The pain which shadows the common human experience

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me.  Psalm 23:4

The rhythm of the merengue does not hint at the forced patience of the people.  Its fire laughs spinning in bright colors ‘round and ‘round.  Yet wait.  Another circle reels, dancing to the heart-wrenching song of birth, love, and death- linked together with heavy chains that try to weigh the dancers down.  One chilly night I step into this dance, rather clumsily and confused, just up the road from the grey rows of refugee camp where my husband and I live, working with an international relief and development organization.  I join the circle of the rehydration room, where even my beloved and wise friend Ramona has lost three babes to its vicious sway. 

The room juts off the entry to the same small health clinic where my daughter Nicól first entered San Jose de Ocoa nine months ago- ah, another wait, my first hupomoni- remaining under- with the Dominicans- a forty-two hour wait celebrated by breathing-room-only crowds to greet this blue-tinged novelty.  Once again I step into the clinic’s mawing jaw, this time cradling a limp child.  Vomiting and diarrhea has ripped four pounds from her overnight.  A brusque nurse straps her into place.  Stained and flood-pocked walls close in tightly around the circle of planks strung with IV bottles.  Twelve bottles, twelve limp bodies with only a flicker of eyelash or a faint tremor.  2”x 4” boards hammered into the wall form a shifty bench to prop up mothers filled with a grievous calm, refined and polished to a sheen from this life of theirs which stretches across the island to Haiti, across the tear-salty oceans, across the ages.

reality

this patient circle of eyes

like so many glistening olives

pooled in the pain which shadows

the common human experience

round gleaming olives

lacking warmth

olives have no warmth

and as we settle uneasily into

our designated eighteen inches of board

we each hide our fear and bewilderment

and loneliness

We can each protect ourselves by fussing a bit with our children.  Nicól looks translucent, a ghostly waif, strapped in line alongside equally feeble dark glowing bodies.  I straighten her cloth diaper and stroke her bald head.  Both set her apart in this fetid room.  Dominicans love to stroke her baldness as they cluster behind me, around me, oh so closely everywhere we wander in this dusty town.  Round olive eyes cannot help but gaze unblinkingly at this white woman and her white baby.  The only whiteness in their collective experience is found in bright Dallas silks on their small television screens or peering cheerfully from Gerber food cans.  With a deep breath, I tighten my jaw and drag my line of vision upward to these watching eyes.  I smile weakly out of habit.  It certainly isn’t a smiling sort of situation but I have no training or forethought for this moment.  I need to settle in and sort through the moment.  There are few options, and one most definitely is not snatching my child and running for the Santo Domingo airport.  I stop standing, hunched.  Wretchedly looming at six feet tall.  Conspicuous in my awkwardness.  Instead I kneel on the sticky tile floor. The close contact brings to mind a previous hospital visit and the wade through two inches of sludgy river with a veritable flotilla of soiled bandages, wrappers and tissue, to be slapped onto a delivery table still warm from a previously splayed-legged woman.  The floor, albeit sticky, is dry.  Dry and hard as I squirm, adjusting weight and pressure from knees to toes and back again.  

Sweet Nicól so close.  I count the drips.  Irregular.  Very irregular.  None of the one, one thousand, two, one thousand of my nursing days in distant Flagstaff, Arizona.  I can see the veins in Nicole’s lids.  She isn’t sleeping, but she hasn’t the strength to open her eyes.  Her fingers lay slack in my hand.  The olive eyes still weigh heavily on my bowed blond tangles.  Not hostile, yet too distant to even be curious.  Just watching.  Reluctantly I slide to my feet and join the propped-up bodies lining the wall.  I return the distant curiosity, willing friendly compassion into my gaze.  Dominicans don't greet and politely drop their eyes.  The matched looks last much, much longer than a shy American can bear.  I delicately shift my attention to the setting.  Actually, now that I am peering out away from behind my private discomfort, the room fairly shivers with low-grade activity - shuddering arms and legs, low whimpers as vomit trickles out of parted lips and the furtive wipes of damp rags smoothing away bubbling diarrhea.  Giardia’s distinct sulfurous twinge hangs heavy in this world far from  Pampers and lightly-scented wet wipes.  Actually the stench battles in and amongst us.  A broken-hinged door opens permanently into the toilet room and the multi-brown mound volcanoes from the white porcelain moat.  It is clear that once again the water system is out in San José de Ocoa.

no one knows no one

we are all from separate villages

on different hills surrounding Ocoa

perhaps a face or two is familiar

from the market square

strung with freshly slaughtered cows

covered in raisen-pie flies

patient dangling chickens await

a swift swipe of machete

we are all strung here waiting

in the land of mango heaps and guandules

and cans of sardines

Dusk fades in the lone window of the adjourning waiting room and we settle in.    I dutifully fuss at the occasional nurse about the broken regulator in Nik’s IV bottle but it seems fairly trivial in this environment.  A few lunch pails are brought in by relatives, but most of us merely swallow and shift our belts.  At least I won’t need to use the restroom in my dehydrated condition.  That’s a little trick I’ve learned in this country; if I don’t drink I won’t need to use the never satisfactory bathrooms.  It is going to be a long night, but our attention is sucked away from our dry throats to the twelve babies struggling at the cellular level.

