The Counseling Room

March 17, 2005

The counselor beckons, so I inch down the thin dark passage and squeeze into the counseling room. A small boy and his grandmother sit waiting, her hand resting gently on his. They have been given the news, the soft-voiced counselor explains, and by news we both know what he means.

I look over at the boy and his grandmother, close enough to touch. There are all the years of life between them – her cheeks sunken with age, his eyes set like moons in the creaseless skin of his face. Were it not for the nature of this room, you would not guess that the tragedy is his.

I turn back to the counselor, who offers their story. Both of the boy’s parents are dead, the counselor begins, killed by the virus they have left him. My eyes turn to the small child, who is four-years-old and does not move so much as a finger. His shoes are ragged, and his tiny waist is lost in the knot of a green sweater borrowed for the morning walk to the hospital. But there is more – as if there can be more for a child who has lost his parents. They are all gone now, the counselor offers, the child’s mother and all six of her siblings – swept away as if by a broom, the grandmother adds.

The thin yellow curtain across the doorway rustles as other people shuffle past to get their news in other rooms. I stare at the strength of this woman, her eyes deep set, her face ancient but firm – this old woman who must be a young mother again. She is eighty-five and she begs now for food, the counselor says.

But it is the boy’s face that keeps drawing my eyes. In light of the news he seems impossibly small, swallowed by his wooden chair. His expression is unblinking. He seems almost to understand it all, as if having long-since processed the news he is allowing me space to reach the same unconditional acceptance, to join him in that place where he is. But I cannot cast a single line across the foot of space between us – a four-year-old boy, his world erased, and me with everything.

With nothing more left to learn, they rise to leave. The grandmother gathers a small green file from the desk in which are folded the first pages of the child’s new life as a patient. In it are buried the ugly block letters of this latest burden, divined from the child’s blood like some secret, cryptic message, and boiled down to the single word they came today to hear: DETECTED. If the doctors deem him a candidate, he will receive the anti-retroviral medications Nsambya has to offer. If he is lucky, he will live to see his twelfth birthday.

The old woman and the boy slip through the curtain – she hunched and shuffling, he tiny and willing – his borrowed sweater limp on his hips as they move down the dark passage into the light of the day.