Various Morbid Musings (read at own risk)

I’m lying on my bed looking up at the ceiling. My eyes are not blinking. They are not blinking in order to allow the tears to flow more freely from my eyes on to my hands cupped over my ears. These hands, the only thing between my ears and the noises of something dying in the night, forgotten, ignored. Like so many things in this country, it is dying or crying in pain and hunger. I think it is a dog but I really couldn’t guess for sure, I’m trying not to hear it. But I can’t not hear it and it will only be worse when it stops. For some reason this is the last straw in my quest to be unaffected by the things I see every day. The children with the wastes the size of my wrist and the sad eyes and dirty hands pressed up to me as if I was the savior they had been waiting for. There are some things in this world that you cannot, nor should not get used to no matter how often you see it, or hear it, or experience it. Poverty and suffering is one of these things. I thought coming to this placed to help would be better; I thought that volunteering for the cause would make that feeling in my stomach go away. Like when I was travelling as a student, I thought to myself how useless it was to be learning all these things when outside people were dying. I thought coming instead to work in the field would be easier. But it’s so much worse. You see more; hear more than any sane person can really take. You listen to a 13 year old who lives in a trash pile behind your office explain how his parents died from aids two years ago and last mouth the funding ran out on the program that was paying for his tuition and now he has nothing, can I pay for his tuition? Someone much colder than me told me he must be lying. I asked them why that would possibly matter. Like this boy is running some major scam, living in trash for two months, not eating, really getting into character just to politely ask for my help. And every day there are just more and more people suffering and how could I possibly think I could help them? It’s not that I’m not doing anything worthwhile; I really think that I am. I’m planning a youth outreach next month on HIV prevention and its going pretty well. It’s just that you can’t avoid being affected by the 12 year old prostitutes with their children and the women with bruises on their faces from their husband’s fists and the men all out of work lying in the street with nothing better to do than take drugs. The dog in the street has stopped crying and I take my hands from my ears. All that fills the air now is a tragic silence; somehow this silence seems much louder than the noise. The thick, oppressive air vibrates slightly, usually a sign it’s about to rain, but the sky is clear, and the infinite specks of light shine down on the roofs of Mombasa.