and odds and ends tile. The room was about ten by twelve feet square with bright magenta walls. Framing the room were a bed, shelving, chairs, surfaces stacked with dishes, pots and pans. The bed was full-sized, a mattress mostly covered with a white slip. It took up perhaps a third of the space.

I set the food box down on one of the chairs and turned to Jameson.

Madanm Rose asked him where he slept. He gestured to the bed.

“There’s no one here,” Beverly voiced our mutual observation. The house was certainly devoid of people. There was nowhere to hide.

I picked Jameson up and set him on the bed, wishing for a clean cloth to wipe his face and hands. All I had were my own grubby hands, so I pulled off his shoes and watched him lie down on his stomach, his face flat to the mattress. There were no pillows.

I stood there stroking his head as I’d been doing all afternoon. The shape was familiar now.

The others went outside looking for the neighbor, vwason-la, to whom they could explain the medicine.

Jameson has typhoid fever.

According to the Center for Disease Control, typhoid is “common in most parts of the world except industrialized regions such as the United States, Canada, western Europe, Australia, and Japan…and the highest risk for typhoid is in south Asia.” It’s caused by contaminated food or water.

“He could have fecal matter in his food. He could have fecal matter in his water,” Beverly said as we drove towards Jameson’s house after leaving the hospital. Beverly was driving and her eyes were faithfully on the road before us. I was sitting in the back as I had for the past hour, Jameson’s head in my lap and one hand stroking his hair.

“He’s got to wash his hands,” Beverly concluded.

“How?” I asked.

Beverly turned to glance at me. “Exactly.”

Jameson’s lives with six other people. Seven people somehow compact into that wee magenta-walled space, all corners crammed with odd assortments. On the shelf on the back wall were some VHS tapes, American movies. Above the bed a smaller shelf held some illegible bottles and a toothbrush. To the right of the door was a stack of pots and pans and cookware, and promisingly, next to this was a narrow table covered with a plastic table cloth and dishes of rice and beans topped with those handy plastic fly-screens.

There is no electricity. There is no sink. There was no one there to greet us, listen to the instructions of medicine or comfort one sick little boy.

“We had to teach the children how to pee in the toilet,” Beverly told me recently. “We had to teach them to use the toilet instead of just squatting over the drain in the floor.”

At our school, housed in rented space, there is a bathroom with two grungy stalls. The toilets must be force-flushed periodically with water barreled outside the door. That bathroom is a luxurious accommodation for many of our students.

“We’re bringing them up in society,” Beverly added.

It might sound degrading if it were not so heartbreakingly true.

At our school parents are required to be involved. They must attend parent meetings, they must get their children to school and pick them up from school on time, and should call if the child cannot come. If parents do not comply their children may be expelled.

“They do not pay,” Beverly says, “so they need to try.”

This morning we had a meeting with children and parents preceding a dentist visit tomorrow and the start of school on Monday. Each parent had to sign in his or her presence and take a photo with his or her child before leaving. By the end of the morning there were only 20 students (of 121) without a check beside their name—and quite probably a few check marks were missed.

Parents are trying, the majority of the time. Or the guardian is trying. But when you have nothing, trying might not look like much.

Earlier in the week I went down into the “Ravine” behind Christian Light School, Port au Prince. Ms. Sherrie started doing a feeding program down there in addition to the school and orphanage she ran. These days the feeding program focuses on babies and children younger than three, for the school accepts three year olds and all students are fed during their school day.

Every morning around 9 or 9:30, time is relative here, Ms. Guetty and her helpers step out of the gate with their clipboard and buckets and trek down the road, turn into an alley, maneuver a market, cross a recently constructed bridge over a ravine of trash, sewage and pigs, and turn onto a corner.

On Tuesday Ms. Guetty sat down on a rock, one of her helpers sat beside her, setting his bucket down. The other two stood nearby as the children started to appear. They are too young to be unchaperoned. Many of them are only babes in arms.

For most the sight of a blan, red-faced and freckled, was a new experience.

Some were too shy to return my greeting of “Bonjou,” but one little girl instinctively knew, perhaps, to associate white skin with open arms.

No taller than my knee and her face lit up when she turned towards my voice. She got a huge grin and toddled right to me, arms spread wide. What a warm welcome she gave!

For about half an hour Ms. Guetty marked her clipboard with the attendees. All of those who came with their buckets, bowls and containers were already listed. Careful records are kept of who is fed and how they are progressing, or not.

That morning there were some no-shows, including a few who had not appeared in days previous.

The rest typically didn’t linger, but received their egg, bread and avocado and made their way back out of sight.

Behind us, sitting on the dusty corner of a dusty road, cringing out of the sun, were some houses. They were rusted tin and plywood doors. Laundry hung over a wall. Inside a baby cried. I would cry if I awoke in that house, too.

They’re not truly houses. They’re not homes.

