Chicken Pox and Chocolate Truffle Cake

(May 23rd)

I just got home from a leisurely lunch over the South African border with a fellow teacher. Born 10 days apart, she is my partner in crime at the international school. Back in August, we were the two new American teachers moving into neighboring classrooms. Together, we pondered the unwarranted hostility of the school nurse (who eventually grew on us), the challenges of working with assistant teachers, the purpose of our powerless school board, and who the culprits in our collective classrooms are who would pee everywhere in our shared bathrooms except the toilets. Together, we navigated together through the Office of Labor for our work permits, tried yoga (followed by Indian food to be festive) for the first time and had a slumber party while watching Barack Obama get elected.

We ate slowly and talked incessantly for three hours in the garden over salads with gooseberries, and little quiches, the smell of her cappuccinos reminding me of convenience and home. After discussing with the waitress our various dessert options (wait, there are two choices with the word “truffle” in it? . . . which one is bigger?) we each got a massive slice of chocolate truffle layer cake topped with fresh raspberries and little pitchers of raspberry sauce on the side. Neither of us believes in mixing fruit with chocolate so we made divisions on our plates, cake to one side, produce to the other. It was like having two desserts.

Sitting there, my morning seemed years rather than hours away, spent in the dingy nursery of the orphanage where I volunteer. Chicken pox is going around, a disease I didn’t even know existed in Lesotho until this week. As usual, I started the morning by bathing the children one by one in a couple inches of warm water in a plastic basin. I wipe their noses with their dirty clothes to keep the mucus out of the water, and for the children in diapers there are always dirty bottoms to clean as the caregivers won’t change them in the mornings before their baths. Then I soap them up and scrub away at the crust around their eyes, ears and noses, a task that takes an increasing amount of time the colder it gets. Those without chicken pox got their usual smear of lotion before being dressed. Then the sick ones got their spots attended to, prescription antibiotic applied with rubber gloves for the HIV positive ones and calamine lotion with tissue for the others. None of the children, even those with compromised immune systems due to HIV/AIDS have particularly bad cases, still, I didn’t realize how much poxy children can turn my stomach. They weren’t even scratching very much, but somehow my skin just crawled for them.

I tried not to think of this in the café as the word “chicken” popped up again and again on the menu. I think at some point, a morning spent with sick, dirty and parentless babies followed by a luxurious meal would have left me feeling guilty or at least have a certain sense of disconnect. I think (and hope) it is not my compassion that is decreasing, but that my expectations have shifted to encompass such wide disparity in such narrow geography.

Even within the orphanage itself, my experiences and observations also gather along opposing poles. Whether it’s children stealing food from one another one minute and sharing the next, or my own conflicted feelings at the arrival of a new baby (joy at one more tiny creature to love, sadness at the probable circumstances that brought the baby, and if the baby was brought by a parent or family member for a “better life”, uncertainty about whether the orphanage can and will live up to that promise). On the rare occasion when a child leaves, collected by some family member or another, I know children are better off with families than in institutions, but I hate to see them go. My favorite caretaker in the baby’s room is having her last day tomorrow, leaving to do a correspondence course in English in the hopes that she will eventually attend bible college in South Africa. I feel the same way about her departure as I did about the round-faced and dimpled three-year old who went to live with her grandmother. Meanwhile, the cynic in me thinks another preacher is the last thing this country needs. And I wonder, through my nascent understanding of what this woman believes it means to be a good Christian, how she can get any closer to doing “God’s work” than the work she is doing at the orphanage.

My own view of the orphanage, if it is doing all that it can under the circumstances, and if the children really are better off there than they were wherever they came from or wherever else they could go, changes daily if not hourly. A few weeks ago, a 13 year-old girl, who ran away to the orphanage after living with an abusive uncle, was taken to the hospital with a sexually transmitted infection she contracted from being raped by a relative of the pastor who runs the orphanage. The opinion of the hospital social worker was, “Some girls like that and get paid for it.” Girls and young women at the orphanage get kicked out if they become pregnant although pregnant, unwed teens on the street are routinely taken in. Am I happy that Makhatatso did not get pregnant on top of everything else that has happened in her short life, or do I wish that she had so she could get away from this place?

