Garden of Eden (2 page)

Ahead of her is the new administration building. Until two weeks earlier it had been a tent. Glad as she and all the other workers are for its concrete floor and corrugated iron roof, she can’t look at it without an uneasy feeling that something isn’t right here. Shouldn’t they be scaling down their presence with the intention of leaving soon, instead of consolidating it? This is somebody else’s country after all, and they can’t stay here forever feeding the hungry. Sooner or later, surely, the hungry have to find a way to feed themselves.

But whenever she thinks this she has only to do as she is now: look out across the field to the hundreds of starving coming down out of the mountains and across the plain toward the camp, or pause to listen to the pained coughing of the pneumonia cases who will die without the NGO’s drugs, to the whimpering children with their swollen, empty stomachs, the dazed adults with their cupped hands held out imploringly to the workers, or go to the feeding tent or hospital where the severest cases of kwashiorkor are, and marasmus — the skeleton-people. Her misgivings don’t exactly go away. Instead, they’re dissolved in the desperate need of the moment, and she and all the others, dampening their anger, muttering occasionally to one another about the failures of government, or the utter stupidity of war, have to leave — what choice do they have — long-term solutions to Others, whoever they may be.

Off to her right is the tent city where those already registered and healthy enough to look after themselves have settled in to stay until — when? she wonders, watching the thin plumes of smoke from cooking fires beginning to curl into the pale sky. Until the crops grow again, she supposes. People have begun calling back and forth to each other, babies are crying, and somewhere in the rows of makeshift shelters, a woman’s voice rises abruptly, breaking the early morning’s drowsiness with a wild, keening cry. The sound, sudden as
it is, makes the small hairs on the back of Lannie’s neck prickle. A child? she wonders, a husband? One cry, then silence. Soon that body, together with all the night’s dead, will be carried across the camp to be laid out and prepared for burial in the field where the gravediggers will by now have begun work. And every day the number of mounds, the pits beneath which each hold as many as twenty carefully arranged bodies, grows. Yesterday alone nearly a hundred died.

She’s the first of the staff to arrive, she usually is, but already people are milling about or squatting quietly on the ground outside the door, waiting for the centre to open so they can register, be sorted out: the sick to the hospital, the hungriest to the feeding tents, the others to the segregation area where they’ll stay until the staff determines their needs. She glances to her left, to the hospital building behind administration, and sees the doctor, Habte Mika’el, mounting the steps. He waves peremptorily to her, then goes inside. The hours he puts in humble her. She’s only a few feet from her destination now, and tenses herself for the onslaught she has learned to expect.

“Selam
,” she says, without actually looking at the people rushing to surround her, and then,
“Tena yistillin
.” Most of them are women and children. They are wrapped in ragged cloths and garments, torn now, and dirty from their days of walking through the dusty countryside. They press toward her, hands held out, would crush her against the building but Dawit comes hurrying up, towering over them.

“Tena yistillin
,” he says to Lannie, giving her a quick bow.

“Good morning,” she replies, smiling, too shy to reply in Amharic. Every time she sees him she can’t help marvelling at his dark-eyed, fine-boned beauty, at how beautiful Ethiopians often are. In Amharic, loud and firm, he commands the people back, and humbly, not taking their eyes off him, they make room so that he can unlock the door. He and Lannie enter, Lannie shivering at the night’s accumulated chill inside. They arrange the table and chairs, unlock the cupboard and take out the registration forms, papers, and pens, and set them out in preparation for the arrival of the rest of the admissions team. When she looks up out the open door Lannie sees Caroline, Lucy, and Maggie, the image washed in sunlight, coming
quickly across the field, hurrying so as not to be late for the meeting with which the nurses’ day always begins.

Beyond the eerie silence of the crowd outside the door she hears the cheerful voices of the women from the nearby town who work in the camp, as they pass by on their way to the feeding shelters. One of them, Almaz, wearing a dusty blue cotton skirt, a light wool sweater with a white cotton
shamma
over her head and shoulders, stops in the doorway to greet them. She blots out the light and her features disappear in shadow. To Lannie she says a careful “good mor-ning,” and bows gravely, her head a flash of white, before she goes on her way.