These tin and scrap structures are the stuff of children’s forts. They’re something young ones build enthusiastic in their scavenging, unheeding of dirt floors or the odd nail or rust-eaten metal. They play happily in this private space they’ve built themselves, and then when they’re hungry, tired, cold or called, trot more happily homeward to their secure, clean, food-filled house.

But this is reality here.

Reality for Jameson is lack of soap.

He needs to wash his hands.

How?

That’s the question.

How to keep clean when the very bed you sleep on is infused with dust.

Before we left Jameson alone in the magenta-walled house that is sometimes filled with seven bodies, we prayed over him.

Beverly, Rose and Jonas, our teenage handyman, translator, and jokester, filed back through the doorway after talking with the neighbor.

Beverly instructed her when and how much medicine to give Jameson. Rose and Jonas translated the milliliters and frequency. Before leaving the hospital I’d doled out the five milliliters and tipped them back into Jameson’s mouth. The first one went down easily but the second one made his face scrunch up.

“Ooo, I guess it tastes bad,” I said, holding the water bottle so he could wash it down.

Beverly thought we ought to give him the medicine although he’d thrown up the little food he’d eaten.

“There should at least be a little something in his stomach,” she said.

Jameson came to school with his parents and brother this morning. They were faithfully on time and pleased to collect their school shirts and smile for the camera. However, Jameson complained of a sore throat and Beverly sent Jonas to buy some water for him, saying he had a fever.

She held him back to take to the hospital after we’d finished at school.

“The problem is,” Beverly said as we walked through the hospital courtyard, holding Jameson with his exhausted head on her shoulder, “is that no one can afford the hospital. They come and get a list of prescriptions and that’s all they can do.”

We’d entered the first building, squeezing around a corner where the front desk counter jutted outwards towards a row of cots. On one lay a woman with bandages from ankle to thigh. Nurses in blue scrub tops congregated on the side. Nothing looked particularly sanitary, certainly not sterile.

Beverly had said that Rose’s sons needn’t come, because the hospital is full of germs. So we’d dropped them off at home.

“Don’t touch your face,” she also instructed us. Really, don’t touch anything is better advice.

After fifteen minutes of shuffling and different offices a nurse in a blue scrub top and suspicious latex gloves took Jameson’s blood.

“Jameson, gade, look!” Beverly called to him, grinning enthusiastically, turning his gaze away from the needle. Jonas held Jameson in his lap and we all congratulated him as the nurse withdrew the vial of blood.

The blood test was exploring a variety of possibilities, including HIV.

After labeling the vial the nurse asked if Jameson had eaten that morning.

“No,” we confirmed. He hadn’t eaten today, at all, although it was now after 1 PM.

Apparently this was a blessing because the blood tests ought to have been after fasting.

“God knew,” Beverly said, smiling at me.

“I guess so,” I said. I was having a hard time smiling.

In Jameson’s house we grouped together to pray for him. Praying is almost always preceded by singing here, so Beverly asked what song would be good.

“What’s good for this time?” she asked. “What’s one of those songs you were singing last night?”

Last night, or rather yesterday evening before sunset, she and I had spent devotional time by the ocean. Beneath the almond and palm trees we sang and read Psalms and shared knowledge and stories. We marveled at the beauty of God’s Creation and the miracles of our friends’ lives.

It was restorative, filling us with energy and peace. We both could have kept singing there for hours, but dusk prompted our return to the house and all its activity.

Yesterday there was no shortage of songs in our hearts and mouths.

Today I sang to lull Jameson, finding no words for prayer and no tools for sanitation. All I had were my hands and my voice, so I used them both to lend some comfort to one sick little boy.

I’d been singing quietly all afternoon.

But when Beverly asked me to choose a song, I didn’t have an answer. What words could cry out to God in the way I wanted?

So I tried to call out to Jesus, the Bearer of our griefs.

“What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear…” I began, the others joining after the first few words. And that’s when I dropped, ducking out the doorway to staunch the sobs.

They continued singing inside beside Jameson’s bed, and after attempting to wipe my eyes with the short sleeves of the shrug I wore over my sleeveless dress, now spotted with dried sweat, saliva, bits of rice and flecks of vomit, I returned to the room also, putting my hand back on Jameson’s head as they began to pray.

My voice couldn’t join, so instead I let my heart follow Beverly’s words.

She prayed for care for Jameson and his family, for healing, for provision.

“Oh, thank you Jesus for food and clean water. They are such a blessing. We shouldn’t even have to think about having them, but we do. We pray you would provide soap and water for this family, for all our children, so they can wash their hands. We pray protection over this household, because if Jameson has typhoid what are the odds his brothers have it, too?”

After praying we left, Beverly telling Jameson he had to give her a hug.

“And I’ll see you lundi, or mardi, I can never remember which.”

“Lundi is Monday,” I supplied, smiling at Jameson who was grinning as he hugged Madanm Beverly and she hugged him.

“Nou renmen ou, Jezi renmen ou,” Beverly said.

“You know we love you, Jameson?” Madanm Rose asked.

“Wi,” he smiled.

I kissed his head one last time, scrunched up my nose at him and said “N’ale.”

