Love at the Speed of Email (18 page)

Lack of improved sanitation has all sorts of negative
effects on public health. Like dead children – diarrhea is still the leading
cause of death for children under five. Like the additional burden for mothers
who regularly have to take care of sick children. Like cholera outbreaks – ever
hear of cholera occurring in a place with improved sanitation? Nope.

Sanitation is a basic human need. If you look at the data
from New York, London, and Paris from the days before those cities had built
sewers, you’ll see that their mortality rates were about the same as mortality
rates today in sub-Saharan Africa.
Everybody
poos
.
And in many places around the world, still,
everybody
poos
on the open ground.

I’ve spent much of my time overseas focusing on improving
access to clean water and sanitation. Women in displacement camps in northern
Uganda, for example, would often wait in line for two hours to pump water,
while about 1,500 schoolchildren would have to share two toilets. So we drilled
more wells and built more toilets. In Sri Lanka, after the tsunami destroyed
thousands of houses, we installed hundreds of wells and built hundreds of
toilets in addition to rebuilding schools, health clinics, and homes.

In Papua New Guinea I’ve begun focusing more on improving
hygiene practices than building infrastructure. We can build lots of toilets,
but what if people don’t actually use them?
(Happens more
often than you may think.)
And if people don’t wash their hands after
using the toilet, it’s likely there will be hardly any improvements in health.

So for the past year, my focus has been on behavior change:
improving hygiene practices that complement improvements in infrastructure. But
while assessing this project, I’ve been particularly moved by something that
isn’t directly related to safe water or improved sanitation.

Before our project, the women walked an hour or more to get
water. To relieve themselves, they walked far into the bush or the mangroves.
The women told us they used to be sexually assaulted by men hiding in the bush.
Now that there are water taps and toilets close to their homes, they no longer
get attacked on trips to fetch water or go to the toilet.

Domestic and sexual violence against women is prevalent in
the Pacific. I reckon that women tend to get the short end of the stick all
around the world, but it seems to me to be particularly bad here. In the
Pacific, the women are damn lucky if they get any of the stick at all, because
most of the time the men take the stick and beat them with it. Given a choice,
I reckon I'd prefer to be a woman in Afghanistan than a woman in Papua New
Guinea.

On
Petats
, the women told me that
they felt safe when they used the new toilet.

“You know the Bible and I know the Bible,” I said to Pastor
Barry. “You know that Jesus loved the mamas and he loved the weak and the
vulnerable. I think Jesus wants you to build a toilet for the women.”

I hope he will.

There’s a chemical in your brain

It’s pouring sunshine and rain.

You can never know what to expect

You’re manic, manic

(Plumb,
Manic
)

Los
Angeles, USA

While Mike and I were busy writing emails and wondering
about hope and passion, my family and our mutual friends were starting to see
the odd public exchange on
Facebook
that made them
wonder about us.

My parents put out the first feelers, and they were
remarkably unruffled when I informed them that I had invited “that Mike guy
I’ve been emailing” to come make himself at home with us for ten days during
our family holidays.

“Well, I’m sure that’ll be lovely for him,” my mother said
with a commendable lack of questioning or histrionics. “If he’s been living in
Papua New Guinea he probably needs a holiday somewhere nice, anyway.”

“Yeah, I think he does,” I said, trying to sound as if
concern for this poor overworked email buddy in PNG was all that had motivated
me to issue an invitation.

As the weeks slipped past and the date of my trip to
Australia drew closer, however, my parents’ restraint on this topic started to
fray. It started with the odd inquiry as to how Mike was doing, and then it
turned into one sort of query or another during every phone call. None of these
queries, mind you, ran anything along the lines of “Are you sure you know what
you’re doing?” or “Are you out of your mind?” On the contrary, my parents
appeared to be most nervous that Mike might have a sudden change of heart and
decide not to come after all.

“How’s Mike?” Mum asked me one night shortly after
Christmas. “What's up with his plans for January?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, distracted because I was trying to
finish something on the computer and talk at the same time despite the fact
that I regularly scolded Mum for that very practice. “We were emailing about
this the other day. There's this big meeting in Port Moresby in the middle of
January—”

“
Awww
,” Dad interrupted me. “He
can’t come then?”

“Oh, no,” I hastened to reassure them. “It looks like he’s
going to make it for at least a week.
Maybe more.
And
assuming we’re getting on and haven’t freaked out during the first two days, we
might both go to Melbourne together that last weekend, too. It's not quite
sorted.”

