The woman stretched out her bony hand, and her knuckles were rigid and knobby, like knots on an old oak tree. I wrapped my hand around hers, and my skin glowed white against the blackness of hers. It was the first time I’d ever touched a person with AIDS. Well, at least that I knew of. I thought I’d feel scared, but standing there with her hand in mine, I wasn’t.
“Habari,” I said. She smiled back, revealing a gap in her mouth where her two front teeth used to be. Then she put her arm around me to lead the way inside the small home with a corrugated metal roof.
There were twelve women crammed in the main room. Some of them had scarves tied around their heads, some wore beaded necklaces, and all were draped in long skirts that covered their ankles. There wasn’t any furniture apart from a low table and five empty wooden chairs. The women stopped speaking when Jen, Amanda, Irene, and I tucked our heads to duck through the doorway. “Habari!” they called in unison.
“Msuri sana!” The four of us gave the now-automatic response, standing so close to one another that our shoulders were touching. The women just stared back at us expectantly.
“Are we supposed to say something?” I whispered to Jen after a few seconds of awkward silence. Before she could answer, the first plump woman I’d seen yet in Kenya besides curvy Mama Sandra strutted over and grabbed Amanda’s hand.
“Thank you for coming to visit the Masaba widows’ group. My name is Rose, and I’m the secretary.” We each introduced ourselves, and Rose asked, “Did Joshua tell you of our purpose?”
“He said you’re a support group for women who’ve lost their husbands and that you’ve started businesses using micro-finance,” Irene announced for our watchful audience. We could always count on Irene to take charge—I’d had yet to see anything intimidate her, not even killing a chicken for our dinner. “If I can’t kill a chicken, then I shouldn’t eat meat,” she’d declared as a flurry of feathers whizzed by us in the cooking hut. Like Amanda, I’d become a vegetarian in the weeks we’d been living so close to our food.
Indeed, Joshua had explained that many of the widows had lost their husbands to AIDS, and many had also become HIV-positive themselves. Common Ground and Village Volunteers helped come up with small loans for the women so they could start their own businesses to support themselves and maybe even send their kids to school.
“Let us eat first, and then we’ll show you the kiosk,” Rose said, gesturing for us to sit in the rickety chairs. Some of the women had set up small stands in front of their homes to sell staples such as rice, salt, and eggs to their neighbors. Three of the women disappeared behind a back door, and I spied a black pot set over an open fire before the door slammed closed again. The women returned minutes later, holding a pile of plates, silverware, and ceramic bowls heaping with ugali, kale, and beans.
“I had no idea they were going to cook for us,” Jen whispered.
“Yeah, Joshua hadn’t mentioned that,” Amanda agreed. At this point, we were used to going with the flow. Joshua had taken us on what we referred to as “field trips,” proudly showing off his many projects in the surrounding villages. This often called for stops at farms where he’d taught a family how to increase the amount of food they grew so they could feed themselves rather than have to rely on food from the markets. As soon as the farmers saw Joshua approaching, they’d stop their work and wave wildly. “Come, sit in my house,” they’d offer. And then Joshua and the four of us women would crouch on the edges of tattered chairs, or on the floor if there wasn’t enough seating, as our hosts stood before us. If there wasn’t a man around, there was sometimes a grave dug at the edge of the yard where he now rested. Sometimes they’d ask us if we’d like tea, but usually they didn’t have food or drink to offer. That’s why eating lunch with the widows’ group was so unexpected. We felt honored, and a little embarrassed about all the fuss.
Seated in the wooden chairs next to Rose, we spooned piles of beans and kale on top of the starchy ugali. The rest of the women ate standing, talking in small groups while Rose filled us in on their names and stories. “That’s Mary. She has twelve children. Her husband died of AIDS last year, and so did his other wife.”
I’d heard that Kenyan men sometimes had more than one wife, but I’d never met a man who was married to more than one woman at the same time.
“He had two wives. And when a woman’s husband dies, she loses everything. Her husband’s family can take her home, her cows, and even her children.”
“Seriously?” squeaked Amanda, echoing my astonishment.
“Yes, and when your husband dies, his brother can inherit you.” That’s another way HIV spreads, because a woman whose husband has died from the disease might be infected too and can pass it to his brother. That’s why the widows’ group was so important: it educated members about the disease and also helped them combine their money so they had better buying and negotiating power. It gave them more freedom. I thought about how different my life would have been if I had been born here in Kitale instead of upstate New York.
