Two Twenty-year-olds: Face to Face and Worlds Apart

There we are; two twenty-year-olds who are worlds apart and face to face, looking into each others’ eyes in the health center’s treatment room. I found him face down on the wet pavement a few hours before, the rain smattering over his dark frame –plastic sandals, khaki shirt, and raggedy black backpack. Is he dead?! His trembling stills my initial alarm and my pink umbrella serves as a beacon to the passing cars that halt and unload, their passengers crowding around. No one knows if he’s epileptic and everyone is using their cell phones to call for help, but the boy starts pushing himself to standing. Stumbling and haltingly, he rises and shuffles along the sidewalk, clutching his stomach as the crowd looks on fretfully and a man in white follows him to offer a supporting arm.

I end up accompanying the boy and this man in white to the nearest health clinic where I can do little more than provide a comforting hand on the shoulder and offer my gym towel as a makeshift hat for heat-retention. By the time he is allowed to see the doctor, he has regained enough energy to be able to explain his situation in a mumble of responses; he is a Guinean and knows no one in Dakar. He has no family and no connections. It becomes apparent that he collapsed out of exhaustion because his situation of unemployment and homelessness had prevented him from eating anything for two days. The nurse enters and is not happy to see him: “I know you,” she spits out in dismay. “You were here five months ago. I know this one, doctor. Last time I paid for his medicine, food, and bus fare back to the Guinean embassy, and here he is again! What are you doing back here? Why aren’t you with your family?!”

Guinea is in a state of utter chaos and political conflict wherein the police are shooting civilians in the street in reaction to some worker strikes a month-or-so back, so it comes as no surprise that a young man, disillusioned by pain and violence, would seek refuge in neighboring Senegal, with its reputation of political stability and its flourishing capital. But what does he find upon his arrival in Dakar?: a welcoming committee of fifty-percent unemployment and utter helplessness due to his lack of familial connections in a society where relatives are everything. Nonetheless, the nurse shouts, “You go back there to your family! This nice man [in white] has paid for your food and medicine, but you can’t stay here! If you come back I’ll have to call the police!”

What’s sad is that there are many more like this young man –many more refugees from political violence and societal disfuntioning. But the nurse is right; Dakar has too many problems of its own to truly aid this multitude of displaced, impoverished people. But what is even sadder is that one of these times, there might be nobody there to find that boy, and he might never get up.

So I stand there looking at this young man, knowing that there is nothing more I can do for him, knowing that the cycle of pain within which he is submerged is one that is not easily broken. I know that, in his eyes, I am an emblem of wealth and an embodiment of his unattainable dreams. All I can do is wish him luck from the bottom of my heart and go back to what I was doing before: walking to the expensive gym and back into my world of privilege and security. I leave the clinic of distress and black skin, finding my way to an arena of a slightly lighter complexion where hip-hop music booms and ipods abound. Looking around me, I feel oddly out of place.

~Oct 23, 2009