On Sunday

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By Katie Weindler

He sits next to his mother with cow manure smeared across his forehead. Looking down at the ground, he hunches his shoulders when he hears one of us ask what is on his face.
“It’s for the fever,” Emmanuel translates from Dagbani. Emmanuel brings tourists to the widows’ village to help them raise money. We are college students from America, donating gifts to the widows and buying their hand-woven baskets. We bring things like water, pencils and toothbrushes, all of which we buy in a gas station on the way to their village. I buy a basket for my mom to stack her magazines.
I squat down in front of the boy. “Yefre wo sen?” I ask.
The boy looks up at me, but quickly looks down when I meet his gaze. He swings his legs back and forth, under the bench and straight in front of him. I look up at Emmanuel, confused. “He doesn’t speak Twi,” he says.I feel stupid. After three months of living in Accra, I am eager to practice my Twi, but I am twelve hours from the capital and I know not everyone in Ghana speaks the same language.
“Can you ask him what his name is?” I ask Emmanuel.
He translates and the boy answers, still looking at the ground and swinging his legs, “James.” I can barely hear him.“Hi James,” I say, in my best “kid” voice. He doesn’t smile or look up.
Emmanuel stares at me, waiting for another question, but I am frozen. James must be about four years old and the only child I’ve seen in a long time that looks visibly sad. No smiling or dancing, just head down and legs swinging. His mother touches his leg to be still. She is a widow, living in the north of Ghana, weaving baskets to feed him.Emmanuel talks to James’ mother following my silence and as I stand up to move away, I overhear him say, “He has the malaria.”We are silent.
Finally my friend asks Emmanuel, “Do we have any Tylenol to give him?”
“We can’t give him that,” he responds. “He’s not used to it and we have to make sure he takes it with enough food and water.”The widows thank us for our gifts and we leave the village on our air-conditioned bus. I think of my weekly anti-malaria medication with the label attached, take mefloquine with plenty of food and water. And in this foreign place, a place they used to call “the white man’s grave,” I prevent malaria with one pill, lots of water and a big dinner every Sunday.