Rose paused to take a spoonful of ugali. Then she turned to me. “How many children do you have?”
“None,” I said.
Her eyes widened, startled. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Not even one, sistah? Not a single one?” she prodded.
“Um, not that I know of,” I said, trying to make light of the fact that I surely ranked at the bottom of the totem pole by Kenyan standards, where the more children you have, the higher your social status. In fact, it’s tradition that women change their names entirely when they deliver their first baby, adopting that of their child. For example, Joshua’s wife is called “Mama Sandra,” after her eldest daughter. At first I felt a little funny calling another grown woman “Mama,” but I quickly learned it’s a sign of respect.
“How many children do you have?” Amanda asked Rose.
“Only six,” she replied.
“And how old are you?” Jen chimed in.
“Twenty-seven,” said Rose.
Rose asked Jen, Amanda, and Irene how many children they had, and each shook her head to indicate she didn’t have any. Rose clapped her hands over her mouth, trying to keep from cracking up. “Not a single baby between all of you?” Her amused expression turned stricken.
“Don’t worry, Rose. We’re going to have babies just as soon as we return to America,” I said, hoping my pledge would relieve her concern. The other three girls animatedly nodded their heads in agreement.
On another field trip to a medical clinic a few days later, we met Sister Freda, as the locals called her out of respect. Leading Jen, Amanda, Irene, and me through her farm, she freed avocados from their branches with a flick of her wrist. Sister Freda was dressed in a white nurse’s uniform, and a silver cross dangled next to a stethoscope around her neck. Her face, the color of ebony, didn’t have many lines, so she looked as if she were in her early forties. I later learned that she was actually in her late fifties. She’d finished her work for the day, which called for treating the sick from surrounding villages who couldn’t afford to go to the hospital in Kitale. If she didn’t help them, many would probably die.
Joshua had insisted we stop by and meet Sister Freda. Although we were still doing dance classes and play rehearsals with the boarders every night, Joshua also wanted us to spend our days learning about a few of the other organizations Common Ground had partnered with, such as the widows’ group and this clinic.
Eager to explore the world outside Pathfinder’s gates, the girls and I flagged a boda boda and rode sidesaddle in our skirts. Our drivers dropped us at the matatu stand, which was really just a dusty street corner where a crowd of locals waited for the next van to arrive. We crammed in beside villagers clutching babies or chickens (or both) in their laps. The van eventually slowed down just enough so we could hop out, and we plodded along a red road crisscrossed by rivers of mud and bordered by cornfields.
About two miles down, we spotted a wooden sign that read: SISTER FREDA’S MEDICAL CLINIC. Rounding the bend, we converged into a clearing filled with a mass of people. “Oh, my God,” I said under my breath. Are all of these people waiting to see a doctor?
A line snaking around a whitewashed building teemed with skeletal men, rag-clad women holding hollow-eyed babies on their hips, and children with bloated stomachs, a telltale sign of malnourishment. The afflicted spilled from the front door, streamed around the sidewalk, and flooded the muddy road. Their pain stretched in front of us, wrapping all around until it was raw and real. I’d watched the faces of the porters on the Inca Trail light up after receiving open tubes of antibiotic ointment during the porter-tipping ceremony and Igo, the kid begging on the streets in Brazil, grin as if it were Christmas when Sam had bought him dinner at that sidewalk café. But now, for the first time on the trip, I saw poverty on a larger scale. Joshua’s house may have lacked electricity and running water, but still, he and his family had food. The boarders had school uniforms and a bed to sleep in. I suddenly understood that staying on Joshua’s farm was like living in a protected bubble. We’d been sheltered from the hunger and disease that were the reality for some rural Kenyans.
When we arrived, Sister Freda came outside to greet us, pausing along the way to pat the back of a waiting child or place a hand on an old man’s forehead. When she got to us, she ignored our outstretched hands and pulled us in for a hug. Despite the overwhelming need around her, she radiated calm and peace.
“God bless you for coming!” she said before gesturing us to follow her for a tour of the compound.
“We don’t want to take you away from your patients,” Amanda said, echoing my worry.
“I have doctors volunteering today who will be taking care of them,” she said, and so we followed her lead.
