The Immediacy of Human Need

"Some pictures never leave your mind. They are the faces of the children. The ones we left behind." - Miss Saigon, Claude Michel Schonberg and Alain Boubil

Since I returned from my most recent period of work in Swaziland a couple of weeks ago, I have heard almost on a daily basis the words "It must be so hard leaving them."

I usually nod in quiet recognition and explain that it is hard but I stay in touch with many of my friends in Swaziland and will be back next year.

But there is something more which I wish they could understand.

It is not possible to leave.

Once you truly allow the immediacy of human need to enter the boundaries of your awareness. You are there. Connected. Entangled. Involved.

Always.

This may seem like a horrible thing. Akin to being haunted by ghosts.

I remember once speaking to a group of psychiatrists at a very fancy psychiatric clinic.

I showed them a video of two little children 5 and 10 surviving on their own in the town of Nkandla following the death of both their parents from AIDS. The interviewer asks "Do you miss your mum?" And the children start crying uncontrollably. The little boy sobbing into his older sisters dirty dress.

The question they asked me that day was "Maithri, how do you cope, having seen such sadness? How do you forget that kind of experience?" (It was a little more psychoanalyitical than that, but that was the jist lol

My answer was this - I cope by not forgetting. By remembering them, by honouring their lives, their pain, their struggles. I cope by allowing my comfortable life to be disturbed and allowing the reality of this world in.

There was a family of children I visited just a few days prior to leaving Swaziland with our team from the hospital.

There were nine kids. All under the age of 10. Their father had died early this year from HIV. And their mother had run away with another man. Leaving them alone to fend for themselves.

The police found these nine children and brought them to their grandmothers hut.

This grandmother was another of our patients. She had end stage airways disease and heart failure, rendering her almost completely immobile. The effort it took for her to stand would cause her to become critically short of breath. She spent all of her day sitting in a corner of her hut, waiting for the pain to end.

When we found these kids, they were naked, without food, playing with pieces of barbed wire in the mud outside their hut.

I wanted to take them with me. To put each one on my shoulders, put them in the car and bring them somewhere safe.

But there was just no time. We had to leave in two days.

So those children remain as they are. Alone. Unfed. Unloved.

It is easy to allow the enormity of the problems facing the developing world to immobilise us.

But we can not afford to do that.

Because while we swim in pools of woe, we forget that if there is any answer to their problems, then it is us. You and I.

When I stepped off the plane into my familiar Australia, I was reminded that we do in fact live in an abundant universe. There is so much here. Far more than we could ever need or use.

So how do we get a fraction of this abundance to where it is so desperately needed?

We need to build bridges. Bridges of awareness. Bridges of understanding. To remind ourselves each day that we are all here together. That on a round planet there's no choosing upsides.

So when I am told "It must be hard leaving them"

What i want to say is "I could never leave them. They are with me. As real and immediate as if they were across the street.

Wherever I am, whatever I do, their lives will be honoured within the context of my own. The work doesnt end when we leave Swaziland.

It begins.

My love to you,

Maithri