A Bandage for the Heart

The mental health team mainly spent our days training the staff who work with the children (which proved to be challenging but rewarding work), but there was definitely a desire to interact with the children themselves.  We had the opportunity to meet with teen girl residents, younger girls (future post on this), and the female teens that come from the community for a tailoring and dressmaking class.  But I must say I was happily anticipating a 2nd meeting with a group I had met with in 2009.  It was a group of boys who were eager, open to talk, insightful and probably made the most noise with their laughter and commentary than I had seen in any male group session I have ever led.  They are called The Street Boys.

Street boys are children ranging from young toddlers to late adolescents and up who live day in and day out in the streets.  The closest comparison would be our homeless teen population, which is much more prevalent that anyone would like to admit in our very own Hollywood, CA.  But to be homeless in Kenya is different.  First off there are no safety nets to help these boys:  no homeless shelters where you can grab a cot to sleep, no shelters or food banks, no strategic places to go where begging gets generous results.  What’s more, there are no Goodwill clothing centers where you can get some low cost pants or shoes when you need them. Street children are treated as the lowest of the low in Kenya – they are insulted, degraded, abused and exploited.  Street boys get caught up in sniffing shoemakers glue to get high, using weed and other drugs, prostitution (to wealthy male patrons), stealing and all other manner of delinquency you would expect from someone without anyone at ALL to care for or nurture them.

There is no nice way to say this:  street boys are dirty.  Imagine walking around in a bustling city center filled with exhaust, smoke and ashes from a nearby trash burning, dirt, sand, trash, stagnant contaminated water, feces (animal and human) and more. Now imagine doing that with NO shoes.  For DAYS.  Without washing your feet, changing your clothes or sleeping in a bed.  Imagine having to rummage in trash heaps for food that might be fit to eat, swimming in the ocean in place of a bath, and sleeping on the city streets only to wake up the next morning to do it all over again.  Imagine finally breaking down and selling your body so you can purchase food or have a bed for a night, and even possibly support a newly budding drug habit.  Now imagine doing all of that for weeks, months and even years at a stretch.  Now imagine you are 10 years old and have not one family member to call on for help.

Street Boys came to the DHMG clinic held at the Wema Centre (dedicated to getting as many street children permanent residence and care as possible) with rashes, dry and severely cracked skin, untreated wounds and skin infections among other ailments and diseases.  Their clothes are dirty and torn; there feet are black with dirt and calloused beyond recognition.  I mentioned I anticipated conducting a group with these boys, but was not able to do so due to time constraints.  Instead the mental health team joined the medical team to help tend to the needs of the visiting Street Boys on our last day at the Wema Centre. 

I am not a medical professional, I am a psychologist.  I do not deal with rashes, skin infections or oozy wounds.  If I wanted to do that I would have become a pediatrician like I had planned to when I was 12 years old – before I found out I would have to deal with blood and oozy, infected wounds.  But nurse Mom (my mother is on the medical team) put me to work cleaning the rash on the buttocks of 11-year-old Saidi.  He just pulled down his oversized shorts right in front of his peers (he had no underwear to remove) and stood patiently while I cleaned.  He also complained of a throat pain, which we realized we could not treat.  I suggested having him gargle with salt water just to have him feel we were attending to his complaint.  With Andrew Mwuavua as translator, we took a walk over to a fence so he could gargle and spit.  Saidi did not enjoy gargling and told us he felt the saltiness would make him vomit.   He didn’t.  Afterward he told Andrew the “treatment” worked and his throat pain was relieved.  He ran off to play soccer with the other kids.

I realized then that indeed the mental health team was at work after all.  I had just employed the classic trick you learn back in Abandonment 101:  “Always humor the request for attention.”  Saidi was “sick” alright – from a lack of nurturing, attention and positive human and physical connection.  Now as I looked at all the boys waiting to be seen, I saw them in a whole new light.  Many of the boys searched for physical proof they needed to be seen, when in actuality the emotional damage was their chief complaint.

Now Kevin actually did have a medical issue:  scabies or some type of fungal infection on his hands that caused a rash, peeling skin, open sores and bumps all over – especially between his fingers.  Medical treatment had been prescribed – a pill that the 14 year old could take to clear up the infection – but I was instructed to clean up the sores with peroxide and apply ointment.  I quickly realized his hands were far too caked with dirt to properly clean with peroxide, so I asked for a basin of hot water and a bar of soap.

When the hot water and soap arrived, he & I went to work.  The amount of dirt and grime that came off of his hands was jarring.  The basin looked like dirty bathwater within 1 minute of cleaning.  And his hands were still dirty.  I put my hands in the water with his to help clean.  The hot water was very soothing, even with my gloves on.  It hit me that I was sharing a very intimate moment with Kevin – washing his hands, scraping black dirt from the edges of his nail bed, cleaning under his nails, rinsing with more water.  He seemed to savor the wash even as people stopped by to see what we were doing.  I asked him questions, instructed him to wash his hands with soap as much as possible from here on out and we laughed about my inability to speak Kiswahili…and all the while he never moved.  We did a final rinse with some saline solution and dried his hands.  I commented on how the beautiful brown of his skin could now be seen again, and he sheepishly grinned.  He then went off to eat a free meal in the Wema dining hall.

Plans for the day not go according to schedule for our mental health team, but the little work I did do seemed just as necessary.  Street Boys have seen and experienced more than they ever should at their age, and are tougher than most because of it.  But seeing the many boys who requested bandages for their perfectly healthy arms and legs, the grown men who savored having their faces washed and those who invented ailments just to get care made it perfectly clear why they really needed to be seen.  Physical wounds and sicknesses can be treated, but there are no bandages made for gaping wounds of the heart.

lighter spots are sores and bumps, there is cracked, open and peeling skin between fingers (thumb and forefinger)

  

blog contributor:  Jennifer Noble