The shock started to melt, and I felt weirdly detached, as if my emotions had temporarily gone missing. Back home, pain meant a very different thing to me. I might’ve used the word “hurting” to describe a friend who’d gotten fired and was worried about making the rent. I might have called myself “devastated” after finding out a boyfriend had cheated on me. I might have felt life just couldn’t get any worse for the homeless man begging on the subway steps. But the thought “Will my neighbor die today?” or “Will I die today?” didn’t cross my mind the way it might have for someone waiting in line at Sister Freda’s clinic.
To cope, I put on my reporter hat and started firing off questions. “How much funding does it take to run the clinic—does the government help?” I asked Sister Freda while we walked in the farm behind the building.
“I don’t really understand your question,” she paused, twisting free another avocado before continuing, “I don’t receive money from the government, but I do raise some of what I need by growing crops on this farm.” She sold coffee, maize, bananas, avocados, pears, kale, and local vegetables such as dodo and sutcher sucker at a local market to earn income. The farm also helped her save on the cost of medications, since she harvested plants she could use in traditional remedies.
“But the government has to help you a little, right?” I asked, incredulous. A small farm couldn’t possibly pull in enough cash to run a healing center that treated hundreds of people.
She laughed at the question and explained no, but she channeled all the money from a few paying patients to buy meds and to help cover doctors’ wages. She also said a few churches back in the States helped support her work.
“Truthfully, most of my patients are poor and can’t afford a single Kenyan shilling,” she added. She’d watched men die of AIDS, leaving behind wives and children to live in makeshift shacks and forage for firewood and food in the slums outside Kitale. She believed it was just as much her responsibility to help those who couldn’t help themselves as it was anyone else’s. “Someone has to save them. Why shouldn’t it be me?”
I kept asking questions and learned that Sister Freda hadn’t been in a much better position than many of her neighbors. Like many rural women in Kenya, her family had married her off when she was barely fifteen years old to a man she didn’t know. By the time she was nineteen years old, she’d already had four children. But her husband had had lots of affairs, which had put her at risk for contracting HIV. Sister Freda was brave enough to actually file for divorce and cut ties with her husband, even though many Kenyan women wouldn’t because they depended on men for financial support. Only in Kenya financial support typically didn’t mean a house with a white picket fence but a hut with a cow-dung-coated floor to call home and chapatis to feed the kids.
Still, Sister Freda left her husband and didn’t ask him for help but was able to go to nursing school because her parents and sister took her in and watched her kids. Then she worked her way up at a private hospital in Kitale, caring mostly for wealthy patients. She’d accomplished something I took for granted as an American: she was able to earn a living as a woman on her own, without a husband.
Still, Sister Freda wanted to do more to help. She couldn’t wipe away the images tattooed into her mind of the poor crawling to the hospital each day but unable to reach it, some dying along the roadside. Rather than just shake her head over how wrong the situation was, she raised money to open a mobile clinic to bring treatment to those who couldn’t travel to the hospital, let alone afford payment. After ten years, her mobile healing center had expanded into the full-blown hospital we were walking through, thanks to donations, her personal savings, and funding from Richard—her longtime friend and second husband. She had even started a feeding program for the hundreds of poor children, and created a separate wing at the clinic for orphans who’d been literally abandoned on her doorstep. As her center grew, she left her coveted hospital position in Kitale, and some of her former coworkers from the hospital in Kitale even volunteered their services.
Sister Freda was the closest person I’d ever encountered to a living Mother Teresa, and I couldn’t hold back questions about how she’d done so much. As I spoke, she just clutched the cross around her neck, and I realized she’d never thought she was working alone. “It’s a miracle. When I’m deep in trouble with no medicine and a dying patient, I pray for help from the Lord and He answers, maybe by sending someone to pay an overdue bill or a visitor to give a donation,” she explained. “God is always here and listening to our prayers.”
In a land where AIDS has been called an epidemic, where many people can’t afford to eat, where girls are often married before their sixteenth birthdays and have little chance at a higher education, maybe the only way to keep going is to wrap yourself in faith. I watched Sister Freda, smiling in spite of witnessing so much suffering. She was living proof of how something as intangible as faith—in God for listening to her prayers, in herself for having the courage to divorce her husband and find a job, and in the goodness of other people for donating their time and money—can provide the power to make a real difference. Sister Freda carried her faith beyond the wooden walls of her Sunday church services, sharing it with the people forgotten on the roadside. She filled me with hope.
