An Untended Garden

I’m finding it difficult to focus today, or even to interact with my colleagues.   An incident I witnessed yesterday in the hospital continues to play through my head, like a movie reel that loops around and around.  The scenario plays out, no real beginning and no ending.  Only an insert, a short vignette that violently and immediately brings me choice-less into the scene without introduction or understanding. 

A small boy leans against the hospital wall, his belly severely distended, suffering from kwashiorkor, and extreme protein deficiency.  His eyes meet mine, expressionless.  A second child, an emaciated girl, is propped up against her mother, who is absent-mindedly administering sips of water as she chats with another woman.  The child’s bony arms are too weak to reach out for the cup.   Her head, seemingly too large for her skeletal frame, drops to one side, resting on her mother's lap.

The women, healthy looking and well dressed in western clothes visit with one another gaily.  An older woman in the group sits and eats a bowl of porridge.  The incongruence of this scene confuses and arrests me.   I’ve seen seriously malnourished children before, but not here.  And, I didn’t expect to see it here.  This region is rich in foods, mile upon mile of the land farmed to produce rice, vegetables, fruits and grains.  Every family subsides on their efforts and various fruits are free for the taking, growing alongside the roads.  The misery of these children is absolutely needless.

I make an inquiry to the medical doctor who is working with the long lines of mothers lined up with their babies at the Well Baby Clinic.  Here the children are weighed and measured and receive vaccinations.  He told me that the woman said the fathers had abandoned the families and that they had no money for food.  The woman said they did not work their gardens as they were out looking for the husbands. 

Incomprehensible. 

Many of the children in Mozambique do not have fathers active in their lives due to being left orphans, fathers that work away from the home or cultural norms that   render women almost solely responsible for child rearing.  And for a family to not garden?

Inconceivable.

I try to make sense of it all.   This level of malnutrition is the result of long-term depravation. At this point, the children are unable to ingest foods, even nutritional supplements.  Intravenous care and medicine is first needed to counter the worms in the belly of the small boy, the worms that absorb any nutrients the boy receives.  And, the digestive system of the little girl has shut down.  After a series of medications, she will need therapeutic foods.  It will be some time before she can take in foods.  Our hospital does not have a feeding program nor are the medicines free. The children were not admitted.

An unpredicted and twisted side effect of years of international aid is a sentiment of entitlement.  There are those, a limited percentage of people to be sure, who manipulate the good conscious of aid programs.  Travelling from clinic to clinic, they prey on the offered resources, now seen as an expectation.  I am not sure if this was the case with these women, but surely they were expecting someone else to solve their problem.  The doctor said it was simply due to their “poor mentality”.

Abuse and neglect is everywhere and certainly no more prevalent in Mozambique.  But in a world that hurls a series of unrelenting challenges upon an impoverished land to masses of weary people; epidemics, war, natural disasters and economic strife, intentional inflicted pain on children screams out degradation so low, so base, there is no human response but to collapse inwardly, disconsolate and crestfallen. 

I struggle to feel compassion and forgiveness to the adults who caused this to happen and to those who were silent and immobile witnesses.   Like the children they too are starving.  It is not their bodies that exhibit the signs but their souls.