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My upstairs neighbor, John, was in love. He was
planning a marriage. The woman he was to marry was beautiful and from a
well-to-do Kenyan family. John was handsome. He had a great job with a
widely recognized and respected relief and development organization,
World Vision. He had a nice apartment. He owned a good looking, bright
red, Volkswagen Jetta. But John no longer had the one thing he wanted
most in life - the continued love of his fiancée.
John’s fiancée had decided to break up with him.
John was in anguish. He couldn’t accept this decision, he argued and
pleaded. He told her he would give her two days in which to change her
decision, but it made no difference, she refused to change her mind. So
three days ago my neighbor John hung himself
in his apartment upstairs.
Since coming to Nairobi, I have seen first hand the
sorrow caused by the death of a parent or a child; the suffering in a
family when a loved one is sick and in the hospital, not sure if they
will return home. I’ve seen the despair in a community when there is
death after death caused by AIDS. I’ve seen poverty so severe that the
hopelessness in a family causes the children to flee to the streets,
thinking life there will be more promising then at home. But I have
concluded that the greatest misery of the heart comes from truly loving
someone who is no longer in love with you.
Sitting at my computer last Thursday night at about
9 o’clock, I heard a woman’s voice crying out from the balcony above,
“He’s dead, he’s dead, he killed himself! Oh
my God, he killed
himself!” John’s fiancée had been calling him all that day and
gotten no
answer. He hadn’t reported to work and his car still sat in the
driveway. Late that night she came to check on him and getting no
response at the door let herself in with her key and discovered John’s
tragic end with a note sitting next to his body.
About a year ago I arrived in Nairobi on the day a
young woman who I worked with from Kibera slum, gave birth to a baby
girl. Everyone was so excited about the birth of this child, including
myself. I had been sponsoring the mother for more than two years and
she had been through some pretty rough physical and
emotional times. We celebrated for several days with all the
family members.
But three weeks later I received a call early on
Sunday morning. “Doug, come quickly, the baby has died.” I rushed to
the house where the mother was and I heard the sad story of how the baby
had gotten sick when they were staying upcountry. I heard how an
overnight trip to Nairobi delayed necessary medical treatment and how
when the baby arrived at the public hospital early the next morning it
was too late to save her. The mother told how the baby had died within
an hour of arriving at the hospital. I was hit with real grief. This
was the second infant death I had experienced this year. Earlier
in the year, the young baby of a mother I had enrolled in our new vocational program had
died from pneumonia, 2 weeks before
the program started. I
had blamed myself for not getting in touch with the mother a few weeks
earlier. Now, six months later, I was ordering a coffin for this
second death of a baby girl. I took the grieving mother to church. But
there her behavior turned from severe grief to bizarre behavior. It was
clear that the mother needed professional help.
The next morning, with the woman’s brother, we
went to the morgue to pick up the infant’s body. We waited for an
unusually long time for them to bring the body out, but to our surprise,
there was no body to be found. In fact, after an extensive search of
the records, there was no death reported either. The baby had just
disappeared. Then, within hours of leaving the mortuary, the mother
disappeared also.
Two days later the mother reappeared, knocking at
the gate of my guest house around midnight. I got her a room and
early in the morning the brother and her father decided to take her to a
mental hospital for evaluation and treatment.
But four hours later I was summonsed to Nairobi’s railway station by the
brother who said the baby had been found alive.
There was a small hospital nearby where the mother
now said she had left the baby with a stranger to watch for a minute but
then simply walked away. The security guard there had taken the address
of the woman, who, when she
realized the mother wasn’t returning, had taken
the baby home. I paid a small ransom to the security guard for the
privilege of being taken to the home where the baby supposedly was now.
On the farthest possible edge of town, in a run down development of
housing units, we were led to a small house
where we all stood in the enclosed yard. There, after much yelling by
the occupants at our mother and some striking of her face, meant to
shame her for leaving the child at the hospital with a stranger, I paid
a second small ransom to the grandmother, supposedly to repay her for
lost sleep caused by the baby’s constant crying that first night.
Then we drove (along with the woman with who had
taken custody of the baby) to the police station nearest to where the
baby had been left. We met with the station's police
chief and everyone told
their side of the story (in Swahili). I later found out that I had been
introduced as a priest by our family, believing, I guess, that
the
presence of a priest with them would add weight to their side of the story. A third
ransom, the largest so far, was demanded by the woman who had taken
care
of the baby. We negotiated the amount with the police
chief until it became
manageable, which I then paid and the chief released the baby into the
custody of the priest (me) and the mother into the custody of her father
and brother, provided that they took her directly
to the mental hospital for treatment.
A quick stop for diapers, formula, bottles,
powder, etc and I returned to the guest house with the now crying,
hungry and wet baby, and got the staff there sterilizing bottles and
heating formula. The baby soon settled down for the night and I
delivered her to the grandmother the following morning. The mother was
released from the mental hospital a week later and went back to the
grandmother’s to care for the baby. I paid for the coffin,
had a friend take a picture, then told the
carpenter to keep it to sell to someone else.
Today,
John's family came
to clean out his apartment. They worked throughout the day sorting
through the
details of John's shortened life. They moved out his furniture.
They
cleaned out his closets and cleaned out his refrigerator.
They drove away his bright
red car. But one thing they
didn't take away was the
memory of my neighbor John and the shock of that
evening. Several times over the last few
days I thought I heard his happy
voice outside. Sometimes
I thought I heard his car leaving in the morning
or returning in the evening. And for the last
two evenings, at about nine o’clock, I heard a noise outside and
jumped. For a moment
I would freeze and listen very carefully, my heart racing, waiting...
waiting... half expecting to hear his fiancée cry
out again, “He killed himself! Oh my God, he killed himself!” |