A toddler with a crop of rebellious braids and Cabbage Patch Kid features waddled into the dark room that served as the orphans’ nursery. There were seven adults crammed inside the roughly four-by-eight-foot space, with Sister Freda, another nurse, and the den mother named Agnes standing next to Jen, Amanda, and Irene near the doorway. I was perched on the edge of a narrow bed taking notes as Sister Freda told the story of how the orphanage had begun.
When I glanced up, the child locked her charcoal eyes on mine. Then she bolted past Sister Freda, Agnes, and everyone else in the room to fling herself onto my legs, burying her head in the folds of my skirt.
“Hey there,” I said, pulling her into my lap. She was wearing a striped shirt two sizes too big under a jean dress practically shredded into strips. She wrapped her little arms around my neck and stared into my eyes.
Sister Freda laughed in delight as Agnes stood guard. “I’ve never seen Esther approach a stranger like that!” said Sister Freda. But she didn’t feel like a stranger to me. As I held her little hand in mine, I had the most peculiar feeling we’d already met. It wasn’t logical, but that sensation of recognition was practically tangible. The professional reporter mask I’d been hiding behind slipped off the second that the child and I touched.
When I heard how Esther had found her way to Sister Freda’s, I felt as if I couldn’t breathe. A woman who might have been her grandmother, or maybe just another villager, had dropped Esther at the clinic when she was eight months old. Her mother was “deranged,” Sister Freda explained, and she’d drowned Esther’s older sister in a tub before disappearing into the bush.
By the time Esther got to Sister Freda, she was malnourished and had a near-deadly case of malaria. She was also deformed—her legs stuck straight above her head from her having been bound to her mother’s back for days on end. The villager handed her to Sister Freda with the parting words “If you can save her, save her. But if it’s not possible, it’s all right.”
“We gave her malaria medication and healthy food,” Sister Freda told us. “The nurses and I worked with her for over nine months to train her legs to come down and taught her how to walk. She mostly hopped around at first.” But to Sister Freda, “saving” Esther didn’t mean just providing her with food and medical care. She also blanketed her with love and offered her an education. I knew that if Sister Freda hadn’t stepped in, Esther could have died.
When Sister Freda headed for the door to signal that it was time for a tour of the medical facilities, I trailed behind Jen and Amanda, reluctantly handing Esther to Agnes. I was surprised when I felt Esther’s little body stiffen and when she sank her fingers into my hair, fighting to hold on to me as tears rolled down her face. “She doesn’t want you to leave. You can bring her with you on the tour,” Sister Freda encouraged. “You like children, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said softly. I’d always been drawn to kids, the way they can turn exploring even a dirt pile into an adventure, their ability to forget about everything else but whatever they are doing at the moment, and their tendency to say exactly what they feel when they feel it. I’d always known without a doubt that I wanted kids of my own. But I’d never before held a child who had already endured so much in her short lifetime. She was a survivor, and she was only three years old.
Our group trekked into the clinic with its bare walls and concrete floors. Hordes of people, from infants to those who looked as if they’d already lived three lifetimes, waited patiently in a hallway that was so narrow you could touch both walls with outstretched arms. They sat on wooden benches or leaned against the wall. Older children held little ones in their arms while younger brothers and sisters formed circles around them. They were sick, they were tired, and still they waited. Many had no money; Sister Freda’s clinic was their only hope.
I waded through the crowd with Esther on my hip, and she waved at the patients like a goodwill ambassador as we brushed past. Sister Freda proudly cracked the doors to show us where surgeries were done on operating tables that looked more like lounge chairs. There was also a closet-sized room lined with shelves that served as the pharmacy, but the shelves were only half filled with bottles and syringes. An assistant wearing a white jacket was busy taking inventory of the drugs in a spiral notebook. It was a task that wouldn’t take long.
“What kind of medicine do you need?” Jen asked. Unlike Amanda and me, who broke into a sweat around blood and needles, Jen felt completely at ease in hospitals. Both of her parents had nursing degrees, so she’d grown up exposed to medical lingo, and was as intrigued by hospitals as she was by airports and amusement parks. It had all made perfect sense once I’d discovered Jen loved being surrounded by tons of people—she rarely if ever wanted to sleep in a room alone on the trip or hang out solo in a coffee shop like I did.
