CHAPTER TWELVE
The gates opened as if in anticipation of our arrival around four forty-five in the morning, the sun had yet to rise and I found myself begging its return. The night I once found unbelievably peaceful and beautiful now felt unbearably dark, as if a decided lack of hope had enveloped us. As we passed, Kate and Mercy were on the other side, closing us in and running our direction. Dingane tore through and stopped abruptly, close to the schoolhouse, his headlights lighting up the baobab tree as we passed.
He ran to my side and took the little boy from my arms, running him inside. I gathered one of the girls, who’d grown unconscious during the ride back to Masego, and carried her behind him. He passed me again after dropping off the boy and gathered the remaining girl in the front.
Charles and Solomon were carrying those who could not walk on their own and within a minute we were all inside, hovering over children.
“Sophie, grab that bag for me!” Karina ordered, pointing to a bag on the creaky wood floor.
I brought it to her and opened it up. She was working on the first girl Dingane and I had helped, the one riddled with holes in the chest. She was unconscious. Karina stood quickly and ran to a drawer of a metal cabinet she had rolled into the room. Makeshift cots dotted the entire room and each bed was filled with a bleeding child.
She returned, ripping open a paper and plastic envelope carrying an IV.
“I’ll need your help removing the shrapnel,” Karina said dryly.
I looked behind me to see who she was talking to but there was no one there, everyone else was busy over the beds of one of the children. I looked back and saw her eyes trained on me.
“I can’t,” I told her.
“Wash your hands with Hibiclens. There’s a station set up there,” she said, gesturing to a corner of the room.
The room was awash in candlelight since there wasn’t any electricity and I could barely see a thing. They need a generator for these situations!
“Shouldn’t Charles help you with this? He’s trained!” I was panicking.
“He’s with another child, Sophie. It will be fine. Trust me. She’s bleeding out as we speak though.”
I ran to the corner and washed my hands, one of the older orphans there stood next to me, ready to rinse for me into the awaiting bowl. She handed me a box of older-looking latex gloves and I took two, putting them on as I walked back to Karina’s side.
“What do I do?”
“Spread this wound open for me. I can’t seem to reach the metal inside.”
Oh my God. Oh my God.
I leaned over the girl and reluctantly pulled the wound as wide as I could. Karina’s tweezers were ready and dove in without hesitation, digging back and forth, making me cringe. She pulled out a large piece of sharp metal and it clinked into a porcelain bowl on a small table beside the bed. One by one she removed the metal embedded in the girl’s tiny chest.
“There’s one more.” She pointed to another deep wound near the heart.
“What if it’s too deep?”
“Spread the wound.”
I obeyed and almost had to avert my eyes at the blood gushing but held my ground. After what seemed like forever, Karina fished out a small but substantial piece of metal and it clinked audibly next to the other shrapnel.
Karina worked steadily, stitching each wound, as I cut strips of clean gauze and readied the iodine solution. She poured the solution over the stitches, covered them all with an antibacterial ointment and we placed the gauze over each one, finally wrapping the girl’s frame similarly to how Dingane and I had at the village.
When we were done, Karina gave her a renewed dose of sleeping meds through her IV and I stood, removed my bloody gloves, tossed them in a bin and walked into the night air. The sun wouldn’t show its face for at least another hour. I begged for it to rise, to renew the day, to erase the night. The screams would live in my subconscious for the rest of my life.
Sweat poured from my face and neck and drenched my shirt; it clung to my body. The panicked adrenaline was leaving in droves and my hands were shaking with the release.
I heard footsteps on the wood creak behind me. I turned to find Dingane, his white linen shirt had three buttons unbuttoned near his collar instead of his standard two and his usual carefully rolled sleeves were in disarray.
“How is she?” he asked about our little girl.
“She’s fine.” I paused. “I don’t really know. I didn’t ask. I don’t want to know.”
Dingane leaned against one of the wood posts holding up the aluminum awning and nodded.
“How often does this happen?” I asked him, staring at the dark outline of the baobab tree.
“Too often.”
“Why can they not be stopped?”
“They are illusive and they get protection from Northern Sudan.”
“Why?”
“Who knows. They’re evil?”
“Without a doubt.” I looked behind me into the schoolhouse. “How are the others?”
“I believe there will be no more death tonight,” he said solemnly.
I exhaled the breath I didn’t know I’d been holding and quiet tears began to fall. “I’m so sorry for them.”
Before the last word had even escaped my lips, the orphans in their beds above the kitchen, the original fifty-nine, began chanting their beautiful traditional songs and this made the tears fall even harder. I had no idea what they were singing, but their innocent voices rang throughout the camp and I couldn’t help but take solace in them. I listened for quite some time while the tears streamed.
