I felt my Irish skin sizzling as I sat in the back of a tap-tap. I heard a chorus of “blanc! blanc!” coming from all around me. The stench of animal and human defecation, burning trash, and rotting food and flesh filled my nostrils. Billy knocked on the window to get my attention and said, “okay? okay!” He stepped on the pedal, and off we went.
***
“‘elp me?” An aged woman pulled back a blanket to reveal a tiny face, no more than a few hours old. I gasped, horrified, and waited for Sadrac to translate the full story.
“Her neighbor has five babies. HIV. No food. Baby in the trash,” Sadrac told me. I felt breakfast coming up my throat.
I rushed the premature and starving baby in to see Dr. Carter. The clinic had been set up just a week before with HIV testing facilities. Half an hour later our fear was confirmed. She needed care that our little clinic could not provide. In the US she would have been airlifted to the nearest major hospital, but in Titanyen, Haiti, she was bussed and taxied to the only major hospital. Jennifer, a volunteer nurse, a soft-spoken southerner with kind blue eyes and the prettiest blond curls, was sent to accompany the baby on the half-day’s journey to the hospital in Port-Au-Prince.
***
At 5:30 AM the fan in our room turned off, and I woke up instantly when sweat started to pool all over my body. Mosquitoes, no longer warded off by the fan, swarmed around my face. I climbed out of my top bunk and went to get some breakfast. Dr. Carter was sitting at the table talking to Jennifer, who had enormous black circles around her red-tinted eyes.
“What happened?” I asked anxiously.
She looked at me and spoke. “She…,” Jennifer choked on that one word and gasped as tears poured out of her eyes.
Dr. Carter finished for her. “She didn’t make it through the night.”
***
Anitha enunciated every consonant and puckered her lips as she spoke through her thick Creole accent. “Sawah, what do you do at home?” She sorted vitamins on the counter of the Mission of Hope’s pharmacy.
“I work at Starbucks.”
“Eh?” Anitha stared at me, raising her eyebrows in wait for me to actually answer her question.
“I work at…,” Sudden realization must have flashed across my face. “I work at a coffee…,” My eyes looked away as I thought hard. “I sell coffee. And food. Breakfast.”
Anitha nodded. “Oh! You like?”
“Yes… yeah, I like it.”
***
“Can you just drop off these de-worming meds on your way to the beach?” asked Dr. Carter, a wrinkly, retired, seventy-three year-old man with a thick southern accent who spent two weeks every other month volunteering at the Mission of Hope Haiti.
“Sure can!” said Andy, a pudgy New Englander who was, like me, on his first visit to a third world country. On the last day of our trip, our guilt-ridden beach day, Andy, the rest of our group, and I stopped at the same orphanage we’d visited a few days before. We were armed with a Ziploc bag of little white pills, and a party sized bag of Dum-Dums. At their teacher’s command, 45 orphans age 11 months through 14 years lined up for candy. The little ones cried when the medicine touched their taste-buds, but lit up when the flavor was put out by a Dum-Dum.
***
“Sarah! Get in here!” yelled Dr. Carter from the patient examination room.
I poked my head in the door. “Yes?” I asked expectantly.
“Here, take this. You’ve given shots before, right?” He extended his arms, and I saw in his hands a large syringe and vile filled with red liquid.
“What! You’re kidding! You do it. I don’t know how to give a shot.” I held up my hands in protest and started to back out of the room.
Dr. Carter laughed and said, “you have to learn sometime if you’re gonna be a nurse!”
“No I don’t! I’m not even sure I wanna be a nurse!” My eyebrows were raised sternly. “Oh, get over here. It’s easy.” Dr. Carter smiled and beckoned me into the room. Billy, the translator, spoke in Creole to the confused man sitting on the examination table, who laughed. He had yellow teeth and orange hair, a look that meant malnutrition. I stepped into the room, and Dr. Carter handed me the syringe and the vile. “Like this.” He motioned with his hands, and I reluctantly obeyed. I filled the syringe with Vitamin B12 and stabbed the needle into the Haitian man’s bony arm. He covered a wince with a gaping smile and a loud “merci!”
***
“What color is the discharge? And is there any burning or itching?”
Vena had a quick Creole conversation with the young patient, who had the saggiest A cup I’ve ever seen. “Yellow. Itchy.”
