The other day at work, I met a woman close to my age. When she was three days old, an oil lamp fell on her while her mama slept, burning her face and arm, fusing her chin to her chest and destroying one of her hands. She has three children, and when I asked her their ages, it took almost five minutes for her to explain that the youngest is nearly two, the middle one is five and that there's another boy, too, older than the rest. She can't remember how old he is. She can't do the math because she was never able to go to school.
This other mama sat up straight in her bed as she told me her story, a flood of details that spilled out through twisted lips and over clumsy tongue. I held her hand in mine, her three bent fingers finding their places in the spaces between mine while I thought of my own firstborn, of the thousands of photos, every detail of her short seven months carefully recorded and catalogued and stored away for future reference. I have an entire book of letters I wrote to her when she was still inside me, letters full of the promise and the hope of her.
All this mama has is a lifetime of pain and one bright spark of hope that, somehow, someday, she'll be able to stop begging and get a job selling clothes in the market.
I memorize the lines of her face, the smooth stump of her hand and the thinness of her legs under the blanket. Many years down my own road, I will remember her. I will tell her story, because it's the best way I know to honour her life. And maybe one day I'll be back here in Guinea and I will buy fabric from her on the side of a dusty street in a crowded market.
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