Renaissance

The Death of Youth in Africa

There was a particularly trying time in my stay in Africa when everything seemed to go terribly wrong at every turn. My project was having difficulties in supply compounded by difficulties thrown up by man made decisions. I was frustrated in interpersonal relationships, particularly with my girlfriend. I was falling under a long spell of melancholy brought on by homesickness and my erroneous insistence to myself that my problems were exacerbated by the remoteness of the location and the lack of development and education. My mood had deteriorated completely. There was no one or no thing that could grasp me by the heartstrings and pull me into the realization that life was good. There was no final arbiter of equity or worth in the professional, personal, or spiritual realms. I drew on the reserves of my enthusiastic naiveté and found that the reserve had been spent.

I got together what little I needed to sustain myself throughout a weekend away and decided to go to a friend to drink beer and talk it out. I walked up to the center of the village to wait for a tro-tro and I sat in a shaded spot scowling until the muscles in my head and face ached and wrangling with God. If life is fair, I asked him, if there is truly a set of parameters that guide behavior in the universe, if there is truly an argument to be made that there is a purpose to all of this, then give me a sign that it is so. It is the only time I ever asked for such a sign and I will not ask again.

There was a little girl, probably no more than four years old, who would follow me everyday as I walked to work and sing to me and dance along. She found great joy in my difference and shared that joy out to those who would have it, most of all to me. She was very, very cute. I saw her coming toward me as I sat there in the square, splayed out in her mother’s arms, limbs akimbo and dangling, lifeless head lolling to and fro. Her mother was wailing in anguish, crying and cursing God, asking why her baby had to die. When she reached the center of the road she began to try in earnest to crack open her own head, and had injured herself seriously before she could be restrained and dragged away. Some elders took possession of the tiny corpse and whisked it away for traditional treatment.

There were no sirens. There were no cameras, no reporters, and no markers trumpeting the cataclysmic event. The stinking, baking, remote dirt road went back to being a stinking, baking, remote dirt road. When I got on the microbus that would take me to the town, though, I was numb. I had asked my God for a sign and I felt that I had been given one. I had at the time seen it as a metaphysical event after which, psychologically, I would not be the same.

It took time for me to realize that every experience is to some degree a metaphysical event after which one will be forever changed, including the mundane experiences of being cut off in traffic and holding open a door for an invalid. Ten years after that numbing, soul crushing day I was back in that same village center. My own little girl was back in the house in the village “suburb” with her grandmother, aunts, and cousins. I was walking with my wife to buy a few things in the market. My wife was hailed by a cousin who was working on staging, plastering a building at the roadside. She exchanged a short laugh with him, acknowledging his cleverness in posing his request for a few coins. She tried to hand him a bill but it fell and was blown a short distance. Across the road there were some children who had gathered to watch us come into the village and who were calling to us, and may have been asking for a few coins too, I don’t recall now. I stooped over to pick up the bill to throw to my cousin-in-law and heard the sound of a car coming into the village too fast. Still bent over I looked up and just saw the blur of the young boy who had come running across the street to me, eclipsed by the moving taxi. The sound of the screeching tires and the sickening thump of the small body against the car were too close together. My wife stood shocked and I ran to the child, arriving just as his grandmother did. I looked him over. He was unconscious, but breathing. There was no significant swelling anywhere and there were no open wounds. I tried to look into his eyes to ascertain dilation, but it was instantly like a circus around us. I could not believe that people were trying to pull at the boy and jostle him around. The car started to rock. A crowd was pulling the driver out. I imagined a lynching about to occur. I put bass in my voice and spoke with force, telling the driver that he would have to drive the boy to the clinic because there was no other car. The people put him back in the car and the boy’s grandmother sat in the back. We put the boy lying flat along the bench seat in the back, with his head on his grandmother’s leg. A burly family member got in the front next to the driver, assuring that he was going to the clinic and nowhere else. I thrust a bill into the grandmother’s hand and told her to see to the child as best she could.

I was later to learn that the bill was large and that without this significant amount of money the child would not have received treatment at the clinic (I think it was about five dollars). The next day the entire family came to our house to express their thanks, and the following day the boy himself came to thank me. We sat him down and gave him cold water and a piece of candy, and I knew I was right to have stopped asking for signs. I had long since stopped asking and just started looking.