I rolled out of the bed, crawled to the bathroom and threw up. I felt much better. I rested there by the toilet feeling much better. Then I turned on the light, brushed my teeth, washed out my mouth, turned off the light and walked back through the silence of the hotel room and crawled back into bed. When I looked up, the ceiling wasn’t there anymore, just the sky.

There were some girls in that poor country too, I recalled, looking at the sky. Two of them.  They lived together in a little house.  It was in the mountains in the north where it was beautiful and cold. They had snow. They had trees and rocks with water running over them, cutting through the snow. In their little house, I drank tea with them--all of us wrapped up in blankets in the cold morning.  It was very cozy. The two of them were managing an orphanage. They had volunteered for this job, but as it turned out, they were in way over their heads.  There were too many babies and not enough of anything else. There weren’t enough dryers, for example. You could hang out the blankets, but they didn’t dry fast enough. The babies slept in wet blankets and it was cold. They got sick and then they died. A couple died every so often. The girls buried them. There was no-one else to do it. They were orphans after all. Those girls were in way over their heads. It should have destroyed them. Maybe it had destroyed them but they wouldn’t know that until they were adults. They had a grave, tired, hollowed out look but they weren’t destroyed. Or if they were, they didn’t know it. They had volunteered for the orphanage. They hadn’t volunteered to bury babies. Who would volunteer for that? It was, as it turned out, part of the job. The girls had learned a lot in college. They learned about orphans and orphanages and what to do with orphans and orphanages. There were too many babies and not enough help and not enough dryers. Even without the wet bedding, some of those babies would have died. The babies weren’t in great shape to begin with. Some of them were deaf; others were blind; others were infected. They all had problems. In most cases, it had something to do with the way they were born. You can bet they weren’t born in hospitals. There were no hospitals for miles around but even if there had been one, those babies wouldn’t have been born there. They were born on the sly. An unwanted pregnancy was a very sticky situation in that place. The mother of an unwanted baby could get her legs broken. Her own brothers would do it. It was a matter of honor. So you can bet when those unwanted babies were born, there was no doctor around or midwife or anyone else. Those babies were born in the dark and all alone with their terrified mothers. They were born in the woods somewhere, in the snow, and then their terrified mothers brought them to the orphanage—if they were lucky.   Infanticide is a crime. It’s a worse crime than having an unwanted baby. But who wants their legs broken?  If the mother of the unwanted baby was more afraid of God than she was of her brothers, she’d bring the unwanted baby to the orphanage. Bringing the baby to the orphanage was taking a chance with her brothers, but God saw everything. And you can bet those babies weren’t in the best shape when they got there. Not after a birth like that. They had problems. All of them had problems.   In a situation like that, some of them would have had to die whether the bedding was wet or dry. You could have had one full-sized dryer for every kid in the place, and babies were still going to die, and the girls would still have to bury them. They were exhausted. They had this tired, grave, hollowed out look. Those girls were, in a word, destroyed, but as yet they hadn’t a clue about what had happened to them. It wasn’t easy to bury a baby in the snow. The ground wouldn’t take them. You had to thaw it out first and even then digging the hole was no picnic. Of course most of them made it. Children are resilient—even babies. Some of the babies died but most of them made it. They made it through the wet blankets. Once they were out of diapers, their chances improved dramatically.  If a baby made it out of diapers, its chances—as far as not dying goes—were almost as good as anyone else’s. That’s not to say from that point on, everything was golden. Babies aren’t house plants. They require a certain amount of human contact. Their brains require it. Those girls couldn’t cuddle thirty-five babies.  There was never enough help and the help there was didn’t understand about brains and human contact. As a result, the ones who made it suffered from a lack of attention. They don’t get enough attention, the girls told me. I met a kid there as blank as a sheet of paper. He hadn’t gotten enough attention. You couldn’t get a rise out of him to save your life. I kept putting a ball in his hand and taking it out again. I was giving him the ball. I said, here you have it; it’s yours. Then after a while, I took it away. It was like a game. It missed him completely. You could give it to him and take it away and give it to him and take it away all day long.   It was all the same to him.