I WILL BE WITH YOU

It was late Sunday night. I had gotten an emergency request on Thursday from a local court to visit a home where a child had witnessed a death - a murder, in fact - and the father’s response toward his child were so odd that those involved in the case were concerned that he didn’t grasp how traumatized his child was. The court needed an answer by Monday: those involved felt that any delay in removing the child from what could only be termed as a gaslighting environment (“Children see things like that on TV all the time. I think he’s fine.”), while the other side, aligned with the father’s church, was militantly against separating child and father (he would be moved to his grandmother’s place if the court so decided).

I spent hours with the little boy who had not slept in days: in fact, I eventually sang him a lullaby so he could finally sleep, and just as I was leaving, he woke and said, “Would you sing to me again with your beautiful voice?” I spent hours with the father—not a bad man, but still, a scary man—and I wrote a forty-some page report explaining why, for now, the child needed to be somewhere else. [This is just preface; not the subject of this story, so I will give you a happy ending. The child needed to be elsewhere for quite some time. I then had to extricate him from the famous child psychologist who saw this devastatingly traumatized little boy as a five year old schizophrenic and wanted him on anti-psychotics, and I linked him with the most wonderful therapist and they had a theme song they sang together: “I will survive,” and she also taught the father all he needed to learn and a year later they were reunited in total.]

Anyway, I had not slept since Friday evening. I was balancing my ten hours total face-to-face interviews, and several collateral interviews with social workers and police, and I was half-way through my final draft when my LinkSys router just shut down. I cannot remember why - but without it operational, I could not finish the report. It was mid-night. Court was the next day. I desperately called Linksys tech support. I got a young man with heavily accented English. I explained the problem and he began to try to fix things, having to consult with others, as this was not a usual problem. There were long periods of silence. I was pretty stressed and his inability to immediately make things right was stressing me more. And he was hard to understand. Overlaying his accent is that I am hard-of-hearing when there is ambient noise, and there was an international buzz on the line and in the background, other people handling other calls.

I stayed calm, however, and during one of the breaks while he was waiting for an answer, I asked him where he was from. And he told me Egypt. And he asked me why I was up so late. And I explained a little of what I was doing—what I could not do unless we got everything working again. And he took a deep breath and said, “Sir. I will be with you! I will be with you as long as this takes, if day goes to night here, I will not leave you. We will find an answer!” And then, for the next hours (it was finally resolved around four in the morning), he began to tell me about his life in Alexandra, the Coptic church he was brought up in, his little sister who loved history and wanted to be an archaeologist, his mother’s beautiful voice when she sang, and his father, who drove a taxi, and what the air smelled like early in the morning, and how the city was full of doves.

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