choices

Five years ago this month, I was living in Rwanda. My sister had just left for the US on the same plane as my boss, and I was truly on my own in Africa for the first time. Days later, my friend and coworker D.'s husband died. He was 35, and he died of pneumonia. 35 year old men do not just die of pneumonia, not anywhere, not even in Africa. It's not such a different place than here. He died of AIDS, and we all knew it, although we none of us said it.

I have written before about his wake, how I sat on the floor in their bedroom, holding D. while she cried, while his body lay on the bed behind, a bandage wrapped around his head to keep his jaw closed. How I felt honored to be a woman among women where women handle the weight of death, and how I wanted to cry, "I'm not old enough for this!" I may not have written this part before, but that night when I slept in my own bed in my hotel, the Auberge Beausejour where I always stayed in Kigali from the first night I spent in the country, I woke up in the dark afraid to turn over, afraid that I might fight a dead body there next to me in the bed.

I got an email from D. today. She asks if I've forgotten about her, and if I can send some money. She had meningitis and was in the hospital for a month. It's from the "syndrome" she says, and I know. She hasn't had a job since I closed the country program for the organization I worked for in Rwanda. Jobs are hard to find, and she doesn't have many qualifications.

I don't know what to say. How can I say that I fall behind every month myself, that I'm more in debt than I was last month or two months ago, that I owe more money to two banks than she has ever or will ever see? How can I say that I need this money for organic milk and a nice interview suit when she has four kids who need food and school with an unemployed mom and no dad? How can I say that I bought new contacts this month and I thought longingly of a trip to Africa, that I went to Ethiopia for the month that she was in the hospital with meningitis?

I can't, and so I never answered last time she emailed, probably the last time I wrote about this. I stayed silent, and I didn't act. She is desperate, and I am... well, I feel helpless, but the truth is that I am not helpless. I make choices, and if I am completely honest, I have chosen to spend my money, what little I make, in a thousand different ways these last months, and none of them helped her. Not at all.