Deleted

 Refugees were arriving in large trucks to be processed as before they entered the camp. I could see their black hair sprinkled with red dust. The women were bathed in colorful fabric. The men were tall and serious. I had nothing else to offer but handshakes, smiles, and questions.

I checked off my list of questions with a woman leaned against a tree stump. An infant nursed while her toddler wandered nearby.  Her legs were flopped carelessly apart. I asked about her husband. With a flick of her wrist and an expressionless face she said, “mafi.” None. The husband was not dead. He never was. 

“How many days did you walk to get here?” My translator answered for her. “Her legs do not work.”

My singular focus on my job of saving lives blinded me to her broken legs.

She had been lamed long before the birth of her nursing infant. Why would a lame woman in this brutal world have a child? How does a lame woman even have sex?

My mind slowed at this thought. I thought about all the soldiers and men moving unquestioned around the camp. My mind came to a standstill. How does a lame woman stop someone from having sex with her?

She does not. She cannot. Slowly, too slowly, it came to me.

She did not choose this. This was forced upon her. This was violent rape at worst and purchased consent at best. There was a man in this world who used her poverty and broken body for his pleasure. And he was not alone.

Knowledge of his existence and his plurality was more painful to me than her suffering. The knowledge she gave me rewrote my world.

Men were in my life to lift heavy things, change flat tires, and collect tithes at church. Men protected women. Their masculinity was designed by God to protect because our feminine purity was irredeemable.

I told others the story as if I immediately recognized sexual violence. Not all men hurt the vulnerable, but she taught me there are men who do and now I knew they lived among us.

In a sea of 30,000 faceless, nameless, homeless people I would never see her again. I do not know where she went or what happened to her children. I do not know her name. The hopelessness of her situation matched my ability to help.

She was deleted from my report that went to headquarters, but she buried her story in my heart like a match waiting for a light.

--

A sound woke me. When I sat up I heard nothing but silence. Then a flash of light like a lighthouse in the dark and the shuffling of feet. The nurses were rising in the dark and the air smelled of sickness. The cold smell of heat at night surrounded me. I was driven into the darkness. I had no role to play but I went.

There was no moonlight this night. Inside the clinic I felt whispers in languages I did not know. The whispers oozed into my senses without meaning and amplified my displacement. The smell of cold dirt was mixing with warm blood on a cement floor. The cement floor served as a painter’s palette to mix up the colors of life as it came and went. I kept smelling dying fires and burned corn. The fire light was yellow and amber and not enough. Nurses shivered across the cement block building.

Then I saw her. The woman who greyed my line between right and wrong.

At the end of the hallway, on a small stool, she sat with her head hanging in silence in the dark. In my memory, everything is dark and fuzzy. Like an old movie that shakes and scratches while telling its black and white story. All the senses were made insignificant by the smell of dying fires, cooking corn, cold heat, and warm blood on that cement painter’s palette.

Her skirt was covered in blood. She left a pool of it on the floor under her seat. The whispers sounded of frustration and desperation.

Someone kept trying and failing to start the ambulance. The motor turned over and died. It turned over and died. Its sound was more offensive to the night than its death. I moved against a wall and squatted to the floor. I could not leave but I could not help. Something was wrong. This was bad. But no one used words I could understand.

I watched the puddle of blood under her feet grow larger as I grew afraid of the smell of dying fires.

In the darkness, my protective translator appeared. He squatted beside me. “I don’t understand,” I whispered in a stricken voice, “Tell me.”

“Abortion by witch doctors,” he said, “they won’t try to let her live. God decides now.”

The woman was alone and silent. The nurses talked about her but not to her.

I wanted to hide from the night and unknow the knowledge that was making its way into my life. But instead I hid my eyes and watched from between my arms that smelled of sticky two day old sweat.

A motorcycle pulled up to the clinic door. With insufficient help, the woman lifted her bloodied skirt and sat on the narrow seat. Her body would be shaken and martyred upon the pothole filled roads. The staff washed away the only evidence of the woman. The sharp antiseptic smell of Dettol overpowered all other smells, only briefly, then the blood was gone and the smell of burned corn returned.

Another match in my collection. I asked no questions. I sought no answers. I deleted her from active thought.

And the woman? She and the half-birthed baby were buried the next day. I never knew her name.

--

Inside a fence made of sticks and dried grass lived girls. We called them UAMs. Unaccompanied minors. These were the acronyms we used to shorten the vocabulary of death and distance us from human suffering.

UAMs were girls who arrived in the refugee camps without families or adults. Humanitarian codes required that unaccompanied children be housed separately from adults, separated by gender, and in protected areas. So, in a camp full of soldiers, we put all the girls unprotected by the family behind a fence made of grass.

These girls were our responsibility. Bound by Southern religious assumptions of feminine purity, we insisted that sex play no role in their unmarried lives. We forbid sex education, denied access to contraceptives, and taught them how to make necklaces.

I agreed with our consent to local custom that only married women were allowed access to contraceptives. Sex before marriage was a sin in their culture and mine. I knew it was a sin.