I inhaled quickly at the visual in my mind. My nostrils were greeted by putrid body odor. I wrote on my notepad and said, “anything else the matter?”
Vena again spoke to the old woman. “Diarrhea. That’s it.”
“Okay. She can go wait in there and then somebody will come get her.”
***
I wheeled my suitcase around a pile of cow dung and up a steep ladder. The stewardess smiled. “Do you need any help finding your seat?” I shook my head.
***
“I’m starving,” said Andy.
“Chili’s. I want Chili’s,” I said as I stepped into Miami National Airport.
Another member of our team said, “I don’t care where we go, as long as I can get a Bloody Mary.”
***
“Thank you for choosing Starbucks! This is Sarah. What can I get for you?” I spoke into my headset in response to the DING! in my ear.
“Ah, yes, I’d like a Venti Java Chip Frappuccino with whipped cream and extra chocolate drizzle,” said a sickly obese woman from her front seat.
“I’m very sorry, but we’re all out of Java Chips right now, so there won’t be any chunks in your Frappuccino. Is that okay?”
“What do you mean you’re all out of Java Chips? This is ridiculous. Never mind.”
I heard tires squeal, and she was gone.
7.03.2011
COMBAT!
In the early nineties most of our friends watched Saved by the Bell, Full House, and Boy Meets World. Our lack of cable television left us out of the pop-culture loop, but we were blissfully ignorant. My brothers and I, always slightly different or as we thought, slightly cooler than our friends, had a unique favorite television show: Combat! The syndicated 1960s show about a squad of American soldiers in France during World War II scripted our backyard adventures. As often as my brothers Spencer and Rob could manage, our neighbors Chris and Ryan were enlisted to join our ranks. One sticky hot summer afternoon in 1994 while our mother made dinner, our backyard was a bloody battleground. I begged to be Sarge or Lieutenant, or Caje or Kirby. I wanted in on the action. There were krauts that needed to be killed! My chauvinistic oldest brother disagreed. “You’re a girl,” Spencer, age thirteen and therefore in charge, said. His sapphire blue eyes squinted in the sun as he said, “you’re a nurse.” I pouted. There weren’t even any nurses in the show, but Spencer was the sergeant.
After Spencer crawled out of our trench and before he motioned for us to follow, Rob told me, “you can be Doc.” I perked up with a smile at the thought of being one of the show’s regular characters. “He’s important! If we get shot you have to fix us or else we die.” Satisfied, I trailed along after my brothers and Chris and Ryan, intent on doctoring as many wounds as possible. I made sure I had everything I needed in my medical bag. I saw an ace bandage that Daddy brought home for me from his physical therapy appointment, a blue and yellow stethoscope with clear plastic tubing attaching the earpieces to the chest piece, one band-aid, and a bracelet-looking thing that I realized years later was supposed to be a blood-pressure cuff. I wouldn’t be letting my squad-mates die anytime soon.
We crawled through the woods—Sarge, followed by Kirby, Caje, Littlejohn, and Doc. Chris and Ryan’s mom didn’t believe in toy guns, so they made their own. They toted hockey sticks covered in black electrical tape with pieces of two-by-four taped on to fill out the shape of the gun. Our parents were more old-fashioned, so Spencer and Rob had real fake rifles, but Spencer had duct-taped a piece of two-by-four to his to create the magazine of his Thompson submachine gun, also known as Sarge’s Tommy gun. The soldiers clutched their oddly taped makeshift scrap wood rifles closely. I tugged on my doctor bag, and we all tried our best to not lose our camouflage hardhats in the underbrush. We followed Sarge’s lead, crawling on our bellies in order to remain unseen by the enemy.
Sarge suddenly yelled, “duck and cover!” and at that moment we all heard the horrifying, yet strangely exciting sound of an enormous plane flying overhead. Kirby followed Sarge’s order by tackling the straying Littlejohn under the cover of an enormous low-hanging evergreen tree and pulling me and my doctor bag along with him. My heart pounded inside my chest as I reminded myself that I needed to stay safe—I needed to be well enough to help anyone who got wounded. We heard the bomb fall hard and fast only about a football field’s length away—too close for comfort. We found some solace in the hope that it may have hit some nasty krauts.