Sister Freda’s eyes shined at Jen’s question, and she said they desperately needed saline solution and malaria medication. Jen promised to pick up supplies from a pharmacy in Kitale. Then Amanda turned to me with a huge grin. “Esther’s fast asleep,” she whispered, brushing her fingers across the child’s plump cheeks. Despite the commotion happening all around, Esther had closed her eyes and was snoring into my neck. Too consumed with taking in the tour, I hadn’t even noticed the pins and needles running down my arm from supporting her for the past hour. She definitely wasn’t underfed anymore and, in fact, felt as solid as a brick.
“Come, let us go to the house and have food,” Sister Freda invited as we shook the staff’s hands good-bye and walked across the spiky grass to a cottage painted white. A cat swatted at our feet as soon as we swung open the door.
“Hey, little guy,” Amanda purred as she reached down to scratch behind its ears. Esther was awake now, running her fingers through the ends of my ponytail and humming quietly. Sister Freda said I should probably return her to Agnes to be with the other children before we ate. But when I set her down, she started wailing. Her cries felt like icicles inside my chest. I tensed up, torn about what to do next. Agnes seemed on edge. She instructed me to walk away, saying that Esther would be okay, so I turned toward Sister Freda’s cottage, Esther’s cries fading with each step.
I thought about how frustrated Agnes must feel, nursing an abandoned kid back to health, only to have to console her after a Westerner who’d shown her a few hours of attention left to return to her comfortable life.
I’d never realized how many opportunities I’d been given simply because I’d been born an American. I’d learned that even going for my daily runs was a privilege, particularly after seeing how much attention a woman jogging attracted. When I’d sprint over red roads weaving through fields of sunflowers, the men would yell at me in astonishment, “Sistah, where are you going? Where on earth are you trying to go?” Groups of children chased after me like American kids might chase after the ice cream truck, and the little girls would ask, “Why are you training, sistah?” their pounding feet catapulting speckles of mud up their bare legs.
“To beat the boys!” I’d say and laugh. They shrieked and howled at the thought of a woman beating a man, and soon I had a following that rivaled Lance Armstrong’s.
It was a comment from Joshua, though, that really hit home. “My daughters are worth as much as my cows,” he’d stated matter-of-factly one day as we walked to a neighboring farm. “My daughters will get married and then leave to live with their husbands. It is my son who will stay to help with the farm and start a family.” And that was just the way things worked.
Still, Joshua lavished encouragement both on his daughters and on the girls he’d taken under his protection. One night after finishing a meal of chapatis and beans in his living room, he’d called for the boarders. The girls filed in, still wearing their school uniforms because they were the only clothes they owned apart from their Sunday dresses.
Joshua then plunged into what we’d soon learned was his standard motivational speech, telling the girls that the way to succeed was to study hard and stay away from boys. He looked hard at each girl individually as he spoke. When his eyes met Naomi’s, she said, “We shall not fail,” her brown eyes sparkling in the light cast from the kerosene lamp.
Joshua was definitely a godsend to these girls: not only did he take care of his own family and farm, he also granted kids who otherwise wouldn’t have had a shot to get an education. He was a living example for the children he stewarded that one person could make a difference.
After the girls left, Amanda mentioned what a talented dancer she thought Naomi was. “That girl is in trouble,” said Joshua.
“What do you mean?” Amanda asked, surprised.
“She’s pretty, and it’s the pretty ones that will be married young. Others, like Barbara, will be able to stay in school and get their education,” he explained. “The pretty girls don’t go far. Only an ugly woman could become president!”
Unfortunately, not all girls had a choice about whether they got to go to school or not. Some lived too far away to walk safely, while many couldn’t afford books and uniforms. Others had to work their family’s farm or take care of parents who might be sick from, say, malaria or HIV.
Besides getting married young, another all-too-real option for some girls was prostitution. Because they usually didn’t get the chance to go to school or have a family to take care of them, female orphans were likely to have few other options apart from marrying early or selling sex to survive. All of this flashed through my head as I listened to Esther’s cries fading in the distance.
As I cracked open the door to Sister Freda’s cottage, Jen and Amanda were setting the table. I’d just grabbed some plates to help distract myself from the tightening in my chest when Jen turned to me and said, “I really want to get medical supplies in town and bring them back here.”