Then we left him alone in the magenta-walled house, water bottle propped against the wall near his head, food on the side table under the fly cover.

In the whole afternoon he hadn’t washed his hands once. How can he? There wasn’t an opportunity at the school or the hospital for a good scrubbing.

I was uncomfortable going down into the Ravine in Port au Prince. Most times walking the street is less than comfortable, due to physical bothers such as uneven ground and loose rocks, and psychological bothers from catcalls and fear of being run over.

Most times you just don’t feel safe walking as a foreigner in Haiti. Sometimes Haitians themselves don’t feel safe.

I got called blan more times than I could count just trekking through the Ravine area. Like Koreans and their staring, most Haitians don’t recognize, or just don’t care, about the offense of being addressed as “foreigner.”

Even this morning while photographing students, one parent told her son to “gade yon blan,” “look at the foreigner,” so his face was to the camera.

But my own self-preservative qualms were crushed while standing in the “Camp.” The Camp is the second place food is distributed. It was begun after the earthquake, but six years later there are still many people residing there, in those child’s play shacks where babies are half-clothed or naked.

I played Peek a Boo with the wee ones who came through for their food. One little boy was caramel colored, lighter than the majority of his fellows, and was particularly fascinated by my skin. He kept touching it as though wondering if the color would come off, or struck by someone lighter than himself.

“He is almost the same as you!” Ms. Guetty laughed.

After him came the smallest one we saw that day, a babe in arms too young to yet lift up her head unsupported. She was precious and minute with that tantalizing curly hair, lamb soft and springy.

“Allo,” I said to her gently, bending at the knees to peer into her tiny face. A pair of not-quite-right eyes gazed listlessly back at me.

Perhaps they just needed cleaning, perhaps they signified a defect or damage wrought on by the squalor into which she’d been born.

Probably I’ll never know.

“And that’s too bad,” Beverly responded when I told her later. “Sherrie only accepts the best and brightest.”

Another heartrending statement that would sound degrading if it weren’t so true, so practical. With limited resources, you have to prioritize. Many schools and ministries make investments in people with potential, those who exhibit outstanding qualities and high work ethics, those who will study and strive hard and one day might serve well the suffering community.

That little baby with not-right eyes and that little boy with the club foot, they don’t qualify as the best and brightest. They may never have the chance to prove they have potential. They may never know life outside of that Camp in the Ravine.

I hope Jameson will know life outside of the magenta-walled house.

I’m thankful he’s gotten to know the use of a toilet and a large meal while at school. He’s guaranteed warm greetings and hugs and reiterations of “I love you and Jesus loves you.”

“It’s all about adding value to people’s lives,” Beverly says.

Today we added some more value to Jameson’s life, I think. We spent the afternoon going between the hospital and the pharmacy, holding and carrying him, feeding him and giving him medicine, singing to him and stroking his head. We left him smiling in the house with magenta-walls.

We also left him angry.

“I need to be angry for a while,” Beverly said as she typed furiously into her phone, having researched typhoid and its easily preventable causes. “I’m angry at this government. And I want to do something about it.”

She searched through contacts for anyone who would be interested.

We agreed that Jameson’s story needed to be told. And the more prayer warriors to lift up him and his family and all of our students without soap or food or knowledge of the toilet, the better.

When we got back to the house I went upstairs, heavily laid down my things and washed my hands. I got into the shower and washed myself and my clothes.

I wished to do the same for Jameson, who we had left still in the clothes he’d worn all day, now spotted with vomit, too.

But Jameson is not my son, and I’ve no desire to take him from his family who is trying. The most obvious reason for the house to be empty is that his parents are working. There was food laid out so clearly effort is made to take care.

Nevertheless, the pain of going back to a sprawling house with solid doors, matching tile, running water, electricity, fans and a refrigerator of drinking water, a living room with sofas on which an eight-year old boy lies at ease---that pain is not reduced by considering Jameson’s parents and their efforts.

The unfairness of it is excruciating.

The injustice of circumstance, of the uncontrollable where one baby is born into affluence and one into dirt poverty.

And the tragedy of preventability: of lack of basic necessities so that a child contracts a dangerous illness because there isn’t soap and water to wash his hands. Soap and water. Soap and water.

A bar of soap sells for less than a dollar in the States. And water for washing can come from a rain bucket.

Jesus promises that in His Father’s house there are many rooms, some even say mansions. There is room for all, and there are no more tears. There is no suffering, no lack, and no favoritism. There is no need for soap and water, there is no fear of disease, there is no need to be brought up from degradation or filth.

Those are the days I look forward to.

In the meantime, please join me in praying for Jameson, for this dear seven-year old boy with typhoid who shares a ten by twelve foot house with six other people.

Please think of the people in the Ravine, of the children who look forward to school as a place of love and fun and a guaranteed meal in a life guaranteed lack.

Every time you wash your hands with clean water and soap, think of Jameson who can’t. 

John 14:2

Revelation 21:4

http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/diseases/typhoid