Of Compassion and Shame

Yesterday I went through the worst day I ever had in Socotra, and most certainly not the easiest in my personal or professional life.

I spent most of the evening and night to think about the experience I went through. That was a necessary process, as I just cannot forget or save it in the same memory cell where I store loads of strange or funny things. What happened yesterday cannot be kept among trivial events that, at the end of the day, do not have any direct or conscious effects on you and will just fade away as time goes by.

In the first lines I dropped on this blog, I warned that I would have not touched professional aspects of my Socotrian life. But I guess that exceptions are always allowed, especially if they transcend so powerfully to stay, from now on, deeply rooted inside myself.

There is a very youg girl on this island that suffers from a rare disease, Xeroderma pigmentosum, or XP. Even though it may imply pedantry of the writer and consequent boredom of the reader, I must resort to Wikipedia to define the disease as “an autosomal recessive genetic disorder of DNA repair in which the ability to repair damage caused by ultraviolet (UV) light is deficient. This disorder leads to multiple basaliomas and other skin malignancies at a young age. In severe cases, it is necessary to avoid sunlight completely” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeroderma_pigmentosum).

One of my pending professional tasks is to bring some kind of relief to this young girl, who has not even the age to cover herself completely in black like girls here start to do as they reach puberty. Even though I never met her, I know the case since I arrived in the island and regularly updated her father on what steps I was taking. But because an Italian doctor, following up the case, is spending sometime on the island with two young doctors, we decided to pay a visit to the girl. Again, I did not actually see the girl, as the doctors wisely advised me to just wait in the patio with my assistant, but I could hear her screams in panic and see the expression of the doctors as they came out of the dark room where she lives. The doctors were very careful and professional in explaining to me in Italian the seriousness of the case, avoiding every unnecessary detail in their briefing, and in informing her father, through the translations of my assistant, on what possible measures could be taken as to alleviate her from that incurable disease, which may torment her even for the next ten years. Less than a couple of hours later, my boss called me and asked me about the visit. It is not easy to admit that I went through a terrifying emotional collapse and I could not speak out a bloody word for the first five minutes of the phone call.

Wikipedia defines compassion as “an understanding of the emotional state of another or oneself. Not to be confused with empathy, compassion is often combined with a desire to alleviate or reduce the suffering of another or to show special kindness to those who suffer. However, compassion may lead an individual to feel empathy with another person” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compassion).

Is it actually compassion what I feel? The problems I go through, the loneliness of this stage of my life, the boredom that haunts me during these last days of my job here, the sadness I feel when I miss those I love… are just nothing. They can never be compared to the screams that still echo in my mind, to the perpetual torture she is going through. A tremendously brazen shame can never be confused with compassion.