The camp is fully awake now. Back at the feeding tent Almaz and the others will soon be bustling around, preparing the first batch of high-energy milk — proportions of dried skim milk, sugar, oil, mixed with water. And the
faffa
too, a hot porridge. Lannie could do it in her sleep. The day will be over before she knows it, and she’s grateful, almost cheerful, for the fact of its busyness. Unexpectedly, Caroline comes hurrying in, smoothing her pale brown hair back from her face and extracting keys from her pocket with the other hand.

“Have you looked out there?” she asks. “I couldn’t waste time in a meeting when I saw that crowd. And there’s hundreds more coming.” She unlocks her medicine cabinet and begins quickly laying out her measles vaccines and syringes. They’ve had one outbreak here, they don’t want another. Other camps have had cholera; it is their greatest fear here — that and the government with their ready supply of functioning trucks refusing to use them to transport tents, blankets, medicines, and grain, or the army, arrogant as always and in the midst of their civil war against the Tigrayans, running rampant over them for no particular reason.

“Ready?” she asks Dawit, who nods, and then Lannie, who nods too, checking over her shoulder at the two Ethiopian women, strangers to her, and the man, Teodoris, who stand in readiness at the scale.

“Ready,” she says, and allows herself now, when it’s necessary, to look at the crowd in front of them. It has doubled in size in the fifteen minutes since she arrived and she sees that today will be at least another five-hundred-person admission day. Already the camp
facilities are stretched to the limit. If another load of tents doesn’t arrive soon, the newcomers will have to live in the open. Which means more pneumonia, more deaths from the nights which at this altitude are very cold.

She and Dawit move out into the crowd, urging and pushing them into a semblance of a line instead of a pressing, undisciplined gang. Too weak to stand for long, many of them sit down and wait quietly, the expressions on their faces unreadable. Her job now is to assist Dawit who will search the seated crowd for the sickest and take them out to be looked after immediately. Off to the edge of the crowd a young man squats beside an old man — at least he looks old — who lies on a rag in the dirt. She watches him for a moment and her heart sinks. This is triage. Behind her, as if to confirm her judgement, Dawit says, “No. It is too late. No food.” She turns to him, touches his arm lightly with her fingertips. He does not look at her, walks quickly away.

Dawit is speaking Amharic to the first family in the line, a woman and her two, shivering, half-naked children, one of whom lies on a bundle of rags on the ground, her head on her mother’s lap. She’s in an advanced stage of starvation, barely conscious. As Dawit translates the mother’s answers to Caroline’s questions, Lannie is there, ready to carry the weakest child to the scale, or to take the other by his hand to lead him wherever Caroline decrees he should go.

As she moves toward them, the woman opens her
shamma
and reveals a tiny infant nestled against her withered chest. Her expression doesn’t change as she looks down at her skeletal baby. Dawit, alarmed, snaps a question in Amharic to the mother as Lannie automatically reaches out to take the infant. The woman ignores Dawit, resists Lannie’s gesture for a moment, then lets Lannie take the child. As soon as she touches it, Lannie realizes it is dead.

At such moments, she relies on Caroline. Caroline has spent her life in the Third World. Over and over again she’s refused administrative jobs that would have taken her away from the front lines. Nothing surprises her, no emergency is too much for her.

“Over there!” Caroline snaps, the brusqueness of her voice is like a small jolt of electricity. Numbly, Lannie carrying the dead infant
follows her pointing finger to where one of the Ethiopian women workers wraps the body gently in an admissions blanket so she’ll be covered — for dignity? so others won’t see? — as Lannie carries her to the laying-out tent. When the mother has been questioned and she and her living children tended to, if she wishes to see her dead baby again, someone will take her there. Lannie is sure the woman will not want to see the baby again.

The morning passes in a steady round of lifting, carrying, supporting, and sometimes leading children or their weakened mothers to the hospital or the feeding shelters. In between these trips, she carries messages from Caroline to the doctor, or to other nurses. Each time she returns the crowd of waiting people does not appear to have diminished.

At noon, instead of going back to the mud house she shares with the others, even knowing Caroline will scold her —
You have to keep up your strength, you’ll get ill if you don’t eat, then you’re no good to anybody
— she skips lunch to sit with Mariam in the feeding tent.

