About a year ago exactly, my girlfriend and I were coming back from spending a month volunteering in an orphanage in Buea, Cameroon. During that month we did many things and met a lot of people, like Harmony. She was a 1 year old girl who was part of the group of babies of the orphanage. She caught out attention from the very beginning, as she wasn’t able to walk or crawl, which at her age was quite strange. She had no physical disability, but when you live in a place where there are no more than 5 adults taking care of 100 children, there aren’t enough hands to help you give take your first steps, literally. There were thirteen babies like he. The way this orphanage worked was by assigning one of the 7-8 year old veteran kids to the new baby orphans that arrived. These veteran orphans were the ones in charge of feeding the babies or changing the pieces of cloth they used as diapers. But those kids were children, and 7 year old children should play and learn, not become parents. Our work there was mainly focused on helping these kids take care of the babies. We would arrive and feed them, change them and take them out of where they slept so they wouldn’t always breathe the same filthy air or so they wouldn’t spend all day laying in their cradles that never ever dried from their own urine.
We spent a lot of time with Harmony. She always ate with a smile on her faced and never stopped being happy. She loved looking at us, playing with our watched or bracelets and touching in amazement Elisa’s blonde hair. We decided we would teach her how to walk and slowly we did it. We did it in the only was possible; being by her side and giving her confidence.
We asked about her story and they told us that unlike the majority of the other kids from the orphanage, she hadn’t been abandoned. She had a mother and a twin sister who both died during her birth. Dying during birth is very common in Africa. They died because when giving birth in a street full of feces and mud it is very easy to get infections. Infections which can be treated with antibiotics which still haven’t reached Cameroon.
Our month passed and we returned to Spain. One of the two people in charge of the orphanage, Mr. Fritz, promised he would write to us from time to time to tell us how things were going. His last e-mail arrived on the 20th of August. In it, he summarized how things had been going and ended the e-mail telling us that Harmony had left them. Telling us that at 12pm on the 10th of June without any explanation, she had stopped living. The cause was unknown and there were no highways in Cameroon anyway to try and discover it. Elisa and I were together when we read the e-mail and at that moment out bodies froze. We all know that children die in Africa because of the conditions in which they live, but not everyone knows that it happens to a beautiful baby named Harmony with who you have spent a month and have taught how to walk. At that moment we felt useless, we started thinking that on the 10th of june, at 12pm, we were at the beach after finishing our exams. We could have gone back after our exams, we could have taken her to a hospital that day, we could have spent 10€ on a doctor and medications, we could have saved her life. Maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe she was born with AIDS and was dying from the day she was born. One day when I was there I asked one of the workers how many kids had AIDS. He told us he didn’t know because the tests needed to diagnose the virus were to expensive.
You start to think of how you helped for that month, and then left. You left because you had your life here. Here, in Madrid, Elisa and I (especially her) help with children that have problems, that suffer the unjust consequences of drugs, abandonments and abuses. But none of these kids will die one morning with no explanation. Children that die like that are in other parts of the world, but especially in Africa. In Cameroon, Mali, Ghana, Kenya, Ethiopia or Sudan, more than 5 million children die a year from hunger, thirst and illnesses which in our country would be cured with a few pills.
I left, I continued by life here in Madrid, but there are people who went and stayed. People like Alvaro Perez-Pla, who left to Kenya and decided to continue his life there. Dreaming of opening and orphanage and avoiding unjust situations like that of Harmony.
Because of all of this, I wanted to write this post. I wanted to be able to transmit as quickly as possible the sensation that I have of impotence of not being able to do anything for Harmony. For all of those who read these words, you can realize that organisations like Más Por Ellos and heroes like Alvaro change the world and save lives.
Ignacio Ruiz Gallardón
‘‘What is difficult can be done. What is impossible should be tried.’’
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