Dad sounded thrilled. “Oh, that’s good then. He knows
there's going to be a whole bunch of other people here, too?”

Oh, that’s right, I remembered. Not only would my brother
and his now-fiancée be there, as well as my sister and niece, but so would the
six other friends we had collectively invited north for the Australia Day long
weekend.
 

“He’ll be fine,” I said. “I think he’s pretty ...
adaptable.”

“That’s great!” Mum said. “He’ll have a great time. It’ll be
very relaxing. Tell him we’re glad he’s coming.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Make sure you tell him, okay?”

“Mum, okay! I'll tell him.”

* * *

The first of our mutual friends to question me about Mike
was Shelly, younger sister of my first crush, Paul. I’d tutored Shelly in
French when she was nine and I was sixteen. Shelly had somehow managed to learn
how to speak French fluently in spite of me. She was now a doctor, living in
Melbourne.
  

“Hey
Lis
, how’s things with your
new friend, Mike Wolfe??” Shelly emailed me out of the blue with characteristic
directness.
“Seems you two get along pretty well.”

“Shells, you rascal,” I wrote back without addressing her
question. “You've just swung the door wide open for some reference-checking.
So, do you want to send me ten words or phrases that describe our mutual friend
Mr. Mike?”

“Reference-checking, ay?”
Shelly
replied. “Well those of us in Melbourne who know you both commented on it a
little while ago, and we thought it good. Ten words or phrases, hmmm:

“1.
talkative

“2.
thoughtful

“3.
fun

“4.
kind

“5. real

“6.
integrity

“7.
out
there

“8. energetic

“9.
compassionate

“10.
and
again, talkative

“So, what's the story, my friend....?” she finished.

“There is no ‘story’ yet,” I wrote back. “But there is
probably what I would call ‘potential to be a story.’ It is rather hard to
judge story potential when you've never met face-to-face. Hence, reference
checking. So feel free to send any additional thoughts, lists, or formal
reference letters my way. If this made a family dinner conversation on your end
and was pronounced good, then the story potential just went up a notch. There
is, however, a lot of space for notches between L.A. and PNG.”

* * *

After my exchange with Shelly I decided that reference
checking might actually be a good idea, so I wrote to Ryan.

In the three years since I’d visited him in Vancouver, Ryan
had moved to Pakistan. There he’d fallen in love with Pakistani woman named
Celestina
and married her. Canadian officials hadn’t
exactly proved overeager to recognize the marriage and issue
Celestina
residency papers, so as the earthquake-relief
programs they were working on began to wind down, Ryan and
Celestina
moved to Liberia to work and wait out the slow grind of Canada’s immigration
processes.

Ryan had not been writing nearly enough essays for my
liking, something I harassed him about via email every couple of months. It was
easy enough to slip a casual query onto the end of a note.

“I can’t write more now,” I wrote. “Am running late, and
this week is stacking up in advance of heading to Australia in two weeks. I’ll
be spending some significant time there with another friend of yours, Mike
Wolfe. You worked together in Afghanistan, didn’t you? Did you get on?
Impressions?
I’m curious, and there’s potential (nothing
more at this stage, but potential is a good start) that it could be more than a
passing interest.”

“I met him years ago in Afghanistan and we’ve bantered back
and forth with bits of writing and aid-worker angst,” Ryan replied. “He seems
much more suited to development work, judging from the flavor of his recent
writing. Maybe because in development you work on a smaller scale but see real
change if you see it at all – unlike relief work, where you work on a large
scale and wonder constantly if you are making any difference at all other than
to your own life.
Anyway, all that to say, I think he’s a
good person to have potential with.”

* * *

Third-party encouragement from Australia and Liberia was all
well and good, but I spent much of the last two weeks before I got onto the
plane to Australia wondering whether Mike and I were even going to get the
chance to explore this potential. For as the
new year
ticked over, things started to go wrong on both sides of the Pacific.

At my place in California, things went from bad to worse
very quickly after Christmas.

Now that we’d broached the topic of the reality show again,
Travis was like an uncorked bottle of warm champagne, fizzing over every time I
came near him. Nothing seemed to help. Letting him talk for hours about his
delusions got us nowhere; he just got progressively more worked up as he
explained it to me over and over again – improbable scenario stacked upon
improbable scenario that he had somehow fashioned into story and then forged
into desperate conviction.

