Littles at the Hospital

In my last post, I talked about some of the hardest parts of working on the hospital project, for me.  But as I mentioned, my kids were there too.  What about them?

I brought my kids with me the first day with the assumption that we would leave if it was too dangerous or too scary, and I watched. Very. Carefully.  We stayed.

Throughout it all, Little Miss spent most of the time either on my back, or sleeping/ coloring/ watching Her beloved Baby Movie in the car seat.  She is small.  So small, that I’m not sure She noticed too much- other than that She got to have her favorite snacks and do some of Her favorite activities from the comfort of Her favorite spots- the car seat and the carrier. 

 

She didn’t like too much attention from strange adults.  But She spent the great majority of Her time in the rooms being decorated, where no one could bother Her.  She did enjoy playing peek-a-boo and making faces with people on the other side of the glass windows.

And She did enjoy getting to see so very many babies- it was a baby extravaganza!
Babies everywhere! "Baby! Baby! Otha' baby! Aaaaallll the babies!"  
She slept a lot of the time.  She enjoyed the spectacle of the project.  Because She is smaller, I limited Her exposure quite a bit, but because She is shy, this suited Her just fine.  With Her sunny disposition, She was fun for the team to have around. 

Missy helping with stickers for the wall

Then there was Little One. 
Watching Little One’s reaction to the time we spent at this hospital is one of the most rewarding experiences of my life so far.  When we first walked into that place, the adults among us had to muster up our internal strength, the self-control we have developed over our years of growing up, not to react with expletives or grimaces or running away.  I’ve described why.  When we walked in, we saw a disgusting, filthy place that seemed overwhelming at first.  Little One. She saw an art project. 

 As soon as She walked in the door, Little One became at home in that hospital.  She helped paint.  She excitedly brainstormed ideas for future rooms- “Butterflies! Rainbows! Flowers!  Zoo animals!”  I cringed at first, holding Her over a paint can to pee.  She giggled. "This is so funny and silly!  It's a paint-can potty hee-hee!"
Us grown-ups saw these children whose bodies and faces had been burned and disfigured, we saw wounds and pain that wrenched our hearts. Do you know what Little One saw?   

Friends.    

She did not say “Dear God what happened to that kid?!” 
She said to me, “Look! Those children are about mine age.  Can I play with them?” 

Little One with some friends

And despite the fact that they had never met, despite the complete language barrier, despite having nothing at all to play with- that is just what they did.   She colored pictures for Her new friends and bounded into rooms, all smiles, to hand them out and shyly wave and smile at the parents who clapped and cheered and thanked Her in various languages.  She played with the children She was allowed to, holding hands and skipping, dancing, giggling.  She shared Her crayons and coloring books and play dough.  She demonstrated games on the ipad and encouraged everyone to take a turn.  At times She had entire rooms laughing; She was like a ball of sunshine streaming down the halls.  
The last day we were there She paraded through the wing, bestowing all Her stickers on everyone She could find.  

Stickering the masses

Looking around it seemed the patients had been struck with an epidemic outbreak of flowers, stars, and zoo animals.
And smiles.

When we left She emptied Her backpack, leaving all of Her crayons and books and stickers for the children at the hospital to share.   “Mommy we should give them everything.  Just everything, because they want to have fun”.  
I’m proud that She wanted to share.  I’m proud that She wanted to help.  But I’m inspired by the way She interpreted what She saw. 

She understood that the children were sad, that they were sick and hurt.  But She wasn’t afraid of those things.  She didn’t see the dirty bandages and the scar tissue, She saw the person underneath.    

In the same moment She saw the rooms we went into, She saw the possibilities- rainbows, butterflies.  In the same moment She saw the children, She saw the possibilities- hide and seek, trading stickers. 
Far from being frightened, on the days we were otherwise occupied Little One begged to go back.   

She is still missing Her “Hospibal friends”.  When we talk about it, She is proud that She got to make the rooms nice for Her friends, proud that She made pictures that they hugged and kissed and hung up in the slats of their beds.  If you ask what it was like at the hospital we visited, She will tell you it was fun. 

