Last Thursday morning I was brushing my teeth and reviewing my list of to-dos for getting the children to school on time. Then there was a crash and a scream; I ran to my daughter's room and found her lying on the floor next to a wooden stool. Suddenly, her eyes rolled back and she went limp. I scooped her up and began talking loudly, trying to get her to wake up. I carried her outside to the drizzly autumn air, begging her to respond, until finally she squirmed and began crying again. She was able to point to the top of her head and tell me she had hit it on her stool. Her body was strangely floppy though, and she complained "I'm sleepy" and begged to go back to bed. I grabbed my phone and dialed 911.
For ten minutes, I held my daughter and waited for the paramedics to arrive. I strained to hear the sound of an engine turning onto our street, imagined every sound was the wail of a siren, and willed myself not to throw up or start sobbing. Finally--finally--they arrived. By then she'd begun to recover enough to build a block tower and tell them she was going to be Hello Kitty for Halloween. The medics checked her eyes, examined her all over, and jotted notes on a pad of paper. "Kids this age are made of rubber," they assured me. Like so many things in life, none of us knew why she fainted or how exactly she'd hit her head in the first place. We decided, however, that she didn't need to go to the hospital, and they left.
Watching one's child suffer and not knowing how to fix it is terrifying. As I reflect on those minutes between trauma and the arrival of help, I also remember my sisters in other countries. Women who, when their child falls ill, have to wait much longer than ten minutes for help. Their choices are stark: Should they wait it out or risk a long journey on foot to the nearest clinic? Once they arrive, will they have money to pay for treatment?
Even worse, many mothers know what is causing their children's illnesses, because it is something they give them every day. The water that is necessary for survival is the same water that is sickening and killing more than 4,000 children every day. These deaths are preventable. Let's do something about it.
