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"And I got a headache. And you start to cough and sneeze all the time until your chest hurts. People cry from the headache and the stomachache and the coughing, but nothing helps. And then all of a sudden everything comes loose and you shit and shit and shit."
"Okay," said Aunt Margaret, "I can see that the language barrier is quite selective."
"Shit and shit," said Chinma, "and you can't get away from it and nobody will clean you up. Most of them die in their shit."
"I must ask—are the stools solid or loose?"
"Solid at first," said Chinma, "but then piles and finally watery and then nothing but you still try to push out the nothing because it hurts so bad."
"Severe dysentery," said Aunt Margaret as she typed.
"So blood comes out instead," said Chinma. "It comes out everywhere, and if you didn't shit to death you bleed to death. The ones that die, they bleed a lot."
"But not everybody does?" asked Aunt Margaret.
"I didn't bleed," said Chinma. "The people who don't die of it don't bleed as much." She was typing, and he realized that she might have misunderstood. "But a lot of people die without bleeding at all."
"Very important distinction, thank you," she said. She typed more. "Does it help to stop the bleeding?"
"I don't know. It wouldn't stop."
"No clotting?" she asked.
"What?"
"Didn't the blood dry and form a scab?"
"No," said Chinma.
"Does it gush out or seep out or drip out—"
He had no idea what she was asking. So he waited.
"Does it come out fast? The blood? Lots of it, or just a little at a time."
"Little at a time." He remembered his little sister, the baby. She was covered with blood but nobody could even see where it was coming from. It just came out of her skin in very fine drops.
"When the bleeding starts, you only have a few hours left," said Chinma. He had held the baby and when she died he was covered with her blood.
"But if you aren't going to die, there's no bleeding."
"Sometimes a little bleeding but then it stops," said Chinma. "And a lot of people who don't bleed die anyway."
"Is there anything else?"
"If you don't die, you're very weak. You just lie there. You don't have the strength to get up and go for water. You get really thirsty."
"Can you drink? When someone brings you water?"
"Nobody brought me water."
"What did you do? You must have been horribly dehydrated." Then she corrected herself. "Very thirsty."
Chinma nodded. "I made myself crawl to the river. We aren't supposed to drink from the river because it's dirty and makes you sick, but it's the only water I could reach."
"Why didn't someone bring you water?"
"Everybody was sick," said Chinma. "But after I got water I felt a little better and I brought some back for Mother and the others. They were just getting the fever then, coughing and starting to shit. I went back for water again and again, but then the baby died and Mother screamed at me to go away because I killed her."
