The Empty Shed

Our faithful trustee, Mr. Kabika, passed away just before dawn on Sunday morning. It wasn't a big surprise; I had returned from Mozambique (of which I'll blog later or never) to Senanga on Tuesday evening, and on Friday afternoon, the five staff members of S.D.A.C.S.S. (our cooperative) went in to see him.

It often shocks outsiders when I describe some clinics / hospitals as okay, but again, they are without context. I worked for two years at a clinic that had been built in 1945 and looked as if it had been built in 1845, bombed in 1895, and painted in 1965. By that standard, Senanga's Hospital (1985) is relatively well-off.

However, if you are a person with a pathological fear of medical facilities, Senanga could be home to Walter Reed, Mt. Sinai, and the Mayo Clinic rolled into one and I would somehow find every reason not to enter. I don't know what it is, but I just don't care for hospitals. Maybe it's the dough I hemorrhaged when I was applying for my volunteer position (no health insurance); maybe it was the two years in the Kelongwa Clinic; maybe it's the fact that Zambian hospitals don't have private wards and you get to see 20 or 30 people who are in bad shape surrounded by two or three family members / friends in what looks slightly less organized than a Korean Army M*A*S*H unit. 

But when someone's sick in Zambia and you know them, you usually go see them. I've broken that rule and sent money, food, etc. instead (see above), but when someone's dying, I go. And I knew somehow that Kabika was on his way out; he wasn't young (62), had not had an easy life, and he had developed an ominous cough these past few months. Unfortunately, my gut was right ... his skin was drawn tight to his face, his palsied hands had gone into overdrive, and he had difficulty seeing us. Still, he managed his small smile, pulling his upper lip back over the corner of his upper teeth, clasping our hands, and murmuring "Eni sha, eni sha" [yes, sir] to each of us.

His odd little smile was still on his face when we took him from mortuary refrigerator on Tuesday afternoon and dressed him in his best clothes, a tattered old sport coat and dress pants that he wore each and every Sunday to church (Kabika was a Jehovah's Witness). We then gently placed him in the nondescript coffin that Mr. Munalula had purchased, in which we wrapped Kabika in a blanket; Munalula then nailed the lid shut. The hearse and a number of pickups carried the corpse, the bereaved, and the respectful to a beautiful spot near the Harrington's place that had a breathtaking view of the Barotse Floodplains, and we buried him.

Ever wonder over the name of this blog? Yes, it was a play on the Good Intents blog post "Whites in Shining Armor". Now, I think it means more:

1. White ... well that's a no-brainer. [I hope]
2. Tarnished ... that's easy to understand if you know me personally; I can sometimes be grumpy, irascible, tough, overly-focused on work, etc. I wish I wasn't, but as Popeye says "I yam what I yam."
3. Armor ... a symptom of the years; you shut off or internalize certain emotions as a result of insulating yourself from some of the hard things you see too often. The parade of kids who are underdressed and undernourished. The drunken man whose speech to you is punctuated by spittle. Hollow-cheeked men lying in a third world hospitals who grasp your hand in deep gratitude. The coffins that are three or four feet long outside the mortuary, waiting to be filled. 

Part of it is cultural; men rarely show grief, so I don't. Also, you worry once they start, they might not stop. So the result is tautological: you become armored. The armor ain't shiny, but it serves the purpose.

But now, who do I greet before work every morning? Who do I jokingly ask, "How'd you sleep?" in my bad siLozi, eliciting a response of "How'd you work?" I suppose that grief, like everything else here, happens bit-by-bit over a long period of time.