Why?

Today was a tough day.

I arrived back to work at the clinic this morning to the news that 3 of the 9 children we were planning to enroll in our project next month died over the last month or two.

A little later in the morning an HIV-positive mother of 20-month-old twins who is followed at the clinic came to see me and my coworker. The twins - a boy and a girl - weighed 6.2 and 7.1 kg respectively. (That puts them at the 0 percentile for weight for height). Their faces and hands were covered with sores. The little boy had a respiratory infection. When I asked the mother what the children were eating she said they had no appetite for solid food (a common side effect of severe malnutrition) and she could not afford milk. We offered her the last few bags of rehabilitation manba that we had on our shelf. I do have some hope that the children may recover weight in the months to come....but her family's needs run so much deeper than what I am prepared to respond to clinically….or on any other level.

The day ended with my colleague pointing out the fresh blood stains on the walkway outside our office door. Our nutrition project space is one doorway down from the sexual violence clinic where rape victims can receive the exam needed to submit a police report. This afternoon, just outside the gate to the clinic's compound, a young girl walking down the street with her father was assaulted and raped at random. Her father immediately brought her, still bleeding from the attack, to the clinic.

I’ve been reading a book about family planning policy in Haiti written by an anthropologist from San Francisco who spent several years living in Cite Soliel – the slum community where a good portion of our patients live. She opens one of the chapters with this quote from a resident in 2003:

I can honestly tell you – with no jobs, no food aid, and in the end, no love – life today is worse than death itself. I think I’ll get more respect when I’m dead.

Another woman from the community ended her description of her current situation by saying:

There have been times when I would just stop and ask God, “Why did you make me?”

Today I found myself asking the same question.