Our hopes proved to be true—Sarge’s eyes shot from the sky where the plane had been to the grass a short distance away from us. There was a thump and we realized that the arm we saw fly through the sky had been German. The boys grinned and I felt nauseated. All was silent, and Sarge, with a wave and a grunt, gave us the OK to follow his lead and continue on our trek. He waved a hand behind himself—he heard krauts. We all stopped mid-crawl. He quickly held a finger to his lips and we listened intently. They were coming from around the abandoned shack we had been camping out in. Sarge and Kirby raised their rifles, Caje and Littlejohn waited for orders, and I crouched behind a rock to avoid getting struck by a stray bullet.
An incalculable number of German soldiers came into view as their helmets rose above the vast rock that two days later would mark the homerun line of our backyard baseball field. “BANG! BANG! BANG!” Kirby’s rifle fired but was quickly drowned out by the much louder “EH-EH-EH-EH-EH!” of Sarge’s Tommy gun filling the air. Eleven krauts down. Sarge and Kirby, my brothers, were brave and bold, shooting wildly but accurately. Kirby and Littlejohn hung back and stayed low to pick off the sneakier krauts. I could tell the Germans were losing great numbers because my squad mates emerged from their hiding places. Four prepubescent battle cries later, the boys were all up and running, determined to get every last enemy. “I got seven!” yelled Caje. “I got nine!” screeched Sarge. The sound of flying bullets and whooping, warring boys filled my ears. I remained hidden behind my tree while I waited to be needed.
The American soldiers chased the retreating cowards while I during a moment of entirely unwarranted wartime peace ran to tend to the wounded. In an area that my squad mates had already vanquished, I knelt, opened my bag, and urgently drew out my plastic stethoscope. I listened to his fading heartbeat and suddenly his eyes fluttered open. I knew they were the bad guys, but I always thought the German soldiers were so handsome. I could tell it was painful, but he managed a faint smile in my direction. I heard the dying German soldier whisper “danke” as I poured some invisible medicine into his invisible mouth. He sputtered and coughed briefly and then closed his eyes again as the pain eased. I told him “everything’s gonna be okay,” and he breathed his last.
I came out of my trance when I heard “DOC! DOC!” I looked up and I saw the boys running toward me. Kirby was wounded. He had his right arm slung over Caje’s shoulder and his left arm around Littlejohn’s. “He’s been hit!” Sarge called frantically. For the number of enemy soldiers we’d just done away with, a grazed shin wasn’t too bad. “Did you just save a bad guy?” Sarge asked with a mix of shock and big-brother pride in his voice. I nodded my head, relieved that he wasn’t mad. I hopped up to follow the boys along to our safe spot—the house-sized rock that we all thought had once been an Indian grinding stone. I began wrapping an ace bandage around Kirby’s wounded shin. His freckled nose wrinkled with his smile. “You’re a great Doc.” I grinned in response to the type of affirmation that mattered most—the affirmation of a big brother. I continued to wipe away the dirt and the blood from his shin, and for good measure I pulled a band-aid out of my bag and placed it over the wound.
Sarge leaned against the giant rock where Kirby and I were sitting, cleaning his gun. Caje sat on the ground with his back against an old oak tree, and Littlejohn stood a short distance away with a bag of sunflower seeds in his hands. His cheek looked like a chipmunk’s. Littlejohn spit. I looked and saw a growing mound of sunflower seed shells on the oak leaf-covered floor of the woods. “Stop!” Caje glared at Littlejohn after he received one too many sunflower seed shells to the body. He was going to pound his bold younger brother if it continued. “Pooowit!” A sunflower seed hit Caje’s face. He leapt to his feet and as he approached his brother, Littlejohn suddenly screamed.
“Aaaaauuugh!” He clutched his arm and fell to the ground. “We missed one!” Littlejohn pointed with his good arm, and Sarge, Caje, and the freshly healed Kirby immediately bolted in that direction. I rushed toward Littlejohn who was laughing at having so narrowly escaped the wrath of his brother. I listened to his heartbeat, and since I was out of band-aids I placed the blood-pressure bracelet around his arm. Moments later the other boys were back, victorious. “Gimme some of those!” Sarge stuck his hand into Littlejohn’s bag of sunflower seeds. “I’m starving!” I wandered off to pick some flowers. Littlejohn and Kirby began arm-wrestling, and Sarge and Caje watched and argued over who got to take the winner.