“I’ll go with you whenever you want!” I said, jumping at the chance to see Esther again. I glanced out the window to the yard where I’d held Esther just moments before, now empty.
A few days later, a little body slammed into me from out of nowhere and a pair of arms wrapped themselves around my legs, almost toppling me. I regained my balance and turned around to see Esther grinning up at me with outstretched arms. I laughed, lifted her up, and swung her toward the sky.
“So we meet again,” I said as I hugged her to my chest.
Agnes came running across the yard in pursuit of the child who’d escaped from the playground as soon as she spotted me entering Sister Freda’s gates.
“She remembers you!” Agnes said, surprised.
“Hi, Agnes,” I greeted her, bouncing Esther on my hip. Jen stood next to me with the bags of the supplies she’d promised for Sister Freda. After spending the afternoon in Kitale to get the medicine and run errands, Irene and Amanda had hopped a matatu back to Pathfinder Academy. I’d stuck with Jen to ride to Sister Freda’s for the special delivery.
Simply being in Sister Freda’s presence both energized me and made me feel at peace. And I hadn’t stopped thinking about Esther since we’d met. I thought about her before I fell asleep. I thought about her when I woke up. I thought about her as I watched the boarders rehearse the play we’d written.
“We wanted to drop off these supplies to Sister Freda,” Jen announced.
“She’s in the clinic. I’ll take you to her.” Agnes led us past villagers waiting for care, Esther still attached to my hip and twisting the garnet studs I always wore in my ears. The line outside the clinic was much shorter today.
Sister Freda was bent over a table, giving a shot to a boy not much older than three who sat without flinching. A grin spread across her face when she saw us standing in her doorway. “You came back!” she said, delighted. “And you found Esther,” she added, waving to the child in my arms.
“Esther found her first,” Agnes said, recounting how she’d raced right over to me.
Jen held up the supplies, the bags heavy and dangling from her outstretched arms.
Sister Freda thanked her saying, “God has answered our prayers again!” and then instructed a nurse to take the goods to the “pharmacy.” On the matatu ride over, Jen had told me that the meds cost about a tenth of what they would back in the United States.
I thought about how most Kenyans wouldn’t be able to pay for prescriptions at American prices—most couldn’t even afford them at Kenyan prices. The sad fact was that many Americans couldn’t afford prescriptions either, despite living in one of the wealthiest nations in the world.
“Come, let me give you something in return,” Sister Freda said, leading us to her garden. Esther cooed into my neck as her little body bounced with each of my steps across the uneven ground. I noticed she had mud on her jean dress and, breathing her in, that she smelled like sunshine, grass, and dirt.
“Sister Freda?” I said. “There’s something I wanted to ask you. It’s about Esther.” Jen was trailing behind us, chatting with one of the nurses.
“Yes?” she said, looking at me expectantly.
“I’d like to sponsor Esther, to help out with whatever the costs are for her food, clothing, and education.”
She stopped midstride and wrapped me in a heart-stopping hug. Embarrassed, I felt my cheeks turn the color of pomegranate. My small gesture wasn’t a sacrifice. Sister Freda had quit her well-paying hospital job to spend her savings—and her life—healing the sick and poor. Sister Freda and Joshua were real-life heroes. They were the people who remained on the ground day after day, working to heal, to educate, and to save their neighbors. They’d given me something I didn’t even know I needed: the faith that one person could absolutely make a difference.
Still, it’s easy to get overwhelmed when faced with so much poverty, to turn away altogether. Sure, I’d seen the Christian Children’s Fund infomercials with Sally Struthers stating otherwise, pleading for viewers to just save one child. But now that I’d held Esther’s living, breathing, warm little body in my arms, I couldn’t simply change the channel. I could do something.
Six months from now, I’d probably return home to my safe bed, far away from Sister Freda’s clinic. Until then, one tiny thing I could do was share some money and leave Esther in Sister Freda’s—and God’s—hands. By vowing to myself to support her education until she graduated, I prayed that Esther wouldn’t have to marry young or turn to prostitution in order to survive. After finding Esther, I hoped that touching the life of just one person was enough—or at least a start.
As Jen and I left the farm, our arms were piled high with avocados, a gift from Sister Freda’s farm. Crossing over the threshold of the clinic’s gates, I wondered if I’d ever go back to that place and if I’d ever see Esther again.