The Foreign Service Journal, October 2003

of garbage and tributaries of sewage. We knocked on tin doors and crouched on the stoops of many of the makeshift dwellings, looking for children without purple fingernails. One mother met us halfway down the street, gesturing approvingly for us to enter her house. “Doctor, doc- tor, come,” she kept saying. She led us into a small room with a dirt floor where we met her son. She pointed at him and said “doctor,” then nod- ded. Her son was already suffering from polio. My eyes glued them- selves to the floor and blood rushed to my face in indigna- tion and embarrassment as the translator stood and explained that there was nothing we could do for him. Ten steps down the side street and we arrived at the next lean-to. No parents were around, but the grandmother and a 5-year-old that had already come to our station at the school crouched in the doorway. The only other child in the house had not been able to make it to the center of the vil- lage: the smallest baby I had ever seen lay on a stiff straw mat in the corner. Seventeen days old, she weighed maybe five pounds; the tiny girl had not even been named yet. The other volunteers and I cringed as we opened her lips and deposited one, two, three drops of the vaccine. She recoiled in protest but no audible cries came from her tiny body. A wave of sad- ness hit me but remained unspo- ken; we all suspected that this baby would be dead in a few days. When I returned home that evening, my own insulin and dia- betes supplies practically gleamed with modernity and cleanliness. Such fancy, imported medical supplies seemed garish when con- trasted with the lack of even the most basic health care in the rural village. It has been two years since I waved goodbye to those kids I had so little time to get to know, but there is something about children’s faces that stick in one’s mind. I am now involved in peace activism and humanitarian work (from a distance) with the citizens of Iraq, but the children of that Indian village are reflected in— almost superimposed on— those Iraqi faces. As the world discusses terrorism and violence on a glob- al scale, I wonder who is trying to stop the slower, silent killers of all those children who live in poverty around the world. ■ O C T O B E R 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 59 As we rambled down potholed roads toward the outskirts of New Delhi on the rickety old bus that morning, I had to wonder whom I was kidding.