TIA

Life seems unfair for some people. On Wednesday, Melissa came back from her internship at the pre-school bawling. Distraught, she sputtered the story out through fits of tears and snuffles. She was angry.

She told us about a twelve year old boy who was hit by a taxi driver while walking to the school. He was probably going for lunch, since he was twelve and certainly not in pre-school anymore. But they did have a lunch offered free at the school. Anyway, the boy was hit just down the hill from where everyone was. The boy’s friends encouraged him to get up and walk to the school, but he was bleeding profusely from the head, leg, and stomach. His body was pretty mangled

When they finally made it to the school, Mel became frantic to patch the boy up. She definitely knew what she was doing considering she has worked for years being an EMT, one of those people in the ambulance who saves your life. I could imagine her being calm when it happened and doing a thorough job attending to the wounds. After she was finished, she carried the boy home for two kilometers through Okahandja Park, an informal settlement in Windhoek.

Informal settlements are created because the people cannot afford to live in houses. They simply build their own shacks out of zinc. Most of the people in these settlements come to the cities from rural areas seeking work which remains difficult to find. The unemployment rate in Namibia is estimated to be around forty percent. HIV/AIDS is also much more common among the poorest of the poor. It is estimated that anywhere from twelve to twenty percent of the Namibian population is infected. A good majority of the people probably would not even know if they had it.

Upon arriving at the boy’s shack, Mel was shaking violently. She has battled tough things in her life, including cancer. She made it through somehow, but there has been a problem with her shoulder near her collarbone the past two months. There is some sort of cut that is infected, so she has to constantly cut her own shoulder open and drain the pus and blood that has built up. It is often difficult for her to use her right arm. So I can imagine that carrying the boy for two kilometers was incredibly painful. Not only that, but she had to worry about the boy’s blood getting near her wound which was patched fairly well.

When she finally placed the boy down, the father was wondering what had happened. By this time in the day, about noon, he was already drunk. When he found out that the boy had been hit by a taxi, he kept calling the boy stupid for not moving out of the way. Mel emptied her wallet and urged the father to get the boy to the hospital, which she later suggested was highly unlikely. She was able to scrounge up one hundred Namibian dollars (about ten U.S. dollars) to give to the father. She kept seven dollars and fifty cents for taxi fare to get back to the house where we stay.

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Today, Mel returned to the pre-school for graduation. She found out that the boy had been reported as “missing.” There is no doubt in her mind that he is dead.

She can not help to hate the circumstances that led to this. After she had gotten back to the house, she repeated, “I hate this fucking country.” She was angry with the father who was drunk and who would not take the kid to the hospital. She could not do it herself because she is not the boy’s guardian. She was yelled at by the father to leave. He called her names and degraded her womanhood. Mel could not understand why things were the way they were in this country.

TIA.