This room is also a battlefield of mine on another, yet related front, and I am the only woman wrestling with the dangling tubes and straps in order to breastfeed.  The last curtain of polite disinterest had been rent as the dark eyes watch la americana wage an ungraceful war on Nestle’s multinational food conglomeration.  Slick advertising with blond women dressed in doctor coats has convinced Dominicans that all good mothers use formula for their children.  I know that proud shiny pyramids of empty cans line each and every house no matter how humble or isolated they are.  A traditional Dominican photo is of the one-year birthday celebrant seated proudly in front of the triangle of financial sacrifice.  This insidious lie is directly responsible for most of these babies being here tonight.  Formula is diluted with river water which is seldom boiled because firewood is scarce and it is served diluted for economy strengthened with sugar and peanut oil.  Hardly a formula for producing sturdy, resistant bodies.  I am hardly a sweet picture of maternal bliss scrunched over the unsanded boards, but the point is made, and a respectful murmur marks my discomfort.  Deep within I somehow know Little Nicól will leave this room unscathed and restored, but few other other mothers have this assurance.  Death is too common, too likely.  In this valley less than half of the children make it to five years of age.

The night wears on.  No conversing with each other.  Nothing to say.  Every topic is weighed and found superficial and distasteful.  The only sound is breaths of comfort kissed over a child’s brow.  Waiting marked by the unsteady drip of clear liquid in twelve bottles. 

Until an explosion of sirens and lights and screams and music and slamming strikes the hospital door.  A bus load of drunken baseball players has run off a ravine and pickup truck beds of them are being hauled to the hospital.  A few lay quietly on stretchers lost on a lonely path of stoic pain, but most are raining curses down on the hapless candystriper sorts who were left to fluttering ineffectively like the tattered moths around the bare bulb which hung from a wire.  I certainly do not begrudge them the curses.  Raw bones rip through sooty sweat-gleaming flesh mingled with pulsing blood. The scene is ugly, and doctors are not hurrying to help from their air-conditioned homes on the other side of town.  Suddenly someone spies the norteamericana and the tone shifts with a screech.  A twisting avalanche squeezes through the door and sweeps over me.  Que bella.  Que ojos.  Que vaya conmigo. There is no personal space in this country, and the men jostle and grope me freely.  I huddle down, unweeping, longing to push through the nightmare. Finally the young men notice that I am not the Farrah Fawcett who smiles through tousled hair from every barroom wall.  Several doctors finally arrive and slowly the rumble next door subsides and silence once again drapes itself over the twelve mothers propped against the weary walls, waiting for dawn.  One little boy convulses weakly as his body squeezes every last drop of moisture from his cells.

his mother weeps

this is her only child

her whole world lies trembling

flailing for another breath

and she bends hopelessly over him

sobbing to the now less-distant eyes

now only weariness separates us

as we watch this little boy’s life seep away

the only light dimly wavers

in from the waiting room

and here we ourselves

wait

With a low moan, the young mother hefts herself onto the wobbly planks and curls over her child.  A low grade panic grips the pit of our stomachs, but we are immobilized, perhaps by our own fear.  We do not reach out to build sand castle walls against this tide.  We lament our cowardice, but freeze doe-like.  Only one sound presses past the gut-wrenching mourning- a soft hymn weaves through the thick air.  Glancing over to the most worn of women, I catch her eye and smile in agreement.  The corito does not waver.  I can only muster a soft echo, but the gentle words cut across the looping wires and wraps hope like a tejido shawl around the trembling mother.  The sobs subside.  The hope offered is not realized in the present.  The boy is going to die.  Nor does it make paved-in-gold promises for the distant future.  The song offers up the hope of love.  The very pulse of passion beyond animalistic urges is testimony of a greater purpose, a greater will outside of teal green walls flecked with squashed bugs.  The very fact that a song of love can float in the midst of bleak weariness is proof of some existence beyond.  Imaginations cannot create new colors; they must work with what exists.  

This wind of love cannot be seen, and yet its effect can be witnessed and held to a shriveled breast.   We are comforted by a presence more concrete than the walls that surround us.  Life’s cadence is irregular and unrelenting.  Yet wait.  In its oscillating circle of birth and life and death there is the steady undertone of love which beats faithfully past deep nameless grief to wildly thrusting hips and stiletto heels, punctuating out rippling circles of life.

The rehydration room.  Thirty years ago He was with me.  And I will never forget.  I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.