Situations like that make me glad that I work mainly with the babies. Even though it is usually with the youngest children that the prolonged illnesses and the rare funerals occur, it is also the age where life and growth is most evident and there are first steps to celebrate and new teeth pushing up through soft gums to marvel at. Even among the youngest age group, “elders” emerge, and I once witnessed a four year old bite off a huge chunk of his apple and press it into the hand of a one year old and coo at her to eat. She only has a few teeth and doesn’t eat anything much harder than bread. Still, I let her clutch and suck as she was obviously delighted with the apple and I didn’t want to discourage a rare moment of sharing. I was worried she might choke so I kept her close to me, and it was probably this proximity that allowed her, once she had managed to bite off a piece of apple, take it out of her own mouth and put it in mine.

Most days I’m there, I witness fascinating and often disturbing encounters between children and food. Usually, there is no sharing, and when there is, it is calculating and based on alliances. One five year old will knock down a two year old who is eating while a second five year old will grab a handful of food from the two year olds bowl. The two five year olds run to the corner and gobble the food between them while the two year old wails and I try to wrestle it from them to return to the “rightful eater” before it is all gone. Usually everyone ends up in tears. There’s the stealing and there’s also hoarding. I watched preschoolers savor some candy bars recently, they drooled on and licked the wrappers for about an hour while the chocolate slowly melted. I’ve seen one child eat another’s vomit on more than one occasion. The same goes for children drinking out of the toilet. I don’t know how much of this behavior is physical hunger and thirst, and how much it is the body telling them they are malnourished or dehydrated (some children are malnourished at the orphanage but not most) and how much is it the association of food and drink with comfort and security. The children are simply never satisfied. There isn’t much variety in the food although it could be much worse (a standard meal is papa, a maize meal staple with a thin meat gravy and vegetables). The meals are also not served with any kind of routine. This is partly due to the Basotho concept of time (or lack of it), the countless mishaps that can happen when one person is preparing food for 130 people, and the general disregard for the importance of routines for children. And if a child has special dietary needs, he will sooner starve than be accommodated. An HIV positive boy arrived at the orphanage moderately malnourished and after three months is now severely malnourished. The nurse tried to fatten him up on Plumpy Nut, although he couldn’t stomach it and no one with any power to do so at the orphanage would make sure he had the amount of protein (more beans, more eggs, less maize meal) the doctor ordered. Even when the nurse buys him powdered protein drinks herself, the caretakers rarely see that he actually consumes it three times a day.

One of the hardest things at the orphanage for me is to have to confront my own incompetence in caring for a roomful of small, Basotho children. Having to learn how to change (cloth) diapers from a nine year old was a very humbling experience. I dress the children in the wrong clothes, and get their hands slapped by allowing them to put their filthy fingers in my hair. The children aren’t any safer or better nourished or less sick since I have started volunteering. There are many things I would like to do, like bring Thabo, the malnourished boy, protein-rich food from home, that would never be allowed, nor is it a sustainable solution. So in between the incompetence and the powerlessness, I often wonder what good I can do for a place that has taught me so much about this country and culture, about children and about how much my own heart can stretch and my own eyes and mind can open.

Well, the babies, smile when they see me and they put out their lips for me to kiss. With all their poxy, snotty faces it’s getting harder and harder to find a clean spot to kiss, but I kiss them anyway. The slang word for kiss is one of the first words I learned in Sesotho, followed soon after by the word for “again.” Kiss is “mba” (mmmm-ba) because of the sound you make when you do it. When I think about what value the work I’m doing at the orphanage really has, I think about things like that. I think about the children involuntarily absorbing moments of comfort and love and storing them in their bodies and minds. And I think these things stay with children permanently, regardless of whether they consciously remember the actual moments, and that experiences of trauma and neglect can outweigh these moments but not take them away.

Overall, what I do at the orphanage varies with no predictable pattern. Some days, a caretaker reprimands me for “spoiling” one child or another, and other days when I walk in, one will nod to a crib saying, “you like this one,” an invitation for me to spoil away. Some days I rock babies for hours next to the propane heater and some days I scrub preschool uniforms in buckets until my knuckles bleed. Some days I stay doing one thing or another until dusk, then speed walk through the questionable part of town with my phone and money hidden in my bra, home to eat standing up and exhausted. Other days I leave while the sun is still shining, drive over the border and eat chocolate truffle cake.