One by One by One by Aaron Berkowitz

One by One by One by Aaron Berkowitz

Author:Aaron Berkowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-04-10T00:00:00+00:00


12

Late June in Haiti is sweltering. Although June falls during the rainy season, it only rains for about an hour or two each evening. The temperature peaks in the high 90s by midday, the air becoming progressively more humid and heavy until it explodes into a brief but torrential evening downpour. The storm cools things off a bit outside, but the concrete staff house seems to retain the heat from the day. The rains just make it more humid.

As I walked to the hospital in the early morning, my shoes got sucked into the thick, sticky mud from the previous night’s rains. Jerking them out made a loud kissing noise, my feet sometimes slipping out of my shoes. I remembered from my visit during the prior year’s rainy season that by noon, when I walked back to the staff house for a quick lunch of rice and beans, the dirt road would be dusty and chalky, baked from just a few hours of summer Caribbean sun. Then the nightly rains would turn the route into sludge again, and the process would repeat. Haiti, land of extremes, I thought.

My morning ritual in Haiti has always been to get to the hospital about an hour before beginning my work there so I can catch up on the previous day’s emails, since the staff house doesn’t have internet. I had come to appreciate the internet-free period from sunset to sunrise, which allowed me to either focus more fully on whatever work I had brought with me or get lost in a novel until I sweated myself to sleep under my mosquito net. But I tried to keep up with my Boston life as much as I could while I was in Haiti by responding to emails from 7 to 8 a.m., during the lunch hour, and then at the end of the day before going back to the staff house.

When I arrived at HUM, it was still early, and the cleaning staff was sweeping the hospital floors, humming hymns as they worked. They looked at me as I approached and then down at my mud-caked feet. I scraped the soles of my shoes against the concrete walkway to the entrance to remove some of the mud and then wiped them off on a patch of damp grass.

I made my way up the stairs to the administrative area, found an empty office, flipped on the ceiling fan, sat down, and waited for my phone to connect to the hospital Wi-Fi. I always felt my pulse quicken as I connected to the internet each morning in Haiti, wondering what I might have missed in the last twelve hours at work, at home, in the news. Fortunately, there was usually nothing major.

This morning, as my inbox convulsed with each spurt of new emails, I saw a message from Anne fly by with the subject “Janel” and scrolled down against the incoming tide to open it. The email had been sent just before midnight:

Hermide and Janel were on the way home from the airport and are now headed to Brigham after Janel had a seizure.



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