STUCK Part II: Drowning in boiling water

Work at the training center is going well. My girls are used to me sitting with them, watching over their shoulder, taking notes. There hasn’t been any emergencies since Shona’s accident, gratefully, so days go by with ease.

Shona hasn’t been in to the center since her accident, and didn’t attend her certificate ceremony. Tuesday morning, I ask the girls how she is doing.

“Oh, Shona is better, but her daughter is hurt—a pot of boiling rice water fell on her.”

Minutes later, I’m back on a rickshaw with one other girl and a staff worker, heading to Shona’s house. Driving through the morning fog, we are back at the same slum. I feel less jerks bouncing around the roughly paved roads, going with the flow of the devastating surroundings. As we climb through the entrance of the cluster of homes where she lives, the curious crowd of 20 people follows.

Shona begins to cry as we enter the small one-room, dirt floor hut that she calls a home. Sitting on her bed with her feet flat under her, her little daughter sits on her left hip, donned in a ski cap and wrapped in a shawl. The first and last time I met this beautiful, long-lashed baby girl, she looked at me and crawled into my lap as if we were old friends. Many children stare at me in wonder, and my auntie’s nephew cries every time he sees me. But this little one isn’t afraid or intensely curious of my eyes or skin, and just relaxes.

Now I see her, sitting on her mother who holds the baby’s right arm out and away from the shawl. Her neck is covered in round, tender bubbles where her skin boiled from the water, down her shoulder. On her arm is 6-inch burn, her skin yellow and shiny. Dried blood surrounds her wrist and elbow. Biting back my own tears, I wipe away Shona’s as her pressed her daughter’s head into her breast.

We chat with her a bit, looking at the medicines the doctor gave her and allow her to vent to us. With the door crowded, the staff worker shoos them away to give them some space and privacy (not a common habit in Bangladesh.) One little girl stayed, hanging around the door, inching closer over the visit until she was sitting on my knee.

I gave Shona a small Christmas gift, as I did with the rest of the girls, and she wore her new earrings right away. As I hugged her to leave, I slipped her some more taka. With neighbors still watching, I didn’t want to be obvious. And I couldn’t help but look to the skies and say, “She just healed herself, and now her daughter is in pain. All their money is being spent on medicines because of accidents. She can't work because she's taking care of her baby, and her husband's a deadbeat. How can this happen twice to the same family in one month?”

It was an easier visit than the first, I suppose the misery is becoming routine to me too. Bouncing back in the rickshaw, holding the other woman’s hand, I wondered if it was harmful or helpful to become numb to grief out of survival. I arrived at the center with no answer.

In Case of Fire...

Just because I find it amusing how safe I feel in this country:

[next to the gas station]

STUCK: between a rock and a hard place--or a car and a rickshaw..

I arrived at the center today to hear that Shona* was home sick. I imagined a cold or cramps. The story unfolds that a few days earlier she went to the market and was smashed in between a rickshaw and a CNG, penetrating her stomach.

With one other girl from the center Lila*, myself and three aid workers head to Shona’s house. Weaving through the cool morning on a rickshaw, one aid worker Rahim* shares Shona’s story. Her parents are not around and she is married to a man who “is not bad, but not good.” She was a sex worker for a few years when she had no other livelihood available. Finding the organization, she has been working for them doing crafts and making a steady income. Her husband doesn’t work and relies on Shona to support him and their two year-old daughter. The other aid workers gush about Shona, saying that she never argues with the other girls and always helps them when they need it. I see it in her: she is a complete doll. She and I have dance sessions to entertain everyone at the center. It’s uncommon for a Bangla woman to laugh as loud as she does, and I mirror it with my own.

It starts getting quiet as we get farther away from city’s business center and the sun stronger as the buildings shrink from 5 stories to at most 2 levels. The roads increasingly dirtier, bumpier, at parts non-existent or slanted from earthquakes. Getting off the rickshaw in an alley that can fit only three persons, Lila leads us through the garbage filled ditches rotting in the sun. A constant cloud of flies swarm around my feet as we step into a cluster of tin homes, each perhaps three times the size of my clothes closet on Long Island. Seeing aid workers and a bideshi (foreigner), adults and children start popping out of everywhere to follow us. Shona’s name is whispered amongst the indistinct Bangla around me when we enter her home.

She was lying on a bed lined with a plastic table cloth with one sheet covering her. The bed took up one third of the entire house (one room) with tin walls and ceiling. Her husband stood in the corner, watching us pile in with the curious entourage behind us. The rest of the room had one chair and shelves with clothes, pots and plastic bags with personal belongings.

Shona was moaning in pain, holding her stomach. Seeing us, she began to cry and grasped onto my arm, mumbling in Bangla. I covered her forehead with kisses. She lifted up her sheet and revealed the wound. I looked away, I couldn’t see it. Her daughter came around the corner with the biggest eyes and sweetest cheeks, happily placing herself in my lap as she watched her mother breath heavy. Bangla was thrown around the tiny hut too fast for me to understand. Just as I felt that I was going to hit someone if I wasn’t informed as to what was happening, Rahim finally explained: the doctor saw her for a few minutes, gave her 2-weeks worth of antibiotics cost 1000tk and Shona’s husband took out a loan of 500tk to pay for the visit but now have no money to pay for food. That’s about 20 dollars. I handled the money situation but I was so concerned about what she was feeling now. Ambulances don’t really exist, no car or even bicycle could make it to her slum door: so she must walk with this pain to the street, get on a rickshaw and bounce her way through the slum then through traffic to the hospital.

What else can we do, I keep pestering. A stretcher to the street and I'll get a taxi? Can we bring a doctor to her? I was met with nothing but blank stares. Nothing else could be done.

Rahim told me that Shona’s husband was going to take her to the hospital. Tomorrow we will see the outcome.

But that’s all I can do right now. I don’t know what else to do. Recalling the monring, it reads like any other humanitarian documentary covering a similar story. That’s what is so sad: there are so many stories like this: continuously and daily, too common that it’s cliché. But I cannot bellow loud enough or clearly enunciate how though it is prevalent, it is still continuously harrowing and crippling for them. Shona may not have experienced life outside of permanent devastation, but that doesn’t mean that she is ignorant that it should be better.

* Names have been changed.