LITMIR.BIZ

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later. We gave him some medicine from the first aid kit. When thirty minutes had passed with no change, we had a decision to make: Do we take him to the hospital? It was 6:00 p.m., and the last minibus to Kathmandu for the evening would leave soon. After that, there was no way into the city; soldiers began patrolling the Ring Road after nightfall to guard the capital against Maoist incursion. With the permanent curfew, very little could get in or out after the last bus had left Godawari.

      Santosh wasn’t getting any better. We quickly packed a small bag for him, threw in a few warm clothes for ourselves, and caught the last bus to Kathmandu’s Patan Hospital.

      The hospital was eerily quiet at 7:00 p.m. It was much different from my first trip there with Santosh, one month before. With the nationwide curfew, there were few visits after dark. We walked the empty hallways, looking for a doctor.

      I suddenly remembered when, as a small boy, I had contracted pneumonia and was severely ill. My father had to take me to the hospital in the middle of the night. I’d held his hand tightly as I walked through the quiet halls. I remembered how scared I was, and how completely I relied on my father that night to make everything better.

      As nervous as I felt now, in this strange Third World hospital, I realized that this was not the time for me to be afraid. I was the parent now. I saw how scared Santosh was; he walked slowly and slouched over, wincing in pain. I gently lifted him up and carried him in my arms toward the pediatric ward.

      “You need to lose weight, Santosh. You’re getting very fat,” I whispered to the stick-thin boy in my arms.

      He smiled. “No, Brother—you are weak, like a girl,” he whispered back.

      A few minutes later, we found a doctor coming out of his office. He did a quick examination of Santosh, pressing on the boy’s chest, and determined there was indeed something wrong. He led us to the Constant Observation Room, where I laid Santosh on the last available bed. The other four were taken by mothers and their young children. Lying flat, Santosh’s feet touched the rusting metal at the foot of the bed.

      The doctor returned to take a blood sample. He struggled to find a vein in the poorly lit room, so I took out my flashlight and shone it on Santosh’s arm. A minute later, sample secured, he told us we could relax for the rest of the evening. The tests would be done the following day. Sandra and I would stay overnight with him, because the pediatric ward was hopelessly understaffed and they were unable to care for all the patients.

      The only sources of heat were three portable heaters, and the nurses had commandeered all three on the other side of the glass in the Constant Observation Room. Santosh was covered only by a thin blanket, so we dressed him in all the clothes we had brought for him, including his gloves and a jacket, and Sandra managed to find one more blanket. I put on two fleeces and still I was shivering.

      When Santosh was finally asleep, we pulled two wooden stools up to the bed, one on each side, and laid our heads on opposite sides of the foot of the bed. The relative height of the stool to the bed plus the bitter cold conspired to make sleeping a near impossibility. When a baby began wailing a few minutes later, Sandra raised her head, clearly exhausted.

      “Listen,” she whispered. “You try to find some blankets and a free bed somewhere. I will get into bed with Santosh.”

      “You must be joking—that bed barely fits him.”

      “I’ve slept in much worse, believe me.”

      After her story of being taken by the Maoists, it was easy to believe.

      I knocked on the window to ask the nurse about extra blankets. After a few tired denials that such blankets existed, I asked if I might, then, borrow just one of their heaters to bring into the room to help keep Santosh warm. She rolled her eyes, stepped over the row of three heaters, and motioned for me to follow her to a storeroom.

      “All we have is here,” she said. “Take what you want. Do not tell doctor I let you here.”

      The storeroom was almost bare. I took the only useful items I could find—a plastic hospital pillow and two tablecloths—and walked back to our bed. Sandra, sure enough, had managed to contort herself in beside Santosh.

      “Okay, I’m off,” I whispered.

      “Good—where?”

      “Uhh, not exactly sure—down the hall, I guess?”

      I didn’t tell her I had not yet found an extra bed. The nurse had given her reluctant permission to sleep in any spare bed I could find, provided I was up early and that nobody in the room noticed me. That was as good a deal as I was going to get that night. I wandered down the hall of the pediatric ward, my footsteps echoing. Every room was the same: overcrowded, unclean, without sinks or trash cans or any indication that it was being monitored by anybody but the patients inside.

      In a wing far, far away, I poked my head into a brightly lit room. There was a bed that had been recently vacated, judging by the fact that the sheets were unmade. Inside, several tired-looking Nepali women were breast-feeding babies. I stepped back out and looked at the sign on the door. I couldn’t read the Sanskrit, but the English translation below it gave me pause, even in my exhausted state. It read: maternity ward. I steeled myself, then strode in.

      The women’s eyes followed me as I made my way through the ward. Babies stopped nursing. The air was thick as water; time slowed down. I considered what these poor mothers who had just endured the trauma of childbirth must have been thinking, a young pale man marching in at 2:00 a.m. carrying two tablecloths and a hospital pillow, heading toward the only free bed in the room. But I was horribly cold and had no other options.

      Then, a stroke of luck: there was a sheet on the bed. It was bunched up and appeared to have been used, but it would provide one more layer against the cold. I took it by the corners and whipped it to straighten it out, as if I was laying a picnic blanket. As it settled back down, I saw the vast wet blood stain in the middle of the sheet. I gasped and flung the sheet away from me.

      I took a long moment to compose myself, then I put my backpack down, lay on the bed, draped the two tablecloths over me, and curled up to sleep in that bright, cold room. The room erupted in chatter. I had never been so grateful not to understand Nepali.

      I WOULD LEAVE NEPAL two days later. My three months were almost up, and I had a plane ticket to Thailand. I said good-bye to Santosh the following morning. Farid had taken over and would stay with him. I would learn later that they never found out what had been wrong with him, but they had kept Santosh in the hospital for two more weeks as a precaution. Farid had lived there with him while Sandra returned to the orphanage to look after the children.

      That evening, I went into the boys’ bedroom to say good night to them for the last time. They had stopped bouncing around. They sat propped up, attentive, two to a bed, in the oversized second-and third-hand T-shirts that served as their pajamas.

      “When you come back, Conor Brother?” asked Anish, a question that seemed to vacuum all other sound out of the room. They wanted to hear my reply.

      I was expecting that. We had been strongly advised by the CERV staff to be vague and conservative in our answers to this inevitable question. Few volunteers ever returned to Nepal; it was too far away and required too much time. Volunteering in an orphanage was a one-off, an experience that you would never forget and never repeat. The staff at CERV had learned it was better not to give the children false hope that volunteers would return, as it tended to deteriorate the trust given by the children to the next group of volunteers. The children were looked after by a constantly rotating set of parents, and they were becoming accustomed to it. The system was terribly flawed, but there were few alternatives.

      “I’m not sure, Anish, but I’ll definitely try to get back!” I said, upbeat. This provoked no response from the boys.

      “When, Brother?” Anish asked after an awkward silence.

      “Well, definitely not for at least a year,” I told him. “Remember I told you guys that I’m going on that big trip? I showed you on the globe?”

      “So

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