Part of that is because She is naïve and doesn’t know better.  She doesn’t understand that some of those children will never go home.  It’s hard for me to wrap my own mind around.  She doesn’t understand, really, how people suffer.  But it’s not all blissful ignorance.  It’s also the amazing ability a four year old has to see past the things we become conditioned to fear, and see the heart of things, the human side.  She doesn’t see a child that needs surgery, so much as a child that needs a friend. 

That power to see potential in everything, to see the human in every person, to see a friend in a stranger, and see what can be given instead of seeing only need- that is something I think any adult can learn from.   
And I think it was infectious. Little One wasn't the only one who got caught up in the bright side of this project.  But that's another story.  

Sad Stories and Soap Boxes

My last day working in the hospital, I was watching Little One paint a flower as Missy napped in Her car seat.  Suddenly there was a flurry of footsteps and shawls. Strangers speaking urgent words I couldn’t understand ushered me into a room down the hall.  There was a bed like the others, with two men in white coats bent over it intensely.  Behind them was a woman.  A mother, holding the end of her scarf over her mouth.  Her eyes were wide and terrified, slowly leaking tears.  The people who had brought me gesticulated wildly towards the child on the bed, the exact same age as my youngest daughter. 

Sometimes.  There is this stereotype of a Foreigner.  This concept that, coming from one of these nations where you have everything and can do anything, that you are everything-  a doctor, a scientist, an expert.  A miracle worker? 

They were begging me to save her. 

Of course, I couldn’t.  I couldn’t do anything more than they could- hold their hands and say I was sorry… and watch her die. 

I have seen people die. But not a child.  It isn’t the same.   

And while I wasn't there to witness the moment it claimed them, having seen enough of death I surely recognized its telltale signs on the bodies of other children there.  It was haunting to know that I could do nothing to chase it away.   
There was a lot during our time at the hospital that was hard to work through. 
Coming from a public health background, it was excruciating to see so many things, some big and some simple, that fly in the face of what I have been taught is the “best practice” for hospital care.  The bathrooms were intolerable.  The first time one my kids had to pee, a nurse took us down three flights of stairs, across a courtyard and down a long hallway to a small clean-ish room, where they used a fresh stainless-steel bowl and washed hands from water streaming out of a leaking pipe.  After that they just peed in an empty paint can.  My kids are troupers, people.  It was far better than what the patients are stuck with.  It was hard to know that.
It was hard to see children suffering, sometimes without access to pain medicines.  It was hard to see the exhaustion and desperation of the parents and families.  One grandmother cried out to us from beneath a crib. Enclosed in the prison-like bars of a broken bed railing, She begged us to take care of her granddaughter.  I’m sick myself, I’m dying too, she sobbed.  Who will take care of her?  What will we do? 

I think I could drown in the sadness of some of the things I witnessed in that hospital.   

But it would be selfish to allow myself to drown on other people’s tears.   It wouldn’t help them, it wouldn’t change a thing.  So instead, I kept painting. 

And now, I want to retell those hard things because they are real, and they happened, and they are happening right now.  Maybe someone will read and decide to help.  Or to keep doing what they do now- as a doctor, a nurse, a janitor, a taxpayer- to keep that kind of hell from creeping into places where it has been largely weeded out.  

Or to realize how much we have here, and maybe squander it less.  Most of us are surrounded by clean, nutritious, FDA-inspected food we can afford to buy.  Yet we choose to feed our children products, junk that will just kill them later.  We have unlimited, purified water gushing from multiple taps in our homes.  We waste it without a thought; we fill the landfills with plastic bottles. We have access to these miraculous, lifesaving medicines and we forgo them because we heard somewhere there might be side effects.  To each his own (really), but listen, any parent who chooses not to vaccinate their child has never seen one dying of pertussis or tetanus.  

