The Card Above the Phone

I told people I was going to volunteer at a health charity, and they heard something much bigger than what it is. The charity is two rooms above a pharmacy in Ngara, in Nairobi. There is a kettle, a printer that only works if you hold the tray, and a window that looks at another window.

On Monday I folded leaflets about sickle cell disease. Nine hundred of them, in three and then in half. On Tuesday I typed names from a paper list into a spreadsheet, and, because the paper file was open in front of me, the clinic details too — times, days, what to bring. On Wednesday I folded more leaflets, because the first nine hundred had gone out to schools in a single afternoon. Volunteering, it turns out, involves a lot of folding.

I had imagined something else. I had imagined myself explaining the disease to a room of parents, or standing outside a clinic with a clipboard, doing something a person could actually see. Instead I was a pair of hands, and the hands were not even fast.

The woman who runs the charity does everything else, and she calls me by my full name, Wanjiru, like a teacher. On Thursday I asked her, in a careful way, whether I was any use at all. She said the leaflets were use. I could tell she had answered that question before, for other people like me, and that she had a great deal to do.

Then on Friday the phone rang while she was out, and I answered it because there was nobody else in the room. A man wanted to know whether the clinic on Racecourse Road opens on Saturdays, and until what time, and whether his son had to bring the old file. I knew all three answers. I had typed them on Tuesday into the spreadsheet that nobody had asked me to make.

The call took forty seconds. He said thank you and put the phone down, and I never learned his name.

I don’t know if I helped anybody with a disease this week. I do know that those opening times were buried in a paper file before I came, and that they are now written on a card, taped to the wall above the phone, where the next person who sits in this chair will see them.

That card is the only thing I made all week. It took two minutes.