For Maxence, even four days with her had been enough.
He planned to become a priest, as he had for years. He had worked for long years to earn a doctorate in theology to become a Jesuit, and so he spread his large hands on the table and refrained from either discouraging Alfonso or throwing him up against a wall and demanding he never speak to Dree again.
Maxence had no claim on Dree.
He could never have a claim on Dree.
It didn’t matter that Maxence thought she was beautiful, kind, intelligent, and perhaps the most incredible person he’d ever met.
Maxence was going to become a priest for so very many reasons, and that meant Dree would date and marry some other man and not him.
He said, “Alfonso, she’s an absolutely wonderful woman. You would be lucky to have her.”
Chapter Eight
One High-Tech Preemie Mono-Tasker
Dree
Hundreds of small villages dotted the foothills of the Himalayas in the Jumla district of Nepal. The settlements had sprouted up around rivers in the sharp valleys cut by snowmelt water flowing down the mountains.
Dree’s days followed the same pattern: rising early to evaluate possible sites for the NICU micro-clinics, and then riding her motorcycle with the five guys to another village that was desperately in need of healthcare, where Dree would once again work herself to exhaustion. She didn’t complain because there was no use whining about it. She’d been raised to be stronger than that and not to bleat about doing a job that had to be done.
She was dimly aware that she could have just not done it. She could have denied being a nurse practitioner and not mentioned the dwindling medical supplies in her motorcycle’s saddlebags and her backpack, but not giving these people her time and supplies felt cowardly, weak, and simply evil.
As they drove farther into the mountains and away from the larger towns, the children seemed increasingly small for their ages.
When Dree had rotated through the peds wards, she’d been introduced to the racially corrected growth charts. Growth averages were different for children whose ancestors were from different parts of the world. Children of Asian descent were often on the lower end of the overall bell curve in both birth weight and eventual height and weight, and one needed to know that when evaluating whether to suspect a problem or not. A child of Asian descent might be growing perfectly naturally and be in excellent health, but a Black child with the same initial weight and growth curve should be evaluated further for health conditions that were inhibiting their growth. It made sense that Nepali children in Southeast Asia would be smaller than she was used to seeing in the southwestern United States.
Her nurse’s eyes needed to adjust.
This was Dree’s hypothesis until they arrived in a small village where they passed very few farm fields as they rode into town on their motorcycles.
A mother brought a small female child of perhaps six years old into the clinic, complaining that the child would not stop crossing her eyes. Two of the mother’s friends, whom Batsa said were her cousin and sister-in-law, hovered behind the mother, nodding whenever she said anything to Batsa.
When Dree examined the small girl, she found the child had almost all her adult teeth, which meant she had to be at least twelve or thirteen.
When Dree asked the mother how old the girl was, the mother agreed that the child had been born thirteen winters before, a number Batsa confirmed several times before relaying it to Dree.
Dree knew all the reasons why a child might have such stunted growth. She examined the child for other nutritional deficiencies, including rickets and lack of protein.
She found just about everything she looked for.
Dree pulled Maxence over to one side and told him what she thought.
He squeezed his eyes shut and nodded. “I could tell by her eyes and the way she was walking that malnutrition was probably an issue. When we were setting up, it looked like all the children here show signs of it.”
That wasridiculous.“Why are we building ten-thousand-dollar brick and cement neonatal intensive care units for premature babies instead of preventing malnutrition in these children for a few bucks?”
He sighed. “They need everything; all of them do. It’s not their fault, and it is our responsibility to help them. I don’t think we should be building NICU units at all.”
Her chest hurt like a cramp. “That’s not what I meant. Of course, we should be trying to save the lives of preemies. Last week when we got to the village too late to save that baby… That still upsets me.”
“That’s not what I meant. I mean that the basic plan here seems wrong. The Catholic Charities organizers are usually better about things like this. I’m worried that this is one of those projects where they didn’t consult anybody on the ground before they decided to do it.”
That wasn’t what she meant. “But surely, there are no bad charity projects,” she said.
Maxence said, “I was in Somalia and the Central African Republic a few years ago with a different group that I’m not working with anymore. They brought in a bunch of upper-middle-class white teenagers to dig wells for the village. Their parents wanted to ‘turn them around’ because they were mouthing off or failing classes in their private schools, so they spent thousands of dollars for their spoiled offspring to go dig a well in Africa so they would appreciate their privilege.”