He
was
starring in
this reality TV show, he kept insisting. We
were
all in on it. Why couldn’t
someone
just tell him the truth?

By early January I made exactly zero progress convincing
Travis that he wasn’t autistic, that our house was probably not bugged, and
that I definitely wasn’t his pathologically deceptive co-star in a reality
television program. I was also no closer to convincing him that he’d suffered
some sort of psychotic break and was in rather desperate need of psychiatric
care.

I’d talked to some of Travis’ family, but they were just as
overwhelmed as I was. He refused to see a psychiatrist and we couldn’t force
him. He couldn’t be involuntarily hospitalized unless we could prove him a
danger to himself or others, and the closest Travis had come to this was
holding a knife to his wrists in the kitchen one night.

He was begging me to level with him, talking about the
pressure he was feeling knowing that everyone was watching him all the time,
when he suddenly reversed the angle of the knife he was using to chop
vegetables and held the blade against his arm.

 
“If I did a good
enough job,” he challenged me across the kitchen bench, “you could never get
the ambulance here in time.”

“You’re probably right,” I said, gambling on my instinctive
sense that he wasn’t serious, not yet. “So please don’t. That would really mess
up my evening plans.”

Without a more obvious threat I knew that the police could,
at most, only hold him for three days anyway, not nearly long enough for most
antipsychotic drugs to really kick in.
  

I was stuck. And seven days before I was supposed to fly to
Australia I was
done
.

* * *

That night I unsuccessfully tried to head off yet another
three-hour conversation with Travis by playing one of the few trump cards I
thought that he, being a writer himself, would respect.

“I need to write tonight,” I told him long before we
finished eating dinner together. After dinner was done, I started moving around
the kitchen, stacking the dishwasher, deliberately giving off “I’m preoccupied”
signals.

“Will you sit down?” Travis said, irritated. “It’s very
difficult to talk to you when you’re messing with other things.”

“I need to go work,” I said.

Normal cues didn’t work that night. I had to interrupt him
several times to remind him that I had other plans. Finally I had to tell him
that I was going to walk away now, that we’d talk more about this later.

Undeterred, Travis followed me upstairs, stood in the door
of my bedroom, and continued talking. Five minutes later he hadn’t paused for
breath and I had to interrupt him again.

“Look,” I said, willing my voice not to shake. “I am
not
going to talk about this with you
anymore right now. I can’t see any productive way that we can have this
conversation. I’ve told you that I believe you’re temporarily paranoid. There’s
nothing that I can say right now that’s going to convince you that you don’t
have autism. There’s nothing that you can say right now that will convince me
that you do. And, I
have to work!
”

Travis looked at me, startled, and left.

I sat there, shaking, trying to catch my breath, knowing
that whatever else I was going to do that night I was wrecked for any
productive writing.

Two minutes later, before I’d decided what on earth I
was
going to do when I certainly wasn’t
going to come out of my bedroom for the rest of the evening, Travis called up
from downstairs with just a hint of sheepish in his tone.

“Do you want a glass of wine? I probably owe you one.”

 
“Yes, you do,” I
called out, not feigning how much I suddenly
did
want a glass of wine. But as I heard the cork come out
downstairs and the wine gurgle into the glasses, I suddenly wondered …

Would he ever put anything in it? He still believed someone
had slipped something into his drink in Vegas months ago – would he ever do
something similar? Was he just play-acting calm? Was he angry that I’d shut him
down? As I took a deep breath and told myself not to be ridiculous, I also
wondered whether paranoia was catching.

When he bought the wine up he offered up a toast.

“To this next year being the best year for both of us,” he
said.
“And to me overcoming my autism, and my paranoia.”

He had spoken in desperate jest, but I offered up a silent
and hearty “Amen. Please let it be so.”

I drank the wine as a small, silent statement of faith that
he would not hurt me. Then I shut my door, feeling sick to my stomach, and
wrote a long, anguished letter to Mike called
Tonight’s washing machine of negative emotions.

“It’s such a mixture of stuff,” I wrote after I’d described
the evening. “I’m so sad because I’m watching someone who I know well and care
for deeply spiraling down this slide of paranoia and I can't do anything to get
in the way. I can see further than he can, and all I see at the bottom of this
slide is depression and worse. And despite what I said to him tonight, when he
drew
breath
long enough to ask for my professional
opinion (again), despite the fact that I was so careful to place the word
temporary
in front of the word
paranoid
, I don't know if it is actually
temporary now.