This Christmas

Even now, five months later, there are moments that come to the forefront of my mind, seemingly at random. Friday on my way to work I was thinking about the amount of money we spend on Christmas gifts and having an internal philosophical debate with myself as I stared out the bus window out onto Lake Washington. And suddenly the image of giving an incredibly malnourished child a rotting multivitamin jumped into my brain. I couldn’t see the child in my mind, just my hand handing over the stinky, molded multivitamin at the Sisters of Charity clinic in Cite Soleil. This clinic isn’t a part of NPFS/St. Luke, but our organization is friendly with them and so some of our volunteers go there on weekends to help out. Because we don’t oversee it, there are old, expired medications and even some that have completely gone bad like this particular multivitamin.

In the complete, overwhelming chaos that envelopes those families in the clinic, the volunteers, the clinic as a whole, and the neighborhood, you have no choice but to accept some incredibly difficult circumstances because there is absolutely nothing you can do to change it. Is giving a nutrient-deficient child a rotted multivitamin worse than none at all? It’s a theoretical debate that you can’t afford to have with yourself because there are 50 other families standing in line and you’ve only got an hour left of clinic. Maybe that’s a decision that licensed healthcare providers are trained to make, but almost no one volunteering at the clinic has any professional training. And for that matter, how well are you able to apply your training when literally the only common denominator is the anatomy of the human body? The drugs, bacteria, viruses, genetics, incidence, diet… every possible environmental factor is different. I saw a lot of American doctors coming out of that clinic looking every bit as astounded as I felt.  And those were the doctors who felt ready to jump in to tropical medicine. The experience of attempting to help in that neighborhood is chaotic on a level of magnitude that is unimaginable to anyone who hasn’t lived it firsthand.

Looking back on the experience, what’s even more amazing to me is that I rode home from our morning of volunteering feeling tired, but normal. There was no internal war going on, no shock or stress or depression. We stopped for an errand, got back to the house, ate lunch and showered. Having lived in Haiti for over six months at this point, I was fully immersed in its culture. Were these people poorer than the people I was used to working with? Yes, but not exceptionally. It is an incredible tragedy that there were hundreds of gravely ill children in clinic that day, but with the resources and ability to which we had access, we were helping. You had better believe that if we had multivitamins that weren’t expired we would have been passing those out instead. In that place, at that moment, we were doing everything we could.

The true tragedy of that experience didn’t hit until I was far enough removed from the situation to realize that those illnesses, those deaths in many cases, are due to a lack of will to change the circumstance. Being in Haiti with an ineffective government, extremely limited international trade, and almost no big business, I forgot how powerful we are as a society. We ship millions of tons of products around the world. We regulate billions upon billions of pharmaceuticals, both in access and quality. We climb mountains and dive to the depths of the ocean and attempt to conquer every corner of this Earth. But how is it that we manage to leave these children to starve to death? To die from easily curable disease? To let them live with itchy rashes and bloated bellies, spending their days begging on the street?

And how could it possibly be, that just five months later, I find myself spending hundreds of dollars on Christmas gifts? How could I let myself get so caught up? It disgusts me, but I guess I know why. It’s because there is absolutely no way to reconcile that these two lives could possibly be lived out on the same planet, in consecutive years, by the same person. In order to live in the US and relate to others and excel at my job, I have to ignore enormous parts of last year. To sit through a thirty minute discussion of a No-Show policy, I have to block out what I saw at the hospital in Haiti. Even now, I can’t let myself go through the string of tragedies I witnessed on a daily basis to expand on that last sentence. Because now I live here, in the land of plenty, and the way that we show that we care about each other is to give a gift at Christmas. Which used to be one of my favorite activities by the way; picking out and giving gifts to the people I love.  So in an attempt to reconcile, to bring us closer together no matter how minutely, maybe this year we can all give out one extra gift: a donation to the proverbial child, through any organization of your choice. Because you’re right, any donation you’re able to give won’t end poverty. But it might mean that the next child receiving multivitamins gets to have unexpired ones.