Indeed one of the only reasons I could even consider bringing my children into an environment like that was knowing that they carried invisible shields with them.  It was amazing to see these sick, sick little ones just on the other side of the glass, and know that for the price of a few needle pricks my own Littles will never have to carry those burdens.  Never.  

Of course there aren't magic-shield shots for everything, and so the Littles, especially Missy, were only allowed to play with many of the patients through the windows in the walls between rooms.  But some of the children were not contagiously ill, and so the Littles were able to make some friends.  Which they surely did.  But that's another story.  

Let Me Paint a Picture

At this public hospital in Addis Ababa, you can smell the suffering. 

It smells like excrement and stale food and unwashed bodies and infected rot.   

In the children’s wing, the rooms are small and house four, five, six or more patients each, along with their caregivers, who sleep on the filthy floor beneath the cribs because there is nowhere else to sleep. They stay with their children without respite, because there are not enough nurses for such trivial matters as bathing and feeding and changing.  When those things are possible.

There is no such thing as sterile.  The rooms are dirty and things are broken.  There are no electronic monitors, no adjustable beds, no hospital gowns. No sheets.  A baby with a compromised immune system due to severe malnutrition occupies a bed next to a child with TB.  The rooms labeled “surgery ward” or  “burn unit” are just rooms like the others; doors open to the hall where the breath of the ill wanders and slinks and finds new victims to seep into. 

Imagine you are a child in this place. Surrounded by a sea of dingy white, punctuated by faded spurts of God-knows-what and the dark fingerprints of those who lay before you on the bare vinyl mattress, foam swelling out of the cracks. In the rusting, peeling white of the iron crib you are confined to.  There are no TV’s.  There are no books or crayons or comforts.  There is nothing to do but look at the dirty walls and ceiling, the jagged points of the broken-out windows, the others crowded into the room with you.  To listen to the howls echoing down the hallways, the whimpering of the kid in the next bed, the tired murmurs of the mothers.  Whatever you need to feel better, there is not enough. You may wear the same bandage for days.  Weeks. This is your bathroom.

When you become soiled, you mother disconnects you from your IV, straps you to her back, and hauls you through the hallways, down the stairs, past the others laying fevered on the floors, across the courtyard dust to a water pump.  Where she scrubs your clothes with her hands, finds a place to hang them, and waits for them to dry. 

A nurse confides, “Each time a patient is admitted to the hospital and I put them in a bed, I beg God to forgive me”.  
There are no resources.  There is so much need.

The organization I volunteer with is small and is not a medical charity.  It is Artists For Charity; we can’t fix the hospital, we can’t treat the patients, we can’t bring the medicines.  We don’t do nursing.  

But we do art.  We do hope. 
That's worth something.

So, at the inspiration of the AFC children (who have seen their share of hospitals and clinics), AFC’s founder began a new project.  With the permission of an unusually open-minded and compassionate hospital director, AFC began the attempt to make a nightmare child-friendly.  Using something AFC knows- paint.   

I stayed back the first day as the first rooms were emptied and scrubbed down.  The next day, I packed some food and coloring books for the Littles, and we went too.  
We walked into this.

We painted it blue.  

Little One examined the room from a child’s perspective, pointing out spots we had missed.  

We created waves. 

We added sea animals, brightly colored and smiling.

Some of the young patients helped us by lending a hand.

Little One left Her mark too…

…and we created schools of smiling fish.

The rooms are connected by long windows, through which parents and patients watched with great interest.  The mothers hailed us in the hallways to ask questions and introduce us to their children.  The Littles and the AFC workers played peekaboo and coaxed smiles from recumbent babies through the glass. 

It was a long day, but we did a lot of art, and we were encouraged by the connection we made to those babies in the next room. 

AFC team members with the hospital director

By the time we arrived to resume work the next day, one of those babies had died. 

