Calloused Hearts or Just Feet?

The sunset that evening sank into the dusty earth as if in a trance. Just a yellow orb leaving only a tiny trail of pink...it was like a sticky yellow ball flung onto a wall of light blue and slowly sliding into the night with no dying breath or comment. How jipped I felt!

In the early hours before dawn of that same day, Sarah, another nurse, and I had lost a small baby boy to death. His small body was already too weak to live when the parents had finally brought him to the hospital as a last resort. His small round belly had the markings of local healing. That is, he had scars on either side of his stomach where the parents had tried to bleed the evil out. It hadn't helped.

His bone thin extremities barely moved, and his eyes stared up at me in an empty gaze. I lead his parents down the dark hospital hallway, holding his infusion of quinine and glucose high as if it would light my step. I remember thinking I should put him in a bed where the least amount of kids had died. Maybe that would help. It hadn't.

Some people have made light of death of small children at Béré Hospital. It makes continuing with life easier if they laugh about it- saying the parents have eight other kids to worry about. They'll just have another kid to make up for that one. Some have even gone so far as to say that the villagers don't feel much human pain or loss. How unfair that is!

It you could only see the way a worried grandmother looked over her small granddaughter. I watched the shriveled brown fingers of the grandmother's hand gently caress the baby's forehead. Then the grandmother hunched forward as if in extreme pain. I thought she was going to let out a wail for a second, but she just put her head in her hands silently. And people have suggested they don't feel pain?

It is true that most of the dark eyed women here are forced into marriage at an absurd early age. Even before their breasts are fully developed, they are soon sagging after only five years. They are uneducated about sanitation and mud-hut keeping, and trained to cower beneath their old decrepit husbands who already have four other wives.

However, I believe their hearts are calloused (if I should apply such a term) out of necessity of survival...like their mud-soiled feet, yet their motherhood (or fatherhood) seems to bring about a softening of that guarded heart. I guess I can explain it as the kind of life that keeps their feet tough and their brown faces smiling.

Today, for example, I observed an old man squish his face like a contorted raisin with whiskers, (he had extreme pain from his toe amputation,) then in the next second, he stuck out his hand grinning from ear to ear to greet me. Amazing!

I think maybe they have naturally discovered this Buddha thought that "the secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, or not to anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly." Or perhaps Buddha arrived at such a conclusion from watching civilizations similar to Béré?

With their loads piled high on their heads, (the women anyway), and life shooting out of every sandy crevice throughout the village, the people keep laughing. No time is spent on burial...for life is alive and kicking around the corner. It is not their heartlessness or lack of pain that keeps them going each day. It is wisdom!

Becky Jarnes