Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival (10 page)

“Water in the tissues, water around the eyes. And his skin is peeling off, because of a zinc deficiency.”

“He’s getting better very fast,” Dr. Tectonidis says to Zuera, smiling. “I’m sure we’re going to save him, if he makes it through another day or two.”

“You mean he could still die,” I ask, surprised.

“Oh yeah,” he says, handing Aminu a tiny sweet. “In an hour he can die if he gets too much bacteria in his blood, despite our antibiotics. But he’s had five candies already, and he drinks all his milk. That’s the best sign.”

The “milk” is a nutritional supplement created for severe malnutrition. It is filled with vitamins, Dr. Tectonidis says, the result of thirty years of research into the science of starvation.

“Before, we would stuff them with food, and half would die,” Dr. Tectonidis says. “We learned they have to go slow in the beginning, if they’re a severe case. Don’t give them iron in the beginning. Don’t give them too much food. All these things were learned by trial and error.”

He holds a cup of the milk formula to Aminu’s lips, and the boy drinks it eagerly.

“What a life,” the doctor says, his face just a few inches from Aminu’s. “What a life, eh, bambino?”

A few beds down from Aminu is Habu. He’s ten months old and close to death. Even I can see that. His eyes are unfocused, his chest rattles as it rapidly rises and falls. I can actually see the outlines of his heart beating beneath his paper-thin skin.

“He did well for a couple of days, but then on the twenty-third he crashed,” Dr. Tectonidis says, showing me Habu’s chart. “He was admitted on the nineteenth of July. He got an infection. Today is the thirtieth, and he’s worse than when he came in.”

Habu’s mother says nothing. She sits staring off into the empty space between Dr. Tectonidis and me.

“Will he make it?” I ask.

The doctor doesn’t answer.

Here they treat the worst cases first. That’s what TV wants as well. The illest, the greatest in need. It’s a sad selection process that happens in your head.

“That child’s bad, but I think we can find worse,” I say to myself, deciding whose suffering merits time on TV. You tell yourself it’s okay, that your motives are good—at the moment you might even believe it. But later, alone, lying in bed, you go over the day and feel like a fraud. Each child’s story is worthy of telling. There shouldn’t be a sliding scale of death. The weight of it is crushing.

They die, I live. It’s such a thin line to cross. Money makes the difference. If you have it, you can always survive, always find a place to stay, something to eat. For the first few days in Maradi, I’m not even hungry. It’s not just the heat, the dust. I’ve become disgusted with myself. My body fat, my health, my minor aches and pains. I brought with me a bagful of food—cans of tuna and Power Bars—but the thought of eating anything makes me want to throw up. That changes, of course. After a couple days I forget why I’m depriving myself.

They die, I live. It’s the way of the world, the way it’s always been. I used to think that some good would come of my stories, that someone might be moved to act because of what I’d reported. I’m not sure I believe that anymore. One place improves, another falls apart. The map keeps changing; it’s impossible to keep up. No matter how well I write, how truthful my tales, I can’t do anything to save the lives of the children here, now.

THE NEXT MORNING
when we come back to the intensive care ward, Habu’s bed is empty. It’s been some fifteen hours since we first met him. His mother is nowhere to be seen.

I find Dr. Tectonidis and ask him what happened. He doesn’t remember who Habu is, but when I show him the empty bed, he checks the chart.

“He died this morning,” he says, reading the nurse’s notes. “They transfused him, but he was probably infected with something. They often come with malaria and bacterial infection. I knew yesterday he wouldn’t make it. We tried. I gave him the blood—that was the one chance he had. And he made it through the night, but gave up.”

Overall, only about 5 percent of the children the doctors treat here end up dying, but in the intensive care ward, there are two or three a day.

“There are some surprises,” Dr. Tectonidis says. “Those are harder because we’re a bit upset when it happens. But most of them we can tell. Then there are the miracles. We think they’re going to go, and they make it. The worst ones are the ones we think are going to be okay and they drop suddenly. But the ones that we know, what can we do?”

“Don’t you get overwhelmed?” I ask, already knowing the answer.

“We can’t think too much about one of them,” Dr. Tectonidis says, waving a hand. “The little kids they go easy. One in four of them. They estimate something like two hundred thousand children under five die a year here. And in a year like this, it’s probably much more.

