Amina

Last Friday, I was asked to go to the local clinic to have a malaria test administered for one of our volunteers (it turned out negative, no worries there). When we got to the clinic, I saw a girl that we’ve been working with named Amina and her 3-year-old daughter, Shamin. Amina must be about 19, and has lived on the streets since the age of 12, and we’re pretty sure that Shamin has lived on the streets her whole life. The story is unclear to me, but it’s our understanding that Amina was told to leave her village at the age of 12 to find work in Arusha. When she couldn’t get work, she turned to prostitution. She ended up getting pregnant and giving up her first baby, Rama, to adoption. Shamin is her second child, and now stays with Amina on the streets.

As a fellow volunteer has described, she has the face of a woman that is both young and old at the same time. Soft, young features. A small frame, usually wrapped in a dirty blanket. Yet she has the scars, the wrinkles, the deep set eyes of a woman that’s been through years of pain. OHS has been afraid that both of them are HIV positive for a while, but the moment that I stepped into the clinic, I knew our fears were confirmed. A close friend, Chloe, who has been involved with Amina from the beginning of July, was sitting next to her in tears. In the half an hour that followed in the waiting room, I couldn’t take my eyes off of young Shamin. She’s very intelligent. Extremely perceptive, and has a sense of humor and mischief that often surprises and offers a glimpse of hope that she can have a better future than the one her mother has left for her.

But she won’t.

…watching her in the waiting room, I wanted to mentally capture every moment that she was experiencing. The purgatory that we shared there, in that room, was the beginning of the rest of her life that will be spent waiting. She probably won’t see her 9th birthday. Her eyes were wide with reception, staring at the small TV above that flickered between an informational crocodile program and a mediocre Tanzanian soap opera. Her hands held tight onto the one toy she had brought: a tiny plastic tea cup with pretty pink carnations on either side, smeared with dirt. From time to time, she pretended to drink from it. The thin pink fabric that lay on the table in front of her. Some moments it was her headscarf, some moments a mask that made her disappear from the rest of the waiting, other moments it was forgotten about – draped on the simple wooden table that was void of magazines I am accustomed to in waiting rooms in America. She was unaware of anything but the immediate, with the exception of an intermittent nosebleed.

And as I watched the blood trickle from her nose, her eyes still focused on the screen, I became afraid of it. I knew that the blood I saw was dangerous. Deadly. Chloe quickly fetched a tissue, wiped her face clean. In an instant of horror and uncertainty, I watched as she looked at a drop on her hand, respectably finished her duty, and rushed to the doctor’s office to cleanse her hands. In moments that followed, she would tell me that in that moment, she had forgotten all of her years in HIV training and questioned how the virus could be transmitted. Fluids and doors as they say.

Amina finally came back into the waiting room with new medicine. I promised Chloe that I would stay with her and take Amina & Shamin out for lunch. So we walked out of the clinic. Down a dusty road, scattered with people staring at the two muzungus that would leisurely walk with this street girl and her daughter. Silence. Five minutes into the walk we reached a busier street, and a bicyclist slowly rode by, looking at each one of us. As he passed me, he looked back and casually said in strong English: “Don’t spend your time with her, she’s crazy.” He continued to look back for a few beats, and then rode on his way. The only thing I could process in my head surprisingly came out in swahili, a loose and shaky “hap-ah-na”. No. After the shock of his words dissipated, a certain anger filled me. Who was this man? Did he even know this woman’s condition. Her story? Did he see the 3 year old riding on her back, wrapped in a scarf? Most importantly, why were we, the foreigners! the muzungus! the one’s walking with her? why wasn’t he? But that raises an entirely separate issue that some have written books on. It’s the white man’s burden to come and help the needy in Tanzania, right?

He rode away. I forgot about it. And the four of us walked to a dusty wooden building that serves as a food stall and shelter from the sun. We ate in silence, the language barrier saving us from the awkward conversation that we would have had to make if we were from the same place. And I didn’t know what to think. These were the first people that I knowingly sat down with, ate with, that are HIV positive. But I don’t think I grasp the weight of those words. I don’t understand the life that Shamin is about to grown into. I don’t understand the pain the Amina will start experiencing. I don’t understand that I am writing this in a sleeping bag, and that they are out on the streets, infected and moving one cold night closer to their expiration. But I understand that she’s not crazy, I understand how offended I was when the bicyclist said what he did, and I understand why he would. I don’t know how we should help, or if we can. And lastly, I don’t know how to end this entry. But I will tell you that after we ate, after their stomachs became less empty, we parted ways and Amina gave me a very warm smile. I’ll remember that for a good while.

To be continued.