On Sundays, I usually spend my morning buying groceries, swimming in the sea, and walking my dog on the Corniche. But when the afternoon comes, it’s time to take a break from the sunshine, and head off to St. Jude’s in Beirut…
When the automatic glass doors to the hospital open, just one whiff of disinfectant is all I need to transition from my care-free morning to the suffering of children with cancer, waiting to play upstairs. Inhaling the familiar scent of bleach (mixed with hydrogen peroxide), memories of past suffering–my own and others–come flooding back, and I feel even more grateful for the peace I felt just an hour or two before.
Today at St. Jude’s, a little boy–four years old–was already in the playroom when I arrived–watching Tom and Jerry on the TV.
“Do you want to play fusball?” I asked him in Arabic–when Tom and Jerry’s mischief making was over.
After he nodded his tiny bald head, I helped wheel him over to the fusball table–since he was hooked up to a chemo drip.
“Yalla, yalla,” he said. “Let’s go.”
When we got to the fusball table, I realized that he didn’t know how to grip the handles, or hit the ping pong sized ball.
“You are blue, and I am red,” I said. Grateful for the opportunity to teach him how to play, I showed him how to whirl his blue teammates around.
The thing about playing fusball with a four year old, is that the grips of the handles are at chest level–not hip level–for a child that small. So I had to play with extreme caution and mindfulness, to avoid bumping him in the chest–where many of the children have catheters to receive their medicine. I let him use his hands as much as he wanted, and let him score as many goals as he possibly could. When we started to get tired, I got out some rubber dinosaur toys–and encouraged him to trample the fusball field. And when our dinosaur battle got old, we moved on to Grand Theft Auto–his favorite computer game by far…
While we were sitting and playing Grand Theft Auto, something completely unexpected happened–a man walked into the playroom, sat down, and began to unravel a beautiful Sufi story out of the blue…it’s too involved, I think, for a blogpost, so perhaps I’ll publish it as a longer piece of writing. On and on he talked, sharing way more about Sufism in Syria and Lebanon than I ever expected to hear in the kid’s playroom at St. Jude’s…