“I tell the nurses, ‘If you get attached and you want to cry, fine—but go somewhere else. Go hide.’ If you cry in front of the mothers, what good is that? It’s not a sign of sympathy. It makes the other mothers worried. They start wondering, ‘What’s going to happen to my kid?’ You can’t do that; it’s not fair. They look up to you like a God. You’re the one chance they have. Only fifty people died here last month. We saved about fifteen hundred. You can’t stop for one death. The mothers understand. They don’t expect sympathy, they expect you to try your best. They don’t expect you to cry for them. That’s not your job.”

I’D INITIALLY COME
to Somalia in 1992 on my own, hoping to get a job with
Channel One.
I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. At outdoor feeding kitchens set up by international relief groups, young and old, like human skeletons, sat in rows waiting for food. The food was cooked in old, giant oil drums over charcoal fires. The smell of cooking food filled the air, taunting the hungry.

When a person died, he was wrapped in a shroud, and placed with the other bodies stacked like cords of wood in a makeshift morgue, eventually to be buried in an unmarked pit. Saiid took me out to the burial grounds, where each day dozens of graves were filled, while new ones were dug.

By the time we got there, it was already late in the day. I took some pictures of the graves, and then started to get worried because we were all alone. Just me and Saiid and two gunmen. I began to think that they might shoot me and dump my body in an empty grave. I couldn’t imagine why they wouldn’t. I had more money than I planned on giving them, and we hadn’t discussed their fee.

“Saiid, did I mention that I have several journalist friends who will be coming to Baidoa in a couple of days?” I asked him, trying to come up with reasons he should keep me alive. “They’ll need interpreters, and I will definitely give them your name.”

I also gave him a raise on the spot.

We drove around aimlessly for a while, and ended up in a small gathering of makeshift huts along a dusty footpath, where a man and a woman squatted over the body of their dead child, lying on the dirt floor of the hut. I wasn’t sure if I should videotape them. I didn’t want to disturb their grief. When the man finally looked up, I motioned to him with my head, nodding toward my camera. He nodded back, and returned his attention to his son. I pressed
RECORD
.

The man appeared old, but was probably no more than forty. The boy had just died. The man held the boy’s head in one hand and with the other spread out a dirty cloth to cover the child’s face and body. The woman filled a kettle with what little water they had. Slowly, sparingly, she poured it over her son. You could see his hollowed-out eyes through the wet cloth; his ribs were visible as well. He had no muscle, no fat. His legs were as thin as the sticks that formed the outer layer of the hut.

They had already watched their three other sons die. This was their last. He was five years old.

He was just one boy, his was just one death. It happened a thousand times a day in places like this all over Somalia. It happened every day.

“AMINU’S DEAD.”

Charlie Moore, my producer, tells me when he gets back from the intensive care ward. Aminu was four. Yesterday he seemed better. Yesterday was a long time ago.

“Aminu’s dead.”

That’s all the nurses said. They don’t know exactly what killed him. They don’t do autopsies here in Maradi. No point. No time. Aminu was starving, but that’s not what finally did him in. He’d been sick for months, hospitalized for the last two weeks. His body was riddled with infections. He might have had malaria; his skin was peeling off.

“Aminu’s dead.”

When Charlie tells me, I’m surprised at how shocked I am. We both knew this could happen; it’s just not what I expected. It seems so unfair. Dr. Tectonidis had been optimistic. Aminu had been eating sweets, drinking his milk formula. He’d made it through the worst of his illness. He was going to be our success story, a bundle of hope to end our report after the death of Habu. We both know what this means. We find our cameraman and head back to the hospital. That’s what we’re here for, after all, to document the death. That’s how it works, isn’t it? Tell stories, get pictures, look out for just such poignant moments. It’s not pretty how poignancy is made.

At the hospital, Aminu’s bed is empty. His mother, Zuera, left this morning.

“When there’s bed pressure, they throw them out faster,” Dr. Tectonidis explains. “When there’s no bed pressure, they tend to keep them a bit.”

Aminu was buried a few hours after he died. Women are not allowed in the cemetery, so Zuera didn’t see her son’s body wrapped in white cloth and deposited in the sandy soil like an oversize seed hastily planted in the earth. There was no service, no headstone. Nothing marks the grave. A little mound is all that remains. We go and videotape it, but it barely reads on camera.

