Our sad children

I had a cousin who was a pro at this though. He had/has asthma and ever so often would have to be taken to Caura Chest Hospital for treatment and a few days of observation. I remember having visited him once. There were lots of old people in the room with him —there was no children’s ward, no adults ward, just a “this is where we have an empty bed” ward. They all were linked to machines that to me had seemed more capable of doing harm than good. The bed my cousin lay on had a thin, uncomfortable mattress, covered with a sheet made almost transparent from too many washes. It looked nothing like the hospitals seen on TV. Hospital rooms on TV had clean, white walls and were manned by staff in bright blue uniforms. In the room where my cousin was, everything was, assumedly, very clean, but so old and so used that it made cleanliness and hygiene depressing.

From my cousin’s experiences I realised that there were children for whom hospitals were second homes. From my sister’s experience I realised that there were children for whom hospitals were their only homes. My sister spent the months following her time there remembering the children she had met while at the hospital. There were children born with HIV — the AIDS babies as they were referred to, even if they hadn’t yet developed AIDS or were no longer babies. There were children whose medical needs were so complex it was more practical for them to remain at the hospital with its 24-hour roster of nurses and theoretically doctors.

Despite the many reasons that had brought them there, there was one reason why all of them remained. They had all been abandoned. Some had been left there as newborns, by mothers who had given birth and snuck out with flatter stomachs and less complicated lives and by fathers who didn’t know and/or didn’t care what happened to their offspring. Other children — it’s dubious if they could be considered lucky compared to the others — had actually been outside the hospital once. They had been raised temporarily by parents, by relatives who forgot to come back for them after one hospital trip too many.

A lot of things in these children’s lives were sad, mostly that most heartbreaking of things, illness, that for them was not an occasional thing but a solid fact, like an arm or a lung. Few things are sadder than a chronically sick child, unless, of course, it is a child abandoned because it is sick and raised in a hospital all its life.

Most of the nurses that work this ward deserve national awards. They sneak time out from their rounds to hug a child that can go for days without another touch. At the end of their shifts they sit and talk with children whose voices crack from not being used. The women that go to visit these children each week are heroes. Many have their own children at home, their own problems, their own headaches. They don’t get photographed reading to these abandoned children, they don’t get stories in the papers about money they’ve spent on them. They aren’t the donators of cheques big enough to hide behind but their sacrifice takes the form of squeezing an extra twenty out of the budget to pay for a taxi and some snacks with the hope that a pack of corn curls might distract some ten-year-old from the fact that their diaper needs changing again.

The Health Ministry has decided that after many years of inertia, these children, along with their adult counterparts, are to be removed. It is estimated that the 114 permanent residents of the various hospitals country wide cost taxpayers over TT$456,000 a month. Under the new plan outlined by Health Minister John Rahael, these patients are to be transferred to various NGOs and, in the case of the children, various homes.

This new plan leads to many questions, especially when considering the care needed by these children. Many of them, it is to be assumed, will end up in orphanages, homes already struggling to deal with the quandary of having too many children with too little resources and too many problems. And now there’s the promise of more.

So I guess we have to wait and see what happens, to see if, as the Health Ministry prepares for a major bit of PR, whether or not these children who have already been abandoned and failed at least once, will be abandoned and failed once again.

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