Among the Ethiopians (part 2)
This is a continuation of an excerpt from my book, Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird, published in 2006. In 1984, I was a housemother to newly arrived Jewish Ethiopian teenage boys in a boarding school following their airlift to Israel from refugee camps in Sudan.
My very first hour of work was to aid the staff nurse and an additional nurse from the local clinic who were giving the newcomers TB tests. A substance was injected just under the skin on the forearm that would have to be “read” a few days later. It was complicated to listen to the child’s version of his name, and then try to find the Hebrew transliteration on a list.
I wondered what the children understood about this medical procedure and later learned that they subjected themselves to many forms of medical care on faith without being offered an understandable explanation. This was partially inherent in the situation of having an Ethiopian interpreter who only partially understood Hebrew and who also had no cultural background for understanding medical procedures. The children approached one by one with arm outstretched, either grimacing, nervously smiling self-consciously, or with tightly closed eyes.
“Don’t get too close to his head. He probably has lice,” the nurse said to me as I cradled a smaller child protectively while he received his TB test. Strangely, I came to accept lice as the most positive part of the continuous medical morass I sloshed through daily as a housemother.
Lice were a problem I could do something about — at least temporarily. The first de-lousing was done en masse, with eager, wet, curly heads being thrust forward for the special shampoo. Ten minutes later came the special combing which was often painful for them because of their tight curls. We joked about the lice, calling the little ones “babies” and the larger ones “fathers.” This grooming procedure was readily accepted. They would often come to me and pantomime that their heads were itchy.
Other aspects of their medical care were much more elusive. The Ethiopians came with diseases that generally were outside Israel’s modern medical knowledge — active tuberculosis, stomach parasites, abscesses that erupted all over the body, and malaria which had been eradicated in Israel by its intrepid pioneers. The scariest of these for me was malaria that would rather suddenly turn a happy, active, teenage boy into a sweating, listless, shaking and shivering mass.
Amara, one of the children who succumbed often in the beginning months to a high fever, had a particularly beautiful face with finely chiseled features. His personality was generally friendly and happy. He was the joker of the group — the one who could lovingly drive me crazy.
One time, his fever would not break. I took him to the emergency room of a hospital a half hour away. At that time, we had just about no common language, but had developed a certain trust and rapport through smiling widely at each other. I had had gratefully little acquaintance with hospitals, especially in Israel, and felt at a distinct disadvantage with my puny Hebrew.
The doctor was a bizarre middle-aged man who seemed much more interested in me than in the patient. Seeing that the patient was Ethiopian, he launched into a broken-English historical account of how the Ethiopian Jews were descended from Menelik, son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Interesting though this was, I was more worried about Amara than in his ancestry.
A more pleasant encounter during that hospital examination was with a man who had the face and body of a young man, but the wrinkled neck of a much older man. His skin was whiter than mine, and quite freckled. His hair was not as dark as my Ethiopian children, but equally curly, even kinky. He spoke soft Amharic, the language of Ethiopians, to Amara and told me simply that he had been born in Ethiopia.
Amara’s blood test indicated he needed to be hospitalized. I explained to him as best I could that he would have to stay there for awhile. As we walked to his ward, the halls were lined with beds. Many were filled with Ethiopians, their faces and bodies dripping with sweat from malarial fevers. At least he did not have to be in a hallway, but his ward was with old men rather than children.
I left some small toys, pens, and crayons to use when he hopefully would have more energy. And I introduced him to those in nearby beds. As I prepared to leave, he looked at me somewhat fearfully and tearfully. I looked at his brown body against the white sheets of his bed, his smallness compared to the men around him. The hospital smell surrounded all of us; the man in the next bed was throwing up his supper. With a heavy heart and a large effort, I smiled widely at Amara. he responded with a broad grin — our way of assuring each other that things were okay. I turned and left. That was the first time I had to leave a child in the hospital. I was to return to that hospital several times more.
Tags: Jewish Ethiopians in Israel; malaria in Ethiopians in I, Travel
