Me and "Baby ANC"

Here's how I spent my morning today. And no, I am NOT cradling a tiny South African Freedom Fighter in this shot.

This precious, scrumptious, adorable little creature wears a teeny green plastic armband bearing the label "Baby ANC" because her mother, who was likely desperately poor and either already overwhelmed with several other children she couldn't feed--or was much too young herself--bundled her up and left her on a desk at the Pumwani Maternity Hospital's Antenatal Clinic (hence the "ANC" moniker).

Baby ANC is about 1 month old, and she is beyond perfect. I suppose that throughout my lifetime I've considered just about every baby I've personally interacted with to be perfect, so maybe you should take that appraisal with a grain of salt. Still, this itty bitty cherub was clearly THE most perfect, the most placid, the sweetest baby in the Abandoned Babies Room.......

....which I almost didn't make it to, after a minor meltdown in Ward 6 of Pumwani. That's one of the delivery wards for the 80 or so mostly poor women who give birth at Pumwani every day. It was full of mothers recovering from a gruelling process I still have a great deal of trouble determining why someone would willingly put themselves through.

Anyway, I was there with 3 other women delivering the baby clothes and personal products we'd brought for the moms and babies. Ruth, one of the young women I've mentored here over the past few years, was actually born at Pumwani, so this project is dear to her heart. And when I saw the conditions at the struggling facility, which is actually the 3rd largest maternity hospital on the African continent, I understood why Ruth is so commited to helping.

Anyway, my meltdown occurred while I was handing out the sanitary pads I'd purchased over the weekend. I remember standing in the Nakumatt Superstore Saturday afternoon and thinking, "How many is enough?" After about 35 years of dealing with the whole "cycle of life" hassle, I realized that even if I emptied my wallet, it still wouldn't be enough. It would last those women through 2 or 3 cycles, maybe, and then they'd be back to ground zero. Too poor to buy pads--or even rags to use.

I wound up buying 20 packs of 10. Wasn't sure how many moms we'd meet, but at least it was a start. Elizabeth, the hospital's only (INSANELY DEDICATED!!!!) social worker, suggested we split the packages in half and give each mom 5. I gadded about the ward like a flight attendant on steroids, smiling and cooing at the newborns cradled in their exhausted mothers's arms as I doled out pads. But when I reached one new mother's bed, the Ward Matron told me to give her a whole package.

"No one has visited her," she said. "I don't think she has anywhere to go. It would mean a lot to her." That's when I really looked at the girl sitting on the edge of her bed. She looked about 15. She looked terrified. She looked emotionally scarred. She looked desperate sitting there trying to get her baby to latch onto her slight, malnourished breast. She looked poor, and she looked psychologically damaged, and she looked....

Like me. Not physically, and actually not even figuratively, other than the fact that we are both women of African descent. When I say she looked like me, what I guess I mean is she looked like the me that could have been, without God, and the Universe, and Eloise Jones and Julie Newell and my own inherent will. All of a sudden, standing in that hospital wearing shoes and a watch and clothing that could have fed everyone in that ward for a month, I realized that one twist of fate 48 years ago, one decision made differently along the way, could have found me perched on the edge of a public hospital bed clutching a baby I had no hope of offering anything other than the abject misery of my own existence.

Bottom line? I lost it. I started walking out of Ward 6, and didn't stop until I found a hallway with a cool breeze blowing through it, to clear out the smell of bleach and filthy water and various bodily effluvia, and I cried for that girl, and that baby born on Easter Sunday. I cried for myself and for my own unfulfilled maternal instinct. And I also probably cried because as much as I adore babies, I now realize that not only will I probably never have one, I am also forced to accept that I probably never really wanted one that I would have to be fully responsible for, and make sacrifices for, and alter my own life course for in anyway.

So basically, I was standing there in Pumwani Hospital cursing my own selfishness, and the fact that I hadn't bought 400, even 600 sanitary pads, and that I hadn't contributed more money for the infant clothes, and that I had been so damned thoughtless about childbirth 20 years ago when my ovaries didn't resemble raisins, and didn't just get pregnant, for God's sake, and let the details work themselves out, because now even if I wanted to, and met the man of my dreams who would be the best father ever, I probably couldn't.

Ruth and the others probably think I'm just a kind-hearted soul who just wants to do more, and THAT'S why I was standing there dabbing my eyes and clutching my chest. And I suppose I am, in some ways. But after I pulled myself together and made it to the abandoned babies' room, I also accepted that most of time, especially in a developing country like Kenya, by yourself you just can't do more. You can only do what you're able to do in any given snapshot of time. Sure, you can torture yourself about the overwhelming scope of the problem, and you can look at what other people have beeen able to accomplish and beat yourself up for coming up short.

Or you can just pick up the abandoned baby in rusted old crib in front of you, and you can cradle her and coo, and you can give her a bath while you sing to her, and you can hold her head while you feed her milk from a cup because the hospital can't afford bottles, and you can just know that in that moment, you were there for her.