George is living in a small, one room house directly across from the clinic. I met him Tuesday, and helped him see the sun for the first time in about two weeks. My entire hand fit around his bicep, as Silivia and I massaged his unused muscles. We walked with him for about 15 feet, with each of us supporting one of his arms. He has HIV and has refused to take ARVs. He looks frighteningly similar to pictures we’ve been shown of holocaust victims. I kneeled on the ground as he looked down towards me. He kept telling me he was a victim – and I kept replying that he was only a victim if he allowed himself to be. That he could fight, and live. He complained about the medications he had to swallow, and I challenged him that I had to inject myself every time I ate. The sky turned purple as we ate guavas and drank coke with him. He kept repeating thank you very much from his blistered and cracked lips. We left his house promising to come back the next day. He was smiling and seemed lifted, and I walked home feeling hopeful and at peace.
Wednesday, we went back to see him before lunch time. Silivia carried green oranges in a plastic, yellow tub. He would not even turn over to see us when we entered. Flies surrounded his face, as Silivia peeled an orange and handed it to him. He told us that he was tired today, and wanted to go to Homa Bay District Hospital. His oldest son came home from primary school and greeted him. George barely lifted his hand to meet his sons. I asked him if he wanted to sit outside for a while, to feel the sun and breeze on his face. He told me he was too tired as SIlivia hoisted his legs up onto a suitcase. I shook the remaining coke from the day before in a plastic cup, trying to get him to drink some. The bubbles fizzed up and tickled my hand, while George just stared straight ahead. He took the casing of the orange out of his mouth and placed it on the table – looking so similar to his own shriveled skin. We walked out shortly after we had come. A white curtain that was serving as the door billowed in the wind, and kept all problems and life trapped inside the house.
We returned to the school, and I sat on a blue, dilapidated bench on the stoop of the clinic while people tried to tell me that life is hard. Apparently the anger that was burning holes into my stomach was presenting as sadness – but really I guess those two feelings are as connected and overlapping as the barbed wire that serves as fencing here. You cannot make someone who wants to die live, no matter how full of food and drugs you pump them. I’m angry that he feels like he has nothing to live for, that there’s nothing he wants to recover to see. His entire family has already decided he will die, and are now just waiting for the life to drain from this man, the way that water does from a plastic bag.
I shared with SIlivia that I wanted to start visiting other people like George Wednesday night, and do home based care. Someone made a card before I left that says, ‘travel light, live light, spread the light, be the light,’ which I have laying on my desk here. I get the most joy from spreading light to other people – from making someone an excessively decadent birthday cake, from taping 78 pennies to a card for my grandfather’s birthday, from helping a man that the community here is afraid to touch walk 100 steps. I like witnessing the light in places that society has deemed dark. For me those places are when I find the brightest lights of all. Maybe that’s what I came to Kenya to really find and tell people about – light.
I sat on a desk in one of the classrooms on Sunday as the sun went down. The boarders were busy doing their homework and asking me if I knew how to draw graphs. I lifted Chagos onto my shoulders as another kid told me that the man I had helped carry had died yesterday afternoon. He told me like he was telling me what color the sky was. I walked over to the edge of Abba and looked at the wooden door to his house that was closed. Chagos was laughing and kicking his small legs against my chest as he put his hands on my forehead. I was angry and sorry that the light from the rest of the World couldn’t keep this man’s illuminated – burning, and how normal and expected it was for someone’s light to be extinguished here.
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