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.