life stories

Alfred is back.

He came in during the week for a routine post-operative appointment to get the dressing changed on his foot. There's no such thing as home health nursing here in Liberia, so when patients are discharged with complicated bandages, they come back to the ship a couple times a week (sometimes daily) to have our dedicated team do it for them. When Alfred came in, they noticed that something wasn't quite right about his foot. It wasn't healing like they wanted, so the decision was made to readmit him to the hospital. It turns out the decision was a good one; Alfred has osteomyelitis in that foot of his. So he's going to hang out with us for a while while he gets IV antibiotics and dressing changes and love.

I thought both of our faces were going to fall off from grinning when we saw each other the first day he was back in A Ward. We fell back into our pattern of Alfred trying to sweet-talk me and me trying to not get sweet-talked. He's even more comfortable here this time around (if such a thing is even possible). When they were trying to find him to slap a hospital bracelet on him, it took them about half an hour before he was discovered in the x-ray office, looking up photos of people with Proteus Syndrome on the internet. The boy is incorrigible. We spent all day today playing Rummikub and holding the debates for the presidency of Little America (aka the Africa Mercy) and discussing how Alfred is going to go to college in the UK and eventually be the one to find the cure for AIDS. (You heard it here first, kids. When this boy is famous one day, I'll be saying I knew him when!)

This weekend is a holiday weekend for the ship, which means no surgeries on Friday or Monday. That, in turn, means no admissions from Thursday to Sunday. Census has been dwindling and the hospital has been condensed into two wards. Everyone has been getting some time off, and we've all taken a collective deep breath and slowly exhaled as we've finally been able to relax. Since no one had to wake up for work on Friday morning, we all decided to watch a movie on Thursday night. Before heading to the lecture room (an impossibly noisy room with a projector that casts a yellow glow across the entire screen where we eagerly gather to watch movies, lying on the floor propped up against chairs turned on their sides) I stopped by A1 to see my man. His face lit up and he pushed himself into the corner of his bed, patting the now-empty spot and telling me to sit down small. He handed me a plastic bag. Choose any one, he told me, as I peered in to see a Fanta, an orange and an unidentified bag of what may have been Middle Eastern corn chips. Saying no to Alfred's food offerings is, I have come to learn, the height of insult, so I chose the orange. Good, he grinned at me. I already had one anyway.

It was then that he asked me to tell him my life story. You tell me yours, I will tell you mine, was the deal I was offered. I sat there, orange in hand, debating with myself. I started to say no, to ask him if I could come back another day for the sharing of histories. I had friends and laughter and a movie waiting. I was too tired to listen to his drawn-out Liberian English ramblings. I didn't feel like talking about my past. But something stopped me dead in my selfish tracks, so I leaned in close and got comfortable. Who's first?

I started. I told him about growing up in New Jersey, about my family and my summers at the farm. I told him about Johnny and how much I hated God for taking him from us. I told him about running and running and running until I finally turned around and realized I had gotten nowhere except deeper into God's own heart. I told him about praying for Africa and about my summer in Zambia. He laughed at my stories of youth group and he smiled proudly when I got to the part about coming to Liberia. So now I'm here. And we're friends. And that's all.

He asked me if I was finished, and then, as we passed that orange back and forth between us, he shared with me his life. I'm the first person he's ever told, and his story isn't mine to pass on to you. But I think my heart was broken, just there in the corner of A Ward, next to a small boy who has lived more in fourteen years than I ever hope to in the rest of my life.

It was after eleven before I left, but not before I made Alfred a promise. I told him I would pray for him every day, and I plan to. Can you pray too? Pray that healing will come to his body. We still don't know if he will be able to keep his foot, and for a basketball star like Alfred, losing a foot would be a tragedy. But mostly, just pray for his heart. Pray that he would somehow get a finger wedged into the idea of God's love. That he would rip even just a tiny hole in whatever's covering it for him and be blinded with the truth and beauty of it. Pray that he would learn what love is and that he would learn how to love. Because he's one of the most amazing people I've ever met, and his huge heart would be wasted on hate.