“I thought they’d be asleep by now. It’s close to six in the morning,” I said, turning to Dingane.
“They couldn’t sleep I’ve been told.”
“Understandable,” I said, looking back up at their windows.
After a few minutes of beautiful song backed by a symphony of singing insects and night animals, I turned back to Dingane. “Why do they do it?”
“Because it brings them joy.”
“And what is there to be joyful about?” I asked honestly, thinking on the images of dead children curled into themselves at the village. Another burst of silent tears streamed down.
“Life, Sophie. They still live. They breathe, they love each other, they find joy in the world around them for no other reason than because they are children. They are resilient. They will always rise above. Always. It is a curious facet of the innocent young.
“If I hadn’t seen it before with my own eyes, I never would have believed it. Cynicism comes with the harshness of the world and only as you get older. I’d give anything to have their inherent happiness.”
Dingane turned toward me and I toward him, leaning on the post beside him. We stared at one another for a moment and a sense of understanding passed between us. I didn’t believe that he’d ever like me, but after the night we’d experienced, I did believe he would be more tolerant of me.
“You two should get some sleep,” Charles said, breaking the trance between Dingane and me.
“You and Karina should sleep. I can stay with them. They’ll sleep as well,” Dingane told him.
“I can help,” I added and Dingane whipped his head toward mine, nodding slightly.
“We’ll cancel classes tomorrow,” Charles said when Karina met his side. “Sophie and Dingane will watch them for a few hours. We can have Ruth and Solomon relieve them after breakfast.”
Karina nodded and both slumped toward their cabin. Dingane sat in the doorway and I followed his example, sitting against the pole opposite him, both our legs spread out before us. I crossed mine at the ankles.
“I’ll check them every few minutes,” he explained.
“I’m glad Karina had sedatives.”
“It’s the last of our supply. I’m not sure how we’ll be able to replenish.”
“You don’t have a regular supplier?” I asked.
Dingane smiled softly sending butterflies in my stomach fluttering, the basic attraction I held for him not being able to be denied despite our current situation. “We don’t have anything like that, though I wish we did.”
I just couldn’t imagine that this very desperate place couldn’t get aid from western civilization.
“Uganda is a forgotten place, isn’t it?”
“Uganda, South Sudan, Kenya, Africa, really.”
“Why?” I asked softly.
“Two reasons. People think this, our predicament, is an exaggeration or they’re in total denial. Pretending it doesn’t exist allows for a light conscience.”
I scoffed at that in disbelief but then thought on it. I’d never really heard of these places save for the occasional TV ad asking/imploring people for aid. I never thought twice about it. Ashamed, I turned my head.
“And the other?” I asked him directly after gathering my guilt.
“They assume someone will take care of it, their governments really, but all they need to do is take the problem into their own hands. Governments are unreliable, corrupt entities. It will only be solved by the hands of many. Thousands of small pebbles, giant splash and all that.”
It was quiet for a moment and the night air was filled with those singing insects again.
“Once, I took this social studies class,” I told him. “In it, we read this story about this woman attacked in an alleyway in New York City.” I shook my head. “I can’t remember the particulars. Anyway, the gist of it was that many people watched the attack from their windows and assumed someone else called the police and the woman died there, waiting for help.”
Dingane lifted his shoulders in acknowledgement, his beautiful, tanned hands lifted as if in explanation.
I remembered the visions of dead children again and turned my head to avoid the humiliation of Dingane seeing the tears fall. I twisted back when he nudged my foot with his.
“It’s not a weakness,” he stated simply, his arms folded tightly against his torso.
“What’s not?” I blubbered, wiping my face with dirty hands.
“Fear, sadness. They’re not weaknesses. They are overpowering, defining emotions. They make you human, Sophie.”
“They are signs of defect,” I told him, reverting back to curt Sophie.
“Says who?”
“Me.”
“Why?”
“Because I — because...”
“Let me guess. Because you are not proud of yourself? Because you despise who you are? Because, if you show these emotions, they acknowledge those thoughts?”
I was deadly silent for five minutes at least. “Yes,” I stated, breaking the absence of sound.
“Do something about it.”
“There’s nothing to do. I’m lost.”
“Bullshit. You don’t really believe that. You want to stick with what’s easy for you. You foresee the amount of work it would take to transform yourself and you’re too frightened to embrace the challenge. Now, that, Sophie Price, is a real weakness.”
Dingane stood and I watched him check each bed, traveling stealthily from one to the other and I hated how right he was.