Oliver Benjamin
just watching it all on television. The only thing that was missing
from the whole scene was the sad music and touching commentary.
He found this very distressing. Was he so desensitized to human
suffering that he couldn’t feel any emotion? Why did he feel as if
these starving children were still ten thousand miles away from him?
He decided to do something that the other volunteers considered
drastic.
One day, he emerged from his hut dressed in nothing but a few
rags he had managed to collect from around the camp. The other
volunteers stared in stunned silence as he sat down on the shady mat
next to the starving men, women and children and requested only a
small dish of faffa. Under no circumstances, he said, were they to
treat him any differently than any of the other two hundred starving
villagers. When asked how long they were to do this for, Joe replied,
“As long as it takes.”
Finally, after nine days of sitting with the afflicted,
communicating only through gestures and eating only one small
bowl of porridge a day, it happened. A small child, whom Joe had
become fond of, finally died in his arms while Joe tried to feed him.
Joe placed the child on the mat, closed his eyelids and covered him
with a tiny blanket. He watched flies land on tearful eyes of his
weakened mother who didn’t even have the strength to brush them
away. The sorrow in the powerlessness of the starving grew inside
him as it had inside of them, swelling like a great, dark rain cloud
gathering condensation until Joe finally crumpled to the ground in
great, heaving sobs. The villagers watched him, barely affected, as he
wept through the night and finally rose in the morning with a fresh
vigor. He continued to work at the camp for the rest of the month,
and then returned home to Seattle, where he planted a single desert
hyacinth on his sister’s grave.
“Beauty in strength. Just like you, sister,” he said, and lumbered
away in search of a big bowl of porridge.
“Where were you in Ethiopia?” I asked him, wondering if Joe might
have been anywhere near Charly was. He mentioned the name of a
small village, just outside of Lalibela. But I couldn’t remember if
she’d ever mentioned that name.
“Ethiopia,” Oscar said. “That’s a shitty place.”
“Oh, no. I fell in love with that country,” Joe said. “Don’t believe
what you hear on TV. It’s a land of riches.”
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