The Hard Truth

Ok. So.  I have been wondering about how to talk about our time in Ethiopia. I wrote you all an epic, in-depth post about this and somehow erased the whole thing when I tried to publish it.  Then I just threw my hands up, Peanuts! Agh! And said- Forget it! Forget the whole thing!
But I do want to share some stories.  And to move on with things here, since there happens to be a lot going on.  So here is the gist of it.
I firmly believe in diversity in parenting styles.  We all do the best we can, I hope, to do what works for us as particular parents, for our particular children and families.  I'm not sure my own philosophy is "right", and I get tired and impatient and don't always live up to my own ideas of what's best, either.  But I do know what I strive for, what I believe in, for me.  For my family.
One of those things- one of the biggest, one that you will have to keep in mind when I write about our time in Ethiopia- is honesty with my children.
I mean avoiding lies. Like, "Sure you can have a pony... some other day."   Or "This?  This red stuff in my glass is uh... juice."
I mean gritting my teeth and giving my best attempt at a real answer for every single "why" and silly question.  Even if "why is it raining?" involves attempting to describe the water cycle to a 3 year old and just ends up spawning a dozen more questions.
It means admitting when I don't know the answer.
Sometimes ("why does people has to die?") it means admitting that no one really knows the answer.
And, I believe, it means allowing them access to reality.  Even though reality isn't always what we wish it were, for them.
I've had plenty of raised eyebrows and concerned questions when I encourage my kids to chat with the bum on the corner, or listen to the news, or when I give real answers to questions like "Why isn't your mommy and your daddy married to each others?" "Why is that animal laying in the road?"  "What is a shelter?"
When Little One was two I scandalized the relatives by taking Her to my grandmother's funeral and letting Her look inside the casket, touch the corpse and feel how it was so still, so cold.  Not sleeping at all.
But I used to volunteer leading support groups for children who had lost their parents, and during training it was stressed how important it is to do just that. Research has shown that children who are "sheltered" from death have a far harder time dealing with their grief.  The same is true for other hard things like divorce or serious illness.  In the absence of answers, children tend to fill in the blanks by imagining something even worse than the truth.
And those children have been shown to have a harder time handling adversity later on in life, when they inevitably encounter such things again.  Because death is a part of life.  It just is.
I think "protecting" my children from Hard Truths in life- like the fact that people suffer, that they can be unkind, that they die- is a selfish thing.  It isn't really that my kids can't handle those things, it's that I don't want to deal with it; it's too hard for me.
After all I am part of a culture that is morbidly uncomfortable with discomfort. 
But I have to realize that so much of what alarms us is because we have been taught to fear things, not because they are actually dangerous.  I mean, what can a dead body really do to you?  It just lies there!
What about exposing them to the veteran who's lost his arms and legs?  The elderly in hospice care?  The kids in the children's home? The view of people struggling on the streets of an impoverished city? Should I cover their eyes and keep our distance?
I think teaching my children to fear these Hard Truths in life is the opposite of making the world a more just, safe, and pretty place for them.  I mean, how can we ever hope to take better care of our elderly, impoverished, sick, and disabled, if we specifically teach our children to look away?
I also think it does my children a disservice in preparing them for a real world that, whether I like it or not, is out there.  I can't fix it for them.  I can't shelter them forever.
Maybe that's part of the problem.  It's hard, as a parent, to admit to our children who think we are heroes, that we are scared too.  That we don't understand a lot of things, that we don't like a lot of things, and that we can't fix it.
But...those things are Truths, too.
Really, I don't need my children to think I am omnipotent, or that they and those they love are immortal, or exempt from pain and danger and hard times.  I need to raise them to live in the world.
To live without fear of the unknown; to live with purpose, making things around them better in their own ways.
I hope that by exposing them to such things early, from the safety of my reach, they will take from these experiences what I want them to. While my lap is still a safe haven if they do get scared.  While my explanations and answers still have credit.   
I hope they will learn that Hard Truths don't always feel as hard as they look, especially when we focus on touching the parts we can change. 
And I hope they can find what I have in the time I've spent walking through shadows- that it makes the things glittering in the sunlight seem all the more vibrant.  And that, even in the dark, there are beautiful things to hold on to.