I also knew that sex and marriage could be separated. I smuggled my tiny pills in my unsearched bags and slid condoms in my pocket. I didn’t have to ask or tell. I knew these girls needed contraceptives but I was silent. I could not look at my own hypocrisy. I held tightly to the harsh distinction between right and wrong. I would close my eyes and pursue righteousness.

Girls this young and alone did not justify my use of a translator’s time, so I never knew the words they said or the lives they lived. I sat with them in silence surrounded by gentle giggles.

The local overseer found thin metal shims and cleaning products in the latrine. Conversations among the chief elders resulted in summary judgement. Adult men took them to the community’s makeshift jail and beat them. The united men slapped her, kicked her in the stomach, and struck her with sticks. The eldest was 15.

Among those who did not have consistent food or water, they would remain poorer still. They left behind daughters whose place in the world was to be much the same. Knowledge of their past made them victims for their lifetimes. They would be one of many wives who bore children without choice.

While my organization did not condone the beating of these girls, we did nothing to stop it, nothing to help them. They were bad girls. They had sex before marriage. They wanted abortions. Our leaders said the words I had spoken many times before. The sanctity of life. Life upon conception. The consequence of sin.

In the shadows of my judgement, I googled abortion clinics then deleted the search history. Strangers would never reconcile my spoken morality and my contradictory behavior. My body was protected by my money, my choice, and my independence, yet I was entirely unaware of my powerful possessions.  

The story of their exposure heightened my protectiveness over my body, but I never spoke my understanding of their bodies. I never admitted to our similarities.

I did not delete their story. I did not write it.

----

My organization wanted to ensure its employees maintained their faith throughout their employment and new job offers were the perfect opportunity to do a status check on our faith. She began her interview abruptly.

“Do you believe women should have access to safe and legal abortions?”

Drip. Drip. Drip.

I saw the blood growing under her chair one drop at a time.

“Uhh. I. I..um.”

“Do you believe women should have access to safe and legal abortions?”

I felt the scratch of metal on concrete. I heard the putter of a dying motorcycle. I was hot again. I saw her unmoving legs.

“Safe?”

“Yes, it says right here, the Women’s March supports access to safe, legal abortions. Do you also believe women should have access to safe and legal abortions?”

The blood puddle was spreading. It was spreading all over my feet. My legs were covered. My hands. All I could smell was heat, antiseptic, blood, and burned corn.

Her voice was sharp. It was condescending and sour with false sweetness. She was prepared. I was not. She laid her trap well.

I had been prepared to say, “I believe life begins at conception.” That was the language of the mission statement. But she didn’t use the words of the mission statement. She caught me. My Facebook had given me away. I liked the Women’s March. I liked abortions.

She repeated the question again. Like a jackhammer on a soft spot of ground. An unnecessary show of force and thoroughly destructive.

Every time she said safe, I saw blood. I was shaking yet frozen in place.

She wanted me to say, “No, I do not believe women should have access to safe and legal abortions.”

But I couldn’t. My world had caught on fire. The reckoning I had so carefully avoided found me with a simple question.

“We lost two lives that day,” I said, with the strength of a spider’s web, “I guess I’d rather lose one than two.”

“So, you think women should have safe and legal access to abortion?”

“Safe. Yes. It should be safe. Maybe she wouldn’t be dead. Maybe they wouldn’t be.”

I heard her fingers typing furiously in the pause.

“Thank you. I will convey your passion. So, your pay request is not something we can match.”

“OK.”

“We will prayerfully consider this. It should take a couple weeks.”

“OK.”

My job offer was prayerfully withdrawn.

----

The organization that was the entirety of my adult life – and the world that reared me to adulthood – had now rejected me. They threw me into a violent world armed with a bible and a notebook. But when I came back damaged and questioning, they closed the door.

Like a splinter that finally reveals itself with an infection, the matches that buried themselves in my heart found their tinderbox and exploded. I saw the lame woman and her babies slumped in the red dirt. I saw the bodies that had piled up over the years. I saw my notebooks filled with stories that went unwritten. I saw with clarity the woman and her witch doctor abortion. And I saw the bad girls beaten for their abortion attempts.  

My soul, my religion, my world, and my actions were reconciled in this fire their lives created. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair that so many lives were used to burn down my world and rebuild it. But it happened.

Life had been so simple. I thought right was unblemished. I was confident in the constancy of wrong. Morality had no indictments, no contradictions to account for, no questions to answer.

Then the amber light flashed before me, I smelled burned corn, and I saw a grave dug for two.

I at last shamelessly accepted the reality of our shared female bodies and my knowledge was made complete. The consequences these women faced are not the result of her choices. They are the consequences of her violent world and our intentional ignorance of her body.  

Look at her swollen beaten face. Look at the blood run down her legs. Lift her hanging head and tell her sin has consequences. Tell her that child bleeding through her legs is innocent.

I would never say it again.

These women redefined my understanding of right and wrong. They burned my morality to the ground and rebuilt it in humanity. They freed me from shame and hypocrisy. They gave me an understanding of life that looked not for accountability and absolutes but that brought me to my knees.

The spilled blood of the judged must be indistinguishable from our own. Until it is, we are all hypocrites. Righteousness is the shameless acceptance of our shared human bodies. Our bodies that relentlessly chase the golden light of evening ever haunted by the darkness we know must follow.