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Ten
Eric
Iturn around whena young girl comes running up to me waving something in the air. “Dak! Dak! Look, I lost a tooth!”
I chuckle. “That’s great, Zola.” I’ve been here three months now and have begun to learn the people’s names, especially the children who come and go. There are no real rules here, as long as they stay in the front part of the infirmary and not back where the sick people are. “Does the tooth fairy visit here?” I immediately regret the question because if she doesn’t, I’m going to have to explain how American children get money for lost teeth and obviously, these people don’t have money to randomly hand out to their children for such silly things.
“What’s a fairy?” she asks.
“So, what are you gonna do with the tooth?” I ask in deflection.
“Well, it’s from here”—she points to where the top front bicuspid is missing—“so we will throw it on the roof after supper!”
This confuses me, but I just smile. “Why?”
“It for good luck, Dak!” she says, giving me a wide toothless smile.
“So you just have a bunch of baby teeth on your roof?”
She furrows her brow as if she’s never thought of that before and then gives me a quick shrug. “I don’t know.”
Another child comes up and taps her shoulder, and she links hands with him and skips off in her pink dress.
“So cute and innocent,” Jack says, chuckling as we watch the children skip away.
“Yes, they are,” I agree.
He turns wise blue eyes to me. “Do you have kids?”
I shake my head. “Nope.”
“Don’t want ’em?” he asks.
“I’m not sure. Just never had the time.” And it’s kind of hard to get someone pregnant from prison. I keep that part to myself, of course. The doc knows about my past, but it makes people uncomfortable to talk about it. And by people, I mean mostly me.
“Let me show you something,” he says, and he leads me through the infirmary in this makeshift hospital that’s nothing more than a glorified tent with a straw roof and canvas sheets for walls. The doc has managed to set up departments, though. Children, elderly, the infectious, and then random other illnesses that may not be contagious, but still require monitoring. I had asked him where the maternity section was, because I’d never delivered a baby and was nervous about having to do it, but he simply told me the women give birth at home and only need doctors if there’s a problem with the mother or baby. “They want no part of men being involved in their birthing process,” he’d told me. “Probably better that way,” he added. I didn’t bother to ask if they ever required pain medication, because I learned on my first day how scarce it is, and to suggest it be “wasted” on childbirth would probably earn me a laugh.
We stop at the pediatric section. There are about a dozen children lying on cots. Some are sleeping, some are sitting up with books. There are a couple hooked up to IVs. One nurse I’ve already met, Amari, a native of the area, makes rounds, checking on them. The doc has mainly kept me in the front for triage and emergencies, but occasionally I’m called to do some light PT. Like the boy who broke his ankle. I didn’t have any other orthopedic patients, so the young man is going to make a full recovery with that ankle because I kept on top of his physical therapy and he promised he was doing the exercises at home.
“Do you want to start working back here, Eric?” he asks.
I feel intimidated, but I also want to learn new things. “Sure, Doc. What would you need me to do?”
“Just help Amari. She can do most everything, but sometimes we require extra hands back here.”
“Okay,” I say. “I can do that.” I turn to him, “Do you want me to stay back here or just make rounds?”
“Just make rounds every hour or so. Amari mostly has it covered from seven to seven, and then another nurse comes in at night.”
I fold my arms across my blue scrubs and look down at my dirty Nikes. The women in the village wash our clothes for us, but these shoes are never going to be clean. I don’t even care. “Sounds good. I’ll hit you up if I have questions.”
He pats me on the shoulder in his fatherly way and smiles. “Thanks, Eric.”
