Some things are hard to stomach

Here in Africa, and especially at the camp, you have to have a will to live. Let's face it some things are hard to stomach. Literally hard to process, such as the volunteers dinner last night, which sentenced 7/8 of us to a prolonged bathroom time, or mentally, like the first child I met that didn't smile. The poverty and the desperation of it all hadn't quite hit me since all the children I had met, ran into, carried had all smiled. Justin is tall for his age 3, but his arms and legs are too thin, and skin looks vacuum-packed to his head, showing the detail of his bones just a little too detailed. His eyes are huge, like a Summersville lake of tears waiting to be undamed (and undamned from his hungry hell). He lies on an old shirt used as a blanket; his mom points out the scabs on his head and body. He has a bad arm that doesn't quite straighten, a deformity due to the way he came out during birth. I ask his mom if he's smart. In a second, she pulls him from his sleep by his arm and tells him to recite his ABCs. With a whisper he gets to the letter G before stopping....

Meeting people like this, experiencing things like this makes me wonder: are some things inevitable?

Inevitable Death
Everybody dies. You can prolong it, but it cannot be cured. Some are admired for their death. The fallen soldier is memorialized, immortalized, but what of Renaldo? He lives in a small room painted blue at the end of a hall without windows. He has two in his room. One is boarded up, the other only lets a small rectangle of brightness in because of a crumbling wall that had been built a foot from the building. It lets enough light in to illuminate the torn mosquito net and his mattress on the floor, but not enough to erase the pungency of urine, not enough to convince the flies around the old food plates to go outside. He makes death personal by calling me sister, by praying in front of me asking for help. He brought in God and showed me pictures of his family. I ask him about the dusty keyboard I've been staring at in the corner. I want to borrow it to teach people how to type. It's not his, somebody left it in his room for safekeeping because nobody goes in there. I stil wish I could take it, and at the same time I wish I could help him. Death is inevitable and I want his to come faster. I dont want to feel the suffering. He asks me to give him my watch when I leave in July. I realize he hasn't given up on living yet. I shouldnt give up for him.

Renldo is one of the patients of the HIV/AIDS department.