Accident

I spent the day at the Children's hospital, sitting with "P"'s wife. 

They have two sons: a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old. 

"P" is in Texas, at an English course in preparation for a year at the Navy Postgraduate school. This is the first time this young Cameroonian family has been in the U.S., so "P"'s pregnant wife and two sons were excited to travel to Newport and spend a year there. 

Eve visited them a couple weeks ago. The boys had been watching American television and couldn't wait to go to MacDonald's. "Mac-doe!" they shouted at her, jumping up and down, "Mac-doe! Mac-doe!"

Yesterday, the boys fell out of a window on the third floor of their apartment building. There aren't screens on windows in Cameroon, so it probably wasn't obvious that the screen wouldn't somehow protect them. But it didn't. 

The 2-year old broke his head. A neighbor dialed 911. The ambulance was close. The surgeons acted quickly, cut out a part of the skull to relieve pressure on the swelling brain. He's in the ICU, with so many tubes coming out of his little body. And I'm grateful for every one: every engineer whose ever worked to get the calibration on the cranial pressure gauge just right; the respirator engineers and the scientists who figured out how to rig a narrow tube to put food in his belly. 

The 4-year-old is, miraculously, fine. I played with him for hours, coloring pictures, assembling Legos and Mr. Potato Head and train tracks. He laughed and played and ran around in the children's courtyard, climbing up to impossible heights and launching himself into my arms. Fearless. And I looked up at the building surrounding the couryard - counting one, two, three windows up.