DR.RICHARD DOES HIS BESTto save the boy’s life, determinedly packing gauze into the boy’s gaping abdominal wound, while another woman, a fellow refugee, inserts an IV.
Not knowing what else to do, I hold the unconscious boy’s hand, and then, thirty minutes later, when he starts to thrash, I bathe his face and murmur the kind of nonsense I remember my mother once murmuring to me.The other female glances at me in approval.Her plain blue hijab and pale tunic are streaked in blood.She doesn’t seem to notice.
The boy is still gasping in agony when an ambulance finally forces its way through the crowd to the med clinic.His eyes pop open just as he’s being loaded into the back, his dark gaze locking feverishly onto me.
“Mama,” he cries.“Stay with me!Please!Mama!”
I stand there frozen, his hand clutching mine.I have to let him go.I can’t let him go.He shouldn’t be alone.This place is a sea of orphans.
What have they done, the stupid politicians and military generals throwing away our lives as if they have no value?
What have I done?
Eventually, Dr.Richard untangles the boy’s fingers from my wrist.A slam of the rear doors, and the ambulance lurches forward, weaving its way around the mass of still-waiting patients, pressed against chain-link fencing.
I don’t know how long I stand there.Seeing nothing.Hearing nothing.Eventually, I register Dr.Richard before me, hands on his hips, expression unreadable.Does it hurt him, too, this calling where whatever he does will never be enough?
I wait to be dismissed.Instead, he offers me a job.And I say yes.
Dr.Richard, who’s volunteered at refugee camps around the world, leads up the night shift from four to eleven p.m., bouncing around the woefully understaffed and ill-supplied clinic in a blur of curly brown hair and disapproving grunts as he pieces together human flesh with little more than Band-Aids and good intentions.
Also on duty are two nurses and four interpreters.Which is to say everyone does everything all the time.By the end of the first week, I know how to check vitals, provide oxygen, and assist with wound bandaging as adeptly as any trained medical assistant.I also learn how to wipe up blood, mop up vomit, and sterilize every available surface in ten seconds or less.
As the polyglot most in demand, my primary responsibility is to greet arriving patients through the small opening in the barreddoor.At any hour, there are dozens of sick, injured, and desperate individuals, all frantically waving their official papers.As the night grows later, and the camp is cast into darkness, the crowds grow thicker, the cases more urgent, the causes more violent.
I start with simple triage, recording everyone’s name and basic information on a whiteboard:
Green means urgent care—stomach bugs, feverish children, broken bones.Address, treat, dismiss.Yellow is severely unwell with irregular vital signs requiring a thorough exam—time we rarely have.Admit for further analysis when we have a moment.Red signifies a full-blown emergency—stabbings, heart attacks, ruptured appendixes.Everyone drops everything to assist, much like the young boy whose status I still don’t know.Another rule I have to learn.We exist in this moment.What happened before, what will happen after, are not our chapters of the story.We must focus on this and this only.
There are two exam rooms, one for the less critical, one for the most.Though by nine p.m., the line between more or less urgent is a matter of debate.
I’ve never been around the infirm before.From feverish children to screaming young men to pain-wracked elderly.From spurting arterial bleeds to bloated stomachs to rash-covered skin.After the first week when Isaad huffs and puffs and demands to know why I’m still going back, I don’t know what to say, other than someone has to.There’s so much need.A bottomless well of desperate families and single parents and abandoned children, all trying to survive.If we don’t help each other, who will?
There are concessions for the volunteers.I’m granted my family’s ration of food and water at the end of my shift, a precious gift, given that normally Isaad or I would have to stand in line allday for the same provisions, only to often end up with nothing.Isaad can’t argue with guaranteed meals when so much about our existence is precarious.Far from relaxing, however, he takes up new responsibilities for our two-family shanty.
Isaad, once considered the most brilliant mathematical mind in Kabul, now tends to bookkeeping for local merchants, in return for another bowl of rice or a treasured piece of fruit.Even more interesting, the camp children have taken to following him around, led by Omid, who basks in Isaad’s shadow.Isaad shows a surprising tolerance for his growing brood, even teaching basic arithmetic in the afternoon, using a stick to scratch equations in the dirt.Soon the whole place becomes accustomed to a glowering older man with his trailing pack of ducklings striding about camp on what always appears to be very important business.
By eleven p.m.he’s back at the clinic to escort me home through the roaming packs of feral dogs, predatory men, and beady-eyed rats.But first, he engages in a nightly staring contest with Dr.Richard, before pointedly gesturing me to his side.
Dr.Richard doesn’t engage; I understand.The clinic closes.Our moment ends.We move on to the next chapter.This is what it means to survive.
I both marvel at our adaptability and fear the consequences.When you have journeyed so far out of your comfort zone, spent so long living what surely must be someone else’s life, can you ever return to the person you once thought you were?
Maybe this kind of slow erosion is as powerful as any traumatic break.You lose your home, then your country.You lose your loved ones, then yourself.You lose your heart, then your soul.
I lie awake deep into the night, my hands splayed around the rounded bulge of my unborn baby.I feel him or her kick insideme.I wonder if I will make it long enough to meet my future offspring.
And I wonder how my own child will ever truly know me when I don’t even know myself anymore.
The crisis erupts two months later.The first young child presents with vomiting and diarrhea, followed quickly by dozens more adults and children, families lining up outside the clinic’s chain-link perimeter well before our four p.m.opening.By the third day, it feels like half the camp is out with a stomach bug, including Malalai and Rafiq in our cabin, as well as their young son and Isaad’s biggest admirer, Omid.
We administer water as they once did for us, Isaad trading for bone broth, a couple shriveled apples.
Cholera, Dr.Richard announces, his face dark with foreboding.We start handing out zinc and electrolyte tablets to the people still strong enough to stumble their way to the clinic.We quickly run out, however, as the first bodies start piling up.
By the end of the week, the clinic is a madhouse of moaning, cramping, dehydrated patients.Parents staggering in with two to three kids in their arms.Older children dragging their younger, more vulnerable brethren, from babies to grandparents.We can offer exam rooms only to the worst cases.The rest we medicate, emphasize the need for hydration, and send on their way.
It is not enough, and the strain starts to show on everyone’s faces, especially after dark, when we begin our nightly run of code reds.