When a child dies at night in the intensive care ward, the nurses let his mother sleep by his side. I can’t get this image out of my mind. Did Zuera speak to her baby in the pitch black of night? When she opened her eyes in the morning, did she think he was still alive? How many seconds was it before she remembered?

Aminu’s dead.

IT TAKES US
half a day to find out where Zuera lives, another half day to get there.

It’s a small village in the midst of a cornfield. A collection of thatched huts and mud homes. When we arrive, Zuera is sitting outside her one-room house, in a courtyard surrounded by women, their feet splayed out in front of them.

Her elderly husband is there as well, standing in a group of men, off to the side. No one seems particularly surprised that Aminu has died. There is no crying, no wailing. Death has come to this village before. Aminu is the first child Zuera has lost, but nearly every mother here has lost at least one child.

“He was a good boy, a gentle boy,” Zuera says softly. “They tried their best for him.” She holds her youngest child, Sani, in her arms. He is two and doesn’t understand what’s happened to his brother. “He was always with Aminu,” Zuera says. “This morning he kept calling out his name.”

Behind her, two women stand over waist-high wooden mortars, pounding millet into flour. The dull thud of the pestles, one after the other, the steady pulse of village life. I pick up a wooden pestle, shiny smooth at either end from years of sweat and scraping. It’s heavy and hard to imagine anyone wielding it day after day. The women laugh when I pretend to be too weak to hold it.

Nearby, Zuera’s grandmother sits with three other elderly women, picking at a bowl of dried leaves—the staple of their diet for months.

Aminu is the thirteenth great-grandchild of hers to die. Half of her thirty-eight grandchildren have died as well. She can’t even remember all their names.

Inside Zuera’s one-room house is a twin bed with a thin mattress—little else. I’ve been in dozens of homes like this over the years, and every time, I still find it shocking. A dirt floor, makeshift shelves. The only decoration: some torn pages from an old magazine taped to one of the walls. Zuera has more than most—the benefit of having an older husband, perhaps—but I can’t imagine what her life is really like. The few pieces of clothes Aminu wore will be given to his little brother. There are no pictures of any of the children. Photos are expensive, and Aminu was too young. Zuera will have nothing to remember her dead son by. None of the mothers ever do. The pictures we’ve taken of Aminu and Habu and the others are likely the only images that will ever exist of them. The only markers that they were ever alive.

I BOARDED THE
plane in Baidoa, soaking wet with sweat. I’d been in Somalia less than forty-eight hours but had shot enough material for two reports and needed to return to Nairobi to write them. I was dehydrated and running a high fever.

I’d finished off the last of my water the previous night. The Red Cross had let me stay in their guarded compound. I’d slept on the floor and considered myself lucky.

When the C-130 finally took off, I leaned back. Cool air blew out of a pipe in the roof, and the plane quickly got cold. I shuddered with the change of temperature.

One of the airmen removed a cassette tape from his flight suit and disappeared toward the cockpit. Seconds later, Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” began to blare from speakers near my head.

“Is this the real life? / Is this just fantasy? / Caught in a landslide / No escape from reality.”
I looked out a side window, trying to catch one last glimpse of Baidoa.

“I always wanted to pee over the equator,” one of the airmen said. He unzipped his flight suit and leaned against a pouch on the side of the plane, which allowed his urine to trickle out into the clouds. The pilot began to rock the plane back and forth, making it difficult for the airman to keep his balance. Everyone laughed.

I arrived back in Nairobi and showered the dust from my hair, lathered my body, pried the dirt from my finger- and toenails. I put on fresh clothes, went to an Italian restaurant, ate pasta, drank passion fruit juice, watched the TV above the bar. I’d been there, now I was here. A short plane ride, a few hundred miles, another world, light years away.

I finished my meal. A cool breeze blew through the restaurant. When I breathed deeply, however, I was suddenly assaulted by a smell. Smoke, rot, flesh, and food—it was the smell of Somalia, and it came like a stiletto stab out of the shadows. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. My clothes were clean, so was my skin. For a moment I thought it was my imagination, a hallucination brought on by the heat and my fever. Then I realized that it was coming from my boots. I had only one pair, and the smell of that place had soaked into the leather, worked itself into the soles. Just that morning, in Baidoa, getting pictures of a dead donkey, I’d stepped into a pool of blood. Who knew what else I’d walked through?