Wanderlust.

unslakable.  I got my drivers license the day I turned 16.   found the road, but not the end.   it’s taking me to the wanderlust festivals in whistler and tremblant later this summer.  i look forward to the community of wanderers that gather there.

for now, i’m in ethiopia.  below my window, the sound of the street.  people laughing, taxis buzzing by, a dog in the distance.  it’s dark, and the evening air is cool and fresh. it reminds me of home.

it’s spring there, in Canada.  in northern alberta, my mother is looking at the black patch of earth in her backyard, thinking: soon. my grandfather, 93, even farther north, will be watching edges creep into the ice lake outside his window, wondering whether he’ll till the ground to the sky and watch plants break from it, or whether that time is done.

in addis it’s autumn.  clouds gather in the afternoon, drop some hard, brief showers.  soon, the rain will thunder on the tin all day and night, and swell the rivers until they are angry and full.  i’ll be gone before then.  a team of teachers is arriving, and once they settle in, i’ll leave.  in a few days, i’ll be high above the clouds.

on my walk up the hospital hill today, sun on my neck, i smelled rain.  i looked up.  the sky was bright blue.  to my left, through an iron fence, two men cut into the ground with great swings.  the smell was fresh soil.  stored rain.

i spent the afternoon in the ER of ethiopia’s largest public hospital, teaching, learning in equal measure.  the last hours, i leaned my elbow on the nursing station, and watched blood drip.

drop.  drop.  drop.

i learned to watch in sudan, where the wind was so hot, blood would clot in the tube before it could drain into a person’s arm.   today, it rolled in a line towards a young, shaking man   even with his black skin, he was pale as a ghost.  that’s where the saying comes from, i’m sure.  not some gauzy vision of a spectre at the top of the stairs, but the pale lips of the newly dead.

i tell my students what was once told to me, that you watch the young bleeding man with great care. don’t let your attention wander far.  there is so much vigour inside, so much energy, so much muscle to squeeze blood from, that they hide the loss until the last minute.  i tell them, should he, with a heart rate of 130, say “i’m so c-c-c-cold” you should feel a chill too, for you are a few deft moves away from a suddenly dead person and the black birds of panic that flutter around them.

drop. drop. drooop.

a drip dangled.   i walked to his bed, rolled the tube between my fingers, took a syringe and flushed the iv.  it flowed again.  his mother nodded.

the students and nurses were busy with other things. a little girl, 14, from days away, vibrated at 160 beats per minute. with each throb of her overlarge heart, her whole body quivered. you could see her shake from across the room. a few beds over, a man bitten by a dog one month earlier, foamed.  despite being dry, he gagged when we offered a bottle of water, pushed it away. hydrophobia.  rabies.  fatal.  to my left, a woman sagged in a chair.  she saw me notice her, half-smiled, let her eyes roll back into her head until they were only whites.

a young doctor, an american, in addis for a month to learn how to do this type of medicine, where minutes matter and you’ve none of the stuff, joined me, surveyed the people circling to the sick.

“how the hell do you know when to leave?” she muttered under her breath, then joined me in watching the drips.

the best teaching is not delivering held knowledge to a student for whom it is new.  It is showing her to fall fully into questions that have no bottom, that point at a truth to which you can never fully arrive, that always live just there, forever shifting, beyond your finger.

how do you help others without hurting yourself?

that was her question. mine too. i don’t have the full answer, but i know how to start.  you hurt yourself, and don’t help others.  try to care for people, before you learn to care for yourself, figure you’ll learn it along the way, that if you save someone, maybe you’ll get saved too.   you go through the motions for a couple of years, but in the end, you get beaten down, touch burnout, or worse, bitterness.

then, somehow, grace. you find the right teacher, the right question to ask, and you learn that first, to help others, you must help yourself.  not to the last piece of pie, but on a deeper level.  then you see that helping others and hurting yourself is as flawed an equation as trying to help others while robbing them blind.  you understand that you’re part of a process that wants you, as much as anyone, to be whole.

something gathers us together, repairs us as we are pulled apart, binds us together and to all living things. you can call it soul, or god, or nature, but there’s no separate piece, just infinite, peripheralized shifting shapes spread among the stars and made of them, pushing fearlessly, inexorably towards some new place of previously unfound release, like plants from bright black soil, reaching as far we can.

in the deep questions about how to do that for as many people as possible, we taste freedom.  i’m not sure it’s a law, like gravity, or just a rule that gives me a way to live, but it seems to me that none of us can fully abide in that peace until all of us arrive.

the drips stopped.  the blood was done.  a nurse went to find a second unit.  the ER was quieter.  many of the young doctors had gone home, most of the family members, save for those with the sickest patients.  nurses moved from bed to bed, doing their endless work, patching up the broken, bleeding bits of humanity that wash through places like this.

a second unit came.  i showed a nurse to watch the drops when she could, told the night duty doctor i would call in a couple of hours.

“let’s go,” i said to the american.  together we walked down the hill, quiet, thoughtful, wondering if that boy would live the night, whether staying through the second unit would help, but we needed to eat, and we needed to sleep, because tomorrow would be full too, and the tomorrow after that.