still frames and memories

The problem with the last few days is that they've been so busy that I haven't written. I've been crawling into bed every night, already dreading the alarm that will wake me in the morning, and there just hasn't been time to stop and write. Which is why it's so unfortunate that so much has happened; I don't know how to share it and make it all make sense without writing forever. I don't know where to start now.

Do I start with Vincent, the patient from last year in Benin who we found waiting here at the port gates in Togo? He'd been living on the streets for days, waiting for the ship to come because his trouble was getting worse again. Do I tell you how, once the wards were finally set up, we brought him into one of the empty rooms only to discover that the cancer in his hand had spread up his arm, that his eyes were squeezed tight shut while we prayed for him? Do I try to explain how he, inexplicably, left to go back home with a smile and a wave, claiming that we had done enough for him. Done enough by telling him that we can't help and that, short of a miracle, this will kill him. But, by all means, please come back in a week or two and we'll let you know if we can amputate more of your hand.

Or do I start with the time when five of my best friends and I headed out in the gathering dusk to search for a place that sold cold drinks. How we walked into a concrete-walled room, sat in mismatched chairs and declared that we thought the place was lovely, simply because their menus were laminated and there was a single fan hanging from the ceiling, pushing around the thick air. Will it mean anything to you when I tell you that, all at once, the lights went out and we went on without missing a beat, the near-dark from the windows more than enough light to talk by? That, somewhere, somehow, I've become accustomed to life in the third world and have already started dreading the leaving of it.

Maybe I should start with this morning, when I headed up from the dock to find a little group of mamas and babies huddled in the shade of the gangway. Cleft lips and tumors and little bowed legs waiting for everything to change. I could tell you how I saw them take their hope in their hands and climb the stairs, heading for the hospital where x-rays and CT scans would determine their futures. But if I started there I'd also have to tell you about little Felix and his brother Pascal, the two cutest boys I've seen in a long while (HoJ excluded, of course). I'd have to tell you how Pascal screamed, burrowing into my arms when his mama left him to take Felix into the x-ray room. How Felix's screams echoed his brother's through the door, and how the light fell from that mama's eyes when I told her that Felix wasn't going to be scheduled for surgery. His trouble wasn't bad enough; we'll probably see worse, so we have to keep the books open for them. How Felix put up his arms for me to carry him back down the gangway, back into the hot sun to begin the long walk home on his little crooked legs.

I could start with the French. With the way I've been called upon to translate by so many people who don't know I really don't know French. And how, despite that, I've been able to speak the words I'm called on to speak. How I've gone back into my Bible, poring over the passages about the gift of tongues and trying to figure out if this isn't actually what they meant, this speaking out in language I don't know. I could tell you how a surgeon called to me in the hallway outside the x-ray room and asked me to tell his patient about his findings, how I started to say I couldn't and ended up explaining it all to the patient, who nodded gravely and told me she understood, repeating it all back to me with much better grammar.

But none of those stories is the right place to start. None of them fit together, make any sense next to each other. I can't weave this narrative in the way I'm used to doing; I feel disjointed. But I think that's what my life is right now. Just a bunch of stories. Still frames and memories, collected up and stored away like precious keepsakes. These are the stories I'll tell in years to come when I'm living somewhere far from here, somewhere with reliable electricity and hospitals.

And by then it won't matter where I start, because the beginning can be anywhere when the story has already been told.