Ramadan 1433 - Asil

I have seen death, even held it in my arms. I have seen children die, and seen many others once removed from a horrible fate. And of all these images that return to me from Jamaica, Yemen, Tanzania, Uganda, and Rwanda, it is a single tear drop in the corner of an eye of a survivor that haunts me most regularly. One tear drop, one moment twenty three years ago. Sometimes small ghosts are the most persistent.

I remember the first time I saw Asil (not her name, I never knew it even as we watched her only child die one terrible evening); she was bent over at the waist washing some old clothing carefully in a bucket of water. She was very tall for an Eritrean, and as thin as most. I was walking through the camp to my little shack that day, and I may have even stopped in my tracks as this elegant refugee stood up from her task and stared at me curiously. She wore a beautiful batik covering with a matching scarf draped impossibly, perfectly over her hair. Asil was very dark, had some sort of tribal scars on her cheeks and big elongated gold ring through the middle of her nose. She straightened and glanced at me shyly betraying a beautiful smile and a slightly pregnant tummy. I had no schema for this kind of beauty.

I saw her regularly as I passed though the camp daily on my way to the village school. I had no idea if her husband had abandoned her, was off  fighting Ethiopians, or was dead - my Afar never developed enough to gather such distinctions. I could usually count on a slight nod and quickly turned down smile as I passed, and I looked forward to the platitude. Her stark features began to wear on my western sensibilities, eroding biases and redefining aesthetics. There was also a keen intelligence hiding behind those dark eyes that probably threatened me more than the loss of my superficial sense of beauty and grace.

I watched for months as she labored around her small hut as her pregnancy developed. I wasn't in love with her, most likely as I knew I would never deserve her, never be the man who could be confident enough to look into those eyes and protect her from the world that had treated her so cruelly. No, I wasn't in love with her, and there was a certain amount of relief in that, a certain freedom to continue to make my way past her each day, the efficacy needed to return her smile on the rare occasion I could maintain eye contact. I thought I was comfortable in this pleasant peace until the day I was beckoned to come help Asil and a few other women in a dispute with a local farmer over their goat and his vegetables. The negotiation was ponderous but ultimately successful, but my relative contentment was shattered in a moment of accidental embrace and the tang of a bitter sweet melange of sweat and musk fabricating love.

One of my students intercepted me and pulled me by my hand out of the camp and to a local farm where a group of the women were in an animated discussion with an impatient Yemeni farmer. I walked up and addressed the older man who was quite agitated. As I stepped towards him, he advanced on me quite aggressively and Asil turned away and stepped right into my arms. For a second or so I had my arms around her, felt her slight frame and bulging belly, and I smelled her. Dank and earthy, her scent nearly buckled my knees and if it were not for the short but eminent threat from the outraged vegetable owner in front of me, I might have gone down. At once, I would never appreciate fancy soaps or perfume on a woman's skin ever again, as a matter of fact, they became ersatz and acrid in an instant. I cannot even walk through a women's section in a department store in a mall since taking in Asil that day, my nose objects, or maybe it is just an aromatic excuse by my heart. She slid on by unaware, I thought, of my vulnerability, and I eventually paid the ransom for the incarcerated goat and returned it to the women. Asil and her peers led it away and my antagonist from moments before invited me into his humble house for tea. She went one way, I went another and I did not see her again for several months.

I had heard she had had a baby boy, and I was happy for her and relieved I had some time to process my new worldview, an astonishing revelation born in poverty, dirt, and diligence. A half a year later, I stood by helplessly as her baby died; dehydrated from diarrhea, heat, and no medical facilities. Her son was too young for the rehydration therapies we were implementing in the camp, and she had waited too late into the night to get the child to a hospital an hour away. As I picked up the child to examine it (after the camp doctor had been arrested, I was often called to situations as I had the only medical book in the camp) I felt the same sickening lack of elasticity in his skin that I had felt once before on a mountaintop in Jamaica. I gave him back to her and she went into the adjoining room to try to feed him. I am not sure when he died, but I was a dozen feet away, separated from his passing by a dirt floor and a worn sheet serving as a privacy wall. Asil emerged hours later with a swaddled bundle in her arms and that one lone tear drop refusing to fall in my presence. She disappeared into the night, to wherever one goes in a refugee camp with a dead child.

I think of Asil less often now, but the tear drop she held onto persists. I don't know what happened to Asil after I left the camp, and I did not see her much after that night. I do know that she realigned my notions of beauty, dignity, and courage in a place most would find brackish and repulsive. Sometimes, decency and desire dance in the dust.

 *On a brighter note - I did see Asil smile one more time, actually heard her laugh. She was outside her shack one day watching as I played with some children nearby. We had found some electrical wire, treasure by many standards, and I had commandeered it for an hour or so. I tied one end to the post of a nearby hut and gave the other to the tallest child I could find. I had her twirl the cord and I introduced the art of jumping rope to the group of interested onlookers, young and old. It was probably the first time I stumbled and fell into the dirt that I looked up and saw her. That image of her holding her face, nose ring and scars partially covered, her laugh unsuccessfully stifled, is the one that I prefer to carry forward.