“Right,” she said. “Me, either. It didn’t look infectious. There were skin discolorations, but it wasn’t a rash. There wasn’t a wound that it stemmed from. It didn’t look like a parasite or a bacteria or a virus. A month is too long for most infectious diseases to slowly progress unless it was leprosy or tuberculosis, which it wasn’t. This was disseminated and progressive and weird.”
“Why were you looking in his mouth?” Maxence asked.
“His gums were puffy and swollen. His teeth were loose. He was just a little boy, and his adult front teeth shouldn’t have been loose at all. It wasn’t like he’d gotten hit or something, though. All his teeth were the same degree of loose.”
“It’s odd,” Max said. He felt like he should know what this was.
Dree shook her head and cared for her other patients, but Max could see she was fretting about the little boy.
As soon as they closed the door on her clinic and began to pack up the supplies for the motorcycle ride back out to the campsite, Dree said, “It’s got to be something. He was around six years old. He wouldn’t have lived this long if he had some inborn error of metabolism. I mean, they’re all skinny, but they don’t seem malnourished like some other villages we’ve seen.” She ran her hand down the side of her waist and over her hip, emphasizing her hourglass figure. “I wouldn’t call any of the people here curvy, though.”
Maxence’s mouth had gone dry, and he stared down at his motorcycle boots because his hands wanted to follow hers over her lush body. “No, I wouldn’t call any of these villagers curvy.”
When he looked up, Dree was staring at him. “What’d you say?”
Maxence muttered, “I just said I didn’t think that anyone here has your curves.”
“No,” she said.“Scurvy.You saidscurvy.Oh my word, that’s it. I would never have thought that that little boy might havescurvy.An eighteenth-century British sailor trying to sail to the Maldives would get scurvy, not a little boy, now.But that’s it.It explains the gums, and the loose teeth, and the bleeding under the skin and into his joints. He needs vitamin C. If we give him some vitamin C, he’ll be fine in a week.”
“I’ve read about it in history books, but never seen it before.” Max sighed. “And that explains the child’s abominable body odor and breath. Scurvy causes both as the body rots away from the inside, out.”
Dree nodded, her eyes wide. “I know,right?That poor kid. That poormom.”
Maxence had thought it might be a symptom, and it was.
She was already digging through their supplies, discarding multivitamins and other supplements until she found packages of drink mixes with large doses of vitamin C. She held them up. “The sisters thought of everything. I thought they threw these in so we’d have something to put in our water bottles for taste.We have vitamin C.”
“Excellent,” Maxence said, smiling. She was just so adorable when her eyes flashed with excitement like that.
One of her eyebrows dipped. “But why would he be so affected when none of the other kids are?”
Batsa had been helping them pack up, and he said, “Vitamin C is found in fresh fruits and greens.”
“Right,” Dree said, but her voice was low like she already knew that.
Batsa continued, “No fresh food has grown around here for two months. None of the kids have been eating anything fresh since early October. Why was this kid the only one to get scurvy?”
Dree was scooping their supplies into their backpacks so they could leave. “Most other mammals, like cows and pigs and dogs, make vitamin C in their bodies. Humans and primates are one of the very few animals that don’t make vitamin C and have to get it from our food. That’s why it’s anessentialvitamin, because we can’t build it.”
“It’s heat-inactivated,” Max said, musing. “She said he was eating cooked food, but not milk.”
“—Right,” Dree said, thinking about it. “The mother said that he wasn’t drinking milk. But milk doesn’t have vitamin C—” She snapped her fingers.“Americanmilk doesn’t have vitamin C because it’spasteurized.These guys are drinking raw milk, straight from the ewe,um,the cow or yak.Rawmilk has vitamin C in it because other animals make it, and especially powdered milk does. If all the other kids are drinking milk or eating yogurt and this kid isn’t, then that explains it.”
Maxence zipped the backpacks up and slung one over each arm. “Batsa, do you know where that kid lives?”
Batsa hoisted a heavy cardboard box and balanced it on his shoulder. “I can talk to people and find out.”
With Batsa engaging every person they saw, it took only a few minutes for them to figure out which house the little boy lived in. Everyone knew how sickly he was and had been praying their kids didn’t get whatever he had.
At the house, Batsa translated as Dree emphasized that the little boy must start drinking milk, especially powdered milk from the tiny store but also fresh milk. They mixed the vitamin C powder into water, and luckily, it made a refreshing orange drink that the boy guzzled right down.
They left seven more packets with the family, instructing them to make one drink per day for the boy, and then they returned to the campsite for the night.
The mother-in-law who had attended the appointment assured Batsa that she would mix the powder for the boy every day, and after this week, the boywouldeat several servings of milk and yogurt every day, and there would be no disagreement.
Maxence smiled at her and bent to touch the mother-in-law’s feet, and she said a blessing over him. With his family and a strong matriarch around him, that child was going to be okay.
Because Maxence had lived in Africa and Latin America for so long, the crucial importance of families and communities had become apparent to him. Europe and the United States seemed to have lost that cohesion and strong sense of belonging in the hustle to advance technologically. Social media seemed to be a woefully inadequate substitute.
