The Nameless Boy (Kampala – Day 1)

At Nsambya Babies’ Home in Kampala, a polite staff of caretakers busy themselves with various and sundry duties around the home, while we Mzungus (i.e., white people) anxiously await our opportunity to hold the beautiful children we’ve heard so much about. We no sooner get through the door when numerous  children are reaching out for us to hold their hands, pick them up or otherwise  interact with them. Playing is not enough; they need to be touched, held, nurtured.

Attention, however, comes at a price. Their need is so great, and their socialization so lacking, that they fight – literally clawing at each other – for our attention. Turning attention from one child to another means an inevitable slap, punch or scratch.

While children, Mzungus and caretakers move about in the enclosed courtyard, one small child lays on his side, nearly motionless on the concrete in the hot African sun. He pays very little attention to what’s going on around him. No matter, as the children and caretakers also pay him little attention.

But I notice him, and, once again, my heart is broken. He’s wearing nothing below the waste, and his tattered shirt is soiled with urine. His bald head betrays a history of severe malnutrition; his lack of attention to the people around him tells volumes about a likely pattern of neglect in his first years of life.

I reach down and take the little boy in my arms, forcing myself to ignore my aversion to him in his state. He looks up at me like he doesn’t know how to think of me. Who is this white person? Another new face… What is he doing here?

I don’t even know if I have the answers to his questions.

And speaking of questions…

“Excuse me,” I say to a volunteer – a college student in a nearby town spending three weeks helping at Nsambya. “What is this boy’s name?” I ask. But she doesn’t know. He’s new.

“Do you have any clothes for him?”

She rustles through a pile of donated clothes and finds a pair of old shorts. They’re too big – falling off of him – so she gets a pair of pants. They’re also too big, and they’re pink, but you know what they say about beggars… She finds a clean, pink shirt to match.

I find one of the caretakers and ask again, “What is this boy’s name?”

“We don’t know,” she says. The police found the boy on Saturday, she says, and brought him to Nsambya. It’s Monday today; he’s only been here in this strange place for two days.

No wonder he doesn’t react. If I were him, I don’t think I’d know what to make of this strange world either…  Maybe he’d cried all his tears long ago. A sad thought, considering he can’t be more than two years old.

I hold him a while longer and then give him to my wife, Kirsten,  and go to play a more raucous game of tag with some of the older kids. She lovingly takes him and holds him.

Bath and potty time… The caretakers gather the children together into a large “bathroom.” They bathe them and set them all onto plastic potties to do their duty. But once again they’ve forgotten the boy. The kind volunteer I met earlier takes him aside to a small basin and bathes him in the sun.

Time for us to leave… As we make our way out of the building, we pass by the bathroom. Just around the corner inside the room is the boy, once more alone, this time sitting naked on a potty, looking down with no one attending him. We touch his head – a final attempt at a loving connection.

 

It’s the last time we will see him, except in our pictures…