Two Years of Wonder - A Memoir

Chapter 11: Ted & Rosa Maria

Rosa Maria has died. She was one of my volunteers and in the past few days as I've watched her deteriorate, I have done so with the knowledge that my actions led to her death.

Isabella, a seven-year-old at the home, asks me why Rosa Maria died. She thinks only children die.

"Then what happened to all your parents?" I ask her. A casual reader might be shocked at my candor, but many of the children, like Isabella, don't even remember their parents. The Rainbow parents are the only ones they have now, but they know generally that their birth parents are no longer in their lives.

Rosa Maria was a stooping woman with shoulder-length gray hair and skin that had been sunburned many times. Her eyes were sunken and rarely met my own gaze. She had a long nose that was as prominent as a shark fin rising out of the water. She usually wore jeans, a khaki vest full of pockets, and a baseball cap. She was clearly at that point in her life when attracting the opposite sex was somewhat low on her priority list. She dressed functionally. With that vest, she looked like another mzungu ready to take on the bush.

Rosa Maria turned out to be quite the eccentric. Her English was not great and she was unable to learn the names of the children except for one of the babies she took a liking to. The rest of the children she referred to as cukculuku, Kiswahili for "rooster," and the children called her the same name back. It seemed appropriate.

The staff loved her. Kenyans seem to have an appreciation for eccentricity or even sometimes outright silliness. It's a typical Kenyan trait to look past anyone's faults as long as they make you laugh. I found it one of their most endearing national characteristics.

On paper Rosa Maria looked like the perfect volunteer. She was an Italian citizen. She was fifty-seven, retired, on a pension, and had worked as a UN volunteer in Burundi, Rwanda, and Kosovo, when those hot spots were at their hottest. So her resume made her look as if she was committed, flexible, resilient.

She was actually falling apart. She had a drinking problem. How long she had had it, I never found out. It never interfered with her work at the home. She would work from eight in the morning until five in the evening, often without a break. She would work in the kitchen, help in the nursing room, or dig in the garden. It was only three months into her six-month stay that I found more than two dozen wine and liquor bottles all thrown into the trash bin outside her room at once. One of her roommates noticed that she drank a glass of vodka like it was water before bed each night. She asked Rosa Maria why and she replied that after working in regions where there has been incomprehensible slaughter, she had nightmares about soldiers coming to kill her and mountains of dead bodies. The alcohol made her sleep more soundly.

Needless to say I was relieved when she finished her time with the home and I was distressed when she showed up a few weeks later just back from the airport, falling down drunk, insisting that she was back from Italy in order to volunteer indefinitely.

I'd heard that one was never supposed to fire a drunk. But I also knew I could not let her live in the home again with her drinking problem. I told her she could work at the home but she had to live elsewhere until she sobered up.

She found an apartment in Dagoretti living with some staff members from the home. For all intents and purposes she was a faithful volunteer.

Then one weekend she went down to Mombasa. A few weeks after she returned, she fell ill with a fever and chills. She said her joints hurt. We told her she needed to be tested for malaria. She refused. On a Tuesday I visited her apartment. She said she was feeling better, although I didn't believe her. I returned Thursday and no one answered her door. I tried to believe that she had gone to a doctor. The next day Eve called me and told me she had seen Rosa Maria in the internet café.