Often, holding her Oxfam cup to the little girl’s lips to make sure she drinks every drop, Lannie is reminded of being allowed to hold her baby sister Misty, when she was a little girl herself. The memory makes her want to cradle Mariam more firmly, rocking her, burying her nose in the child’s freshly shaved, prickly scalp. Even though she’s ashamed of using Mariam to fill a hole in her own life, Lannie still spends every spare second by the child’s side.

Yesterday Mariam pulled the cup out of Lannie’s hand to hold it herself. Seeing this, Belainesh, the social worker, said to Lannie, “I am trying to find her family, if she has any left.” If Belainesh can find an adult from Mariam’s village, she will send her home with that person. If not, Mariam will have to go to stay with the nuns who will try to find her a home. It is inconceivable to Lannie that no one would want her. She has toyed with the idea of raising her herself, but knows no one would allow it. She would have to kidnap her.

When she arrives at the feeding tent, Lannie scans the crowd of women and children squeezed into the small shelter for Mariam’s
bright little face, but can’t see her anywhere. Almaz, who is helping dish out the
faffa,
says to Lannie in a sympathetic voice, “Some people from her village took her.”

“Home?” Lannie asks, hearing the faint quaver in her own voice. She notices, in the instant she waits for Almaz’s reply, that the woman who had the dead baby at her breast early this morning is sitting on the ground in the corner of the enclosure, not bothering to bat away the flies resting on her cheeks and forehead, the food on her dish untouched, the skinny woman next to her reaching furtively for it. Her other children aren’t with her. Almaz, following her eyes, says in an undertone, “The second one died an hour ago. She brought her too late to save her. The other is in the hospital. Dr. Habte says he will die too. She refuses to sit with him.”

“Who will look after her when she gets there?” Lannie asks, meaning Mariam, as if Almaz hasn’t just told her about the woman sitting in listless silence in the midst of the hum of voices from all the people packed into the shelter.

“They say she has an aunt there. Belainesh says we must get her back to her home.” Moving away, she has to raise her voice over the buzz of voices, of children crying out.

Blinking, Lannie turns away, stepping over people and squeezing between them. At the entrance, she bumps hard into a male body. Each of them steps to the right and then to the left and then laughing, at least he is, he puts both of his hands on Lannie’s shoulders and says, “Hey, maybe I should put up some traffic lights here.” She recognizes him as the engineer who built the admissions building. He’s a true redhead, she can’t help but notice again. How strange we must look to everyone here; maybe they think we’re brother and sister. This whips through her mind as the heat from his hands penetrates her shoulders and spreads, causing an unexpected, answering flush in her abdomen. It’s a long time since a man has touched her. She’s about to pull away when he drops his hands.

“Rob Sargent,” he tells her. “I’m a Canadian.”

“Lannie Stone. Me too,” she responds automatically, smiling, not meeting his eyes. She shakes his hand, still smiling as if she’s glad to meet him.

“Actually we already met,” he tells her.

“What?” she says. Lucy pushes past them carrying a child wrapped in one of their admission blankets. Lannie hadn’t even noticed she was in the feeding shelter. As she passes Lucy mutters, “The hospital is overflowing.” Lannie makes a move as if to take the child from her, nurses are needed everywhere, this is something Lannie can do, but Lucy says, “No, I’m going there anyway. Caroline is going to see if we can send a few patients out so there’s more room.”

“We’d better move,” Lannie says to Rob. Dodging people, they step outside to one side of the entrance, searching for a little shade. Although it’s not terribly hot, the sun is directly overhead and has more power here so close to the equator than it has at home.

“I see I made an impression,” Rob says. He doesn’t seem embarrassed, more curious, almost tender over the fact that she doesn’t remember him.

“I — uh, meet a lot of people,” she says, drawing a line in the hard-packed, red-brown dirt with her toe.

“I’m not supposed to step over that?” he asks, looking down at the line, grinning and looking back up at her. In spite of herself, she laughs.

“I remember you now,” she says, opting for flirtatiousness, then thinking better of it, too late. It had been at one of the many evenings they’d all spent on the terrace of the one bearable café in town. “Much beer.” She tosses her head and looks away to where the column of people are still descending the far slope, all sizes, all ages, the men walking with staffs, the women carrying babies, tramping through the dust toward the camp. She thinks, I’ve got to get back to work, they’ll be swamped at registration. “What are you doing here?” she asks him, then adds hastily, “I know you built the administration building, but I mean, now.”