Attached to the side of our house next to the backdoor hung a giant copper-colored dinner bell, and the sound of our mother suddenly ringing the bell that evening was one of the most exciting sounds we’d heard all day. Sarge, Kirby, and I yelled “MESS!” in unison. We all ran out of the woods and toward the back porch where our mom stood. “Do you guys want to stay for dinner?” she asked Littlejohn and Caje, who excitedly responded “yes please,” and Caje went inside to call their mom to see if it was okay. I scrambled up the back porch stairs and yelled “Hi Daddy!” when I saw him open the door for me. I ran into the house and leapt into my daddy’s arms and dumped my doctor bag on the floor. “Everybody go wash your hands!” said Mommy. Daddy let me down and I skipped past the washing machine into the bathroom. I squeezed among the crowd of boys around the sink. “I need to refill on band-aids,” I thought to myself as I scrubbed the green and brown from my hands. My stomach growled. I smelled tacos.
After Spencer crawled out of our trench and before he motioned for us to follow, Rob told me, “you can be Doc.” I perked up with a smile at the thought of being one of the show’s regular characters. “He’s important! If we get shot you have to fix us or else we die.” Satisfied, I trailed along after my brothers and Chris and Ryan, intent on doctoring as many wounds as possible. I made sure I had everything I needed in my medical bag. I saw an ace bandage that Daddy brought home for me from his physical therapy appointment, a blue and yellow stethoscope with clear plastic tubing attaching the earpieces to the chest piece, one band-aid, and a bracelet-looking thing that I realized years later was supposed to be a blood-pressure cuff. I wouldn’t be letting my squad-mates die anytime soon.
We crawled through the woods—Sarge, followed by Kirby, Caje, Littlejohn, and Doc. Chris and Ryan’s mom didn’t believe in toy guns, so they made their own. They toted hockey sticks covered in black electrical tape with pieces of two-by-four taped on to fill out the shape of the gun. Our parents were more old-fashioned, so Spencer and Rob had real fake rifles, but Spencer had duct-taped a piece of two-by-four to his to create the magazine of his Thompson submachine gun, also known as Sarge’s Tommy gun. The soldiers clutched their oddly taped makeshift scrap wood rifles closely. I tugged on my doctor bag, and we all tried our best to not lose our camouflage hardhats in the underbrush. We followed Sarge’s lead, crawling on our bellies in order to remain unseen by the enemy.
Sarge suddenly yelled, “duck and cover!” and at that moment we all heard the horrifying, yet strangely exciting sound of an enormous plane flying overhead. Kirby followed Sarge’s order by tackling the straying Littlejohn under the cover of an enormous low-hanging evergreen tree and pulling me and my doctor bag along with him. My heart pounded inside my chest as I reminded myself that I needed to stay safe—I needed to be well enough to help anyone who got wounded. We heard the bomb fall hard and fast only about a football field’s length away—too close for comfort. We found some solace in the hope that it may have hit some nasty krauts.
Our hopes proved to be true—Sarge’s eyes shot from the sky where the plane had been to the grass a short distance away from us. There was a thump and we realized that the arm we saw fly through the sky had been German. The boys grinned and I felt nauseated. All was silent, and Sarge, with a wave and a grunt, gave us the OK to follow his lead and continue on our trek. He waved a hand behind himself—he heard krauts. We all stopped mid-crawl. He quickly held a finger to his lips and we listened intently. They were coming from around the abandoned shack we had been camping out in. Sarge and Kirby raised their rifles, Caje and Littlejohn waited for orders, and I crouched behind a rock to avoid getting struck by a stray bullet.
An incalculable number of German soldiers came into view as their helmets rose above the vast rock that two days later would mark the homerun line of our backyard baseball field. “BANG! BANG! BANG!” Kirby’s rifle fired but was quickly drowned out by the much louder “EH-EH-EH-EH-EH!” of Sarge’s Tommy gun filling the air. Eleven krauts down. Sarge and Kirby, my brothers, were brave and bold, shooting wildly but accurately. Kirby and Littlejohn hung back and stayed low to pick off the sneakier krauts. I could tell the Germans were losing great numbers because my squad mates emerged from their hiding places. Four prepubescent battle cries later, the boys were all up and running, determined to get every last enemy. “I got seven!” yelled Caje. “I got nine!” screeched Sarge. The sound of flying bullets and whooping, warring boys filled my ears. I remained hidden behind my tree while I waited to be needed.
