Two Years of Wonder - A Memoir

Chapter 4: Orphans, Spider Man, & Mission Hospitals

I am not alone, of course, at the orphanage, accompanied as I am by a number of well-intentioned foreign volunteers. For one particular month when the children are out of school the need for volunteers is intense. So I am joined, among others, by a team of six Canadian college students, all women, who have already acclimated to living in Kenya after spending a semester traveling to the national parks in a massive Land Rover and taking courses on ecology, biology, international law, and economics at night, in their makeshift camps, from their guides, who when they are not traveling are professors back in Canada. Aside from being amazing with the children, they are great company to hang out with, play board games, and watch movies. One night we compete to see who can clip the most clothespins to their face. The winner, Ainsley, displays an amazing ability to endure a total of twelve pins pinched onto her cheeks, ears, nostrils, lips, and eyelids.

There is Helen with whom I teach preschool. Helen is from the UK. She is soft spoken, gentle, and consistent with the children—basically the opposite of me, so she is a good teacher. She is constantly finding ways to make art projects from bottles, egg cartons, toilet paper rolls, and cereal boxes. She also has a prescient way of always being right about what the kids will want to do next, leading me to coin the unofficial Rainbow Children's Home rule, meant with full sincerity, "Helen is always right."

Melissa is a volunteer from my church back home in Northern Virginia. She is a school teacher and makes me realize that even I need practice at long division. One night I get the losing end of a deal with Melissa. The children had just finished watching a movie in the schoolhouse and Rachel, a new girl still adjusting to the diet and medications of the orphanage, has a case of explosive diarrhea in the schoolhouse bathroom. Melissa asks me if I'd like to take Rachel to her cottage and clean her up or if I would be willing to clean the bathroom. Without seeing the bathroom I agree to clean it, feeling that it would be more appropriate for Melissa to strip Rachel down and stick her in the shower.

There is a scene in the Eddie Murphy movie, Daddy Daycare, wherein Eddie Murphy, having set up his own daycare must confront a similar situation in his own bathroom. As the audience, we never see the actual damage to the bathroom, instead the camera fixes on Murphy's face as he looks in, capturing his reaction to the carnage. His eyes examine the toilet, the walls, and even the scatologically-stained ceiling.

I can assure you such things are not just in the movies. While the ceiling was spared, the rest of the bathroom looked like a trichromatic Jackson Pollack painting. I cannot even enter, the best I can do is haul in the garden hose and spray down the entire room from outside.

For those readers expecting page after page of unmitigated tragedy, I can promise some relief, as it is impossible to have one hundred children living in one place without having ridiculous shenanigans.

Most amusing to me is the children's tendency to personify everything. A toilet is not backed up and gurgling, it is talking. My shirt is not faded and tattered, it's tired. When the soles begin detaching from my shoes, leaving them to flop beneath my toes, my shoes are not ruined, or old, they are just smiling. The creative language does not end there, neither does their directness. After considering my acne for a few moments and mistaking my pimples for mosquito bites, Josephine, a ten-year-old says to me, "Ted you would be much more handsomer if the mosquitos would stop kissing your face."

One Saturday we take the kids to see Spiderman in a theater where the management wanted to provide a treat. We have the theater to ourselves. I sit in back letting the kids sit as close or far from the screen as they want. During the scene when Toby McGuire bursts into the frame chasing after his school bus around eighty children turn around simultaneously and say, "Ted, it's you!" To clarify, no one in my entire life has ever mistaken me for Toby McGuire but just as whites are accused of acting as if all black people look the same, the reverse might also be said of Kenyans, or at least these children. No matter the differences I see between me and Toby, to the children, with my lean frame and glasses, I'm a dead ringer for Peter Parker—even though his face is blessedly free of acne.

For the following years that I know the children they often refer to me as Peter Parker. It is one of my nicknames in addition to Ted D. Bear and Ted Ushumari (the Kiswahili word for nail since my last name, Neill, sounds similar). I lose count of the children who want to examine my wrists to see where the web comes out and/or fold down my middle two fingers and back away, expecting webbing to issue forth.

Harry Potter is a close second to Peter Parker when it comes to my aliases. One of my favorite memories is taking some of the boys from Cottages Red to see Chamber of Secrets and watching them lean forward in their seats as Ron's family car comes roaring to Harry's bedroom window, levitating in the air. The boys were enraptured and amazed and I've never been more convinced of the magic of the big screen. After that, the children regularly check my forehead for a lightning bolt-shaped scar.

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I am in a field hospital in Mesano, in the far west of the country, where HIV rates are the highest. I am accompanying the doctor—an American missionary—on rounds. I see things that will haunt my dreams the rest of my life. A woman with an infected C-section incision that is yellow and purulent, another woman with AIDS whose chicken pox has advanced to the state that massive sections of her flesh have turned to festering sores. She looks as if she has been flayed. Another man lies in a bed reduced to nothing but a skeleton, a figure of death, prone on an altar of white with a gaping mouth, pleading eyes, and a death rattle.

But by far the case that strikes me the most is the story of an eleven-year-old girl. She is sitting alone in the children's ward, nothing beside her except a plastic cup. She sits with her feet hanging off the side of the bed, her hands folded in her lap. Her shoulders are folded inward, her head down. The doctor explains to me that she is HIV positive and from Mombasa, on the country's east coast. Her parents are dead; her relatives, tired of taking care of her, and convinced her case was hopeless, bought her a one-way ticket to the far side of the country to be rid of her.

Now she sits waiting to die in a hospital ward where she knows no one. To even contemplate her plight gives me an ill feeling in my gut—and yet I'm all too aware that I am the observer here, a voyeur to suffering I could never imagine and have avoided by sheer, unfair, dumb luck and a level of privilege that is utterly unmerited and, on some level, built upon centuries of exploitation of millions of black and brown bodies like hers. If she were a middle-class eleven-year-old where I come from, likely she would be entering seventh grade. She'd be consumed with her friends, pop stars, and fluorescent head bands and charm bracelets. Maybe there would be a boy she had a crush on, maybe two. Maybe some would even have crushes on her, her emaciated face shows signs of high cheekbones and clear, light eyes, and long lashes.

But none of those things will be for her. Instead she is here, in an alien part of the country, with no one but strangers to keep her company while she dies.