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Have you seen the Constant Gardener? You need to, and this story will be a lot more powerful if you do. At least, it’s been that way for me.
In april, I think, I got an email from Vero, the Techo coordinator for Villa la Cruz. A kid from our campamento needed some help … he had been hit by a car in february, but had survived. The medical bills were just getting too high for the family to deal with and so they asked for the help of Un Techo. So our job was to get together some basic supplies and take it to them. She didn’t know much about it, so was going to their house after the community meeting and so I tagged along.
Well. People in the campamentos have a habit of making either huge under or over-statements. They sigh and grumble about having to dig another shit-pit but take immensely painful situations without a word.
This was one of the latter… We went up to the house with Elida - she’s the matriarch of the campamentos, runs the store and coordinates the kindergarten and slaps drunken teens into their place - and met Moises Bryan Basaez Tapia’s mother. The house was pretty typical of the shanty-town houses: on a slope you and I’d find difficult to walk on, a shaky platform of wooden pallets with ply-wood walls. Moises was outside, below the house and his brothers went down to carry him up. He was still in a wheel-chair, which I thought odd, since it had been three months since the accident.
Wow. It turned out that this accident was quite a bit more serious than we had assumed… Apparently Moises had been a few breaths from becoming a vegetable.
We were sitting in the living room after he had agonizingly made his way from the wheel-chair to the couch - he insisted on doing it on his own - and I got a better look at him.
The first thing that I noticed was his head. Oh, god… I didn’t realize the skull could be shaped that way and someone be still alive. The left half of his head was concave, a sloped dent that looked like a caved-in foot-ball. Down the middle of his head was a pink, raw, knotted scar.
The second thing I noticed was his face. It was pale and small and his dark dark eyes were alternating between a shy smile and distressed incomprehension. The tube going into his nose was clear and plastic and felt like a violation, not right, something I associated with old people waiting to die after a whole lifetime, not this kid.
It turned out that it was more, so much more than just “getting hit by a car.” He had been walking along the side of the road one afternoon and the car just went inexplicably off onto the sidewalk and straight into him, crushing his foot and plowing right into his head on his way down. It was so agonizingly random and pointless, that he happened to be just in the right spot where he was hit, just in the right spot to survive but forever to have a limp and epilepsy and a mal-formed head and never be able to work or have a family or grow up like he should have been able to…
I realized I had been staring off into space and so turned to listen more closely to the mother. He still, it seemed, couldn’t have solid food, so they had to give him a full tin of special pediatric growth-milk per day except it cost $7.800 (about $18) a day and of course there was no way they could afford that (minimum wage is $135.000 per month - $270 where cost of living is just a little less than that of the US), so they had to feed him one every two days and mix it with regular powdered milk. Then there were all the diapers (he had lost neurological control of his bowels), baby-wipes (too fragile to take a bath), loose gym clothes, creams for sores, and not to mention the operations they were trying to save up for to re-construct his head and buy a special boot for his foot. He would never be “normal” because the parts of his brain that controlled comprehension and certain motor skills had been erased. He could understand most things but still had to have them repeated, to himself and by other people, about a dozen times before it could register. He was learning to walk again but when he got ¾ the way through a step with his left foot the directions from his brain would stop and the foot would dangle in the air and then crash shuddering to the ground.
Basically they (and by they, just the brothers and mom - dad skipped out when he realized how bad it was) were spending everything they had and selling their things to try and put together enough for Moises (the health insurance status in Chile is even worse than in the States) but of course it wasn’t enough so they finally asked for help. The mom was so embarrassed and kept apologizing but wanting to keep her son alive finally overcame her shame…
I’m still not sure why Moises has affected me so much. I mean, I didn’t even know him or the family. Vero did know him from before, as a sporty little impudent 11-yr old boy, and she was crying as we got on the micro to leave.
This is why I mentioned the Constant Gardener before: it takes place in the slums of Nairobi, and the white couple is arguing because there’s a woman and her kids that are walking along the road and they know they’ll be walking all night through a dangerous neighbourhood. The husband refuses to pick them up - We can’t help everybody! but the wife says No, we can’t, but look at them. We can help THEM!
Why I felt this way about Moises in particular I don’t know. I have seen worse things in my time in South America, even turned my back on it sometimes… And whatever I was going to do was only going to be minute and temporary, because even under the best conditions he would never be “normal” again, it would just help the family get by for another day or so.
Maybe because it was so hopeless is why I wanted to help so badly.
Anyways, Vero and I put together a little campaign of money and supplies for him - I even collected a fair amount of money from the kids at the international office. I felt sort of bad for taking advantage of that resource, but it’s amazing how quickly you can get over shame if you don’t believe it’s wrong. So we had a little party for him with his friends where we gave him the donations. I couldn’t come, unfortunately, but from what Vero said he seemed really happy…
Why am I telling you this? I thought a lot about whether or not to put it up, because it probably seems like a Look at Me story, about all the Good things I’m doing here. I’m sorry if it does. Most of the reason I’m writing about all this is me trying to deal with my own feelings of helplessness and grief, things that are new to my life. I really just want to share feelings and situations I’ve been in. And in reality, all the work I’m doing here is more selfish than anything: how can I ever give back what the people in the campamentos have been teaching me?
Hm. A fog just rolled into the bay. The ships are all sounding their fog-horns so as not to crash, but they’ll still keep un-loading their cargo.
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Dan
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