The American soldiers chased the retreating cowards while I during a moment of entirely unwarranted wartime peace ran to tend to the wounded. In an area that my squad mates had already vanquished, I knelt, opened my bag, and urgently drew out my plastic stethoscope. I listened to his fading heartbeat and suddenly his eyes fluttered open. I knew they were the bad guys, but I always thought the German soldiers were so handsome. I could tell it was painful, but he managed a faint smile in my direction. I heard the dying German soldier whisper “danke” as I poured some invisible medicine into his invisible mouth. He sputtered and coughed briefly and then closed his eyes again as the pain eased. I told him “everything’s gonna be okay,” and he breathed his last.
I came out of my trance when I heard “DOC! DOC!” I looked up and I saw the boys running toward me. Kirby was wounded. He had his right arm slung over Caje’s shoulder and his left arm around Littlejohn’s. “He’s been hit!” Sarge called frantically. For the number of enemy soldiers we’d just done away with, a grazed shin wasn’t too bad. “Did you just save a bad guy?” Sarge asked with a mix of shock and big-brother pride in his voice. I nodded my head, relieved that he wasn’t mad. I hopped up to follow the boys along to our safe spot—the house-sized rock that we all thought had once been an Indian grinding stone. I began wrapping an ace bandage around Kirby’s wounded shin. His freckled nose wrinkled with his smile. “You’re a great Doc.” I grinned in response to the type of affirmation that mattered most—the affirmation of a big brother. I continued to wipe away the dirt and the blood from his shin, and for good measure I pulled a band-aid out of my bag and placed it over the wound.
Sarge leaned against the giant rock where Kirby and I were sitting, cleaning his gun. Caje sat on the ground with his back against an old oak tree, and Littlejohn stood a short distance away with a bag of sunflower seeds in his hands. His cheek looked like a chipmunk’s. Littlejohn spit. I looked and saw a growing mound of sunflower seed shells on the oak leaf-covered floor of the woods. “Stop!” Caje glared at Littlejohn after he received one too many sunflower seed shells to the body. He was going to pound his bold younger brother if it continued. “Pooowit!” A sunflower seed hit Caje’s face. He leapt to his feet and as he approached his brother, Littlejohn suddenly screamed.
“Aaaaauuugh!” He clutched his arm and fell to the ground. “We missed one!” Littlejohn pointed with his good arm, and Sarge, Caje, and the freshly healed Kirby immediately bolted in that direction. I rushed toward Littlejohn who was laughing at having so narrowly escaped the wrath of his brother. I listened to his heartbeat, and since I was out of band-aids I placed the blood-pressure bracelet around his arm. Moments later the other boys were back, victorious. “Gimme some of those!” Sarge stuck his hand into Littlejohn’s bag of sunflower seeds. “I’m starving!” I wandered off to pick some flowers. Littlejohn and Kirby began arm-wrestling, and Sarge and Caje watched and argued over who got to take the winner.
Attached to the side of our house next to the backdoor hung a giant copper-colored dinner bell, and the sound of our mother suddenly ringing the bell that evening was one of the most exciting sounds we’d heard all day. Sarge, Kirby, and I yelled “MESS!” in unison. We all ran out of the woods and toward the back porch where our mom stood. “Do you guys want to stay for dinner?” she asked Littlejohn and Caje, who excitedly responded “yes please,” and Caje went inside to call their mom to see if it was okay. I scrambled up the back porch stairs and yelled “Hi Daddy!” when I saw him open the door for me. I ran into the house and leapt into my daddy’s arms and dumped my doctor bag on the floor. “Everybody go wash your hands!” said Mommy. Daddy let me down and I skipped past the washing machine into the bathroom. I squeezed among the crowd of boys around the sink. “I need to refill on band-aids,” I thought to myself as I scrubbed the green and brown from my hands. My stomach growled. I smelled tacos.
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