How Do You Sleep?

A bed of nails is a remarkable thing. Lying flat on those thousands of tiny razor-sharp points, each one takes only a little of the body’s weight. The pressure is spread out so that none of those tiny spears presses against the body hard enough to break the skin. It’s actually quite comfortable.

But imagine that one by one those nails begin to grow. You’ll feel a little discomfort when each one starts, then the pain will sharpen and become more distinct as it bears the collective weight taken from its neighbors. Maybe you’ll be lucky, and it’ll be one down by your foot, where you can just shift your leg a little to let it push by unimpeded. But if you lie there long enough, eventually you’ll feel that tingling in the small of your back. The now-familiar discomfort will take shape and you’ll know that this one, as it rises from the anonymous mass of its neighbors, you’ll know that this one will pierce you straight through.

For me, this one began with voicemail from Liberia.

I met George on my second trip to West Africa. I was there with a contingent of international observers for the 2011 Liberian election, and George was the local member of our three-person observation team. As the native Liberian of our group, he served as interpreter, driver and guide for Susan — a veteran observer — and me, the novice, as we interviewed election officials, noted precinct conditions and recorded voter statistics.

George was from Monrovia, the capital, and our “area of responsibility” was a full day’s drive inland, in Nimba County. Nimba was a bit of the wild west, even by Liberian standards, but George was a brilliant partner. He had an easy way about him that gave him an effortless rapport with the locals and was able to get a real feel for whatever tensions might be lurking below the surface, too subtle for foreigners like Susan or me to detect.

Liberia’s roads are abysmal under the best conditions, and we spent the next four days of our mission rattling along dirt trails through the jungle, sinking into the mud and threading bridges made from uncut tree trunks pushed together to ford streams. More than once we had to climb out to haul underbrush away while George hacked a path through with his machete. But during the long, slow, jarring hours between obstacles, Susan, George and I talked about our lives back home. Like all Liberians, George had faced extreme privation during the civil war, but he had escaped many of the horrors that befell his childhood friends: when the rebels had come to his village to conscript the boys as child soldiers, his mother hid him under the family bed and told them he was away with his uncle.

As a young man, George had been smart, and good with his hands. He learned to drive and began courting a young woman named Bethany. He blushed when I asked if she was pretty. “Too pretty for me,” he said. She was above his station and her parents objected, but George worked hard to show his worth. He began getting jobs driving for the NGOs and charities that flooded into the country when the war ended. Eventually her parents relented and they married. They now had a daughter now, Joy, he said. Four years old and full of spunk; he showed us a picture when we stopped for the evening.

We swapped phone numbers when we parted — I didn’t really think much of it at the time — and exchanged text messages a couple of times per year. A few months later, George texted that Joy would be starting school soon — he would be grateful if I could send shoes for her. It sounded like a lovely gesture, and I sent two pairs: some sturdy ones to get her through the rainy season, and a pair of pretty-in-pink girly ones for church. When George said she needed school supplies, I sent off a bundle of notepads, pencils and a variety of books in a nice new knapsack. Then there was a request for a computer, and a cell phone, and maybe a nice watch for Bethany.

I did let George know when I was next coming to Liberia, and when I did, I brought with me more necessities, and some of the little luxuries he’d requested for the family. He brought Bethany and Joy to meet me at the guest house, and we spent the afternoon together, talking and watching Joy cavort about in her Sunday best. He introduced me as his American brother; I told him I was honored, but confided separately that I was beginning to feel a little more like a supply chain.

Still, the requests continued to grow, and by now I was getting requests from others, too. It seemed that everyone in Liberia I’d ever exchanged phone numbers with had begun texting me, asking how their own “American brother” was doing and asking, by the way, if I could send money, some raincoats, a DVD player. One asked if I could send a car. After months of saying no, no, no, no, I gave up. I could no longer handle the sense of obligation, the sense of opportunistic dependency. I simply stopped responding to any text, any phone call from Liberia.

Yes, it felt heartless to leave those calls unanswered, but after saying “no” so many times, it was the only way I could avoid being consumed by the desperate need of the country and focus on the big picture.

Then, of course, came Ebola.

The pleas for help renewed: send us help, we have lost our jobs to Ebola. Send us money, my husband is sick, send us money so we can organize to fight the disease. To some of these, I responded. Yes, we were sending money (a hell of a lot, actually), but we were sending it to the doctors and health workers who were fighting the epidemic: local NGOs like Last Mile Health, and international organizations like The Carter Center and Partners in Health.

My heart fell with every text I sent. I knew that the best way to save lives in Liberia was to fund nationwide efforts. But the faces, the individual faces, rose from the anonymous mass and cut at me. George, Bethany, Horace, Frances — I saw them when I closed my eyes at night. I could see the hope blossoming in their eyes when they received my response and feel it wither and die when they read its contents.

I was desperately trying to focus on the greater good. By now, my wife and I were giving tens of thousands of dollars to fight Ebola in Liberia. We were supporting doctors on the ground, funding clinics that gave counseling and guidance to survivors, helping find food and clothing for survivors, and jobs for those who were able to work. But these were all for the faceless masses, the multitude that let us rest, comfortably, on the bed of nails.

In The Life You Can Save, ethicist Peter Singer enumerates the many psychological obstacles to giving: diffusion of responsibility, a sense of remoteness, the alienation of money. The most powerful, however, is the lack of an identifiable victim. We know it works: “Give $10 to eradicate hunger,” is not nearly as effective as a picture of a doe-eyed girl peering mournfully into the camera and the plea to give $10 “so Malia will not go to bed hungry tonight.”

Of course, most of us know we’re not actually feeding Malia when we donate. We’re contributing to a wider hunger alleviation program, and that’s how it should be. But Malia puts a face on the crisis, and makes it harder for us to turn away. But let’s say you were contributing to one of these programs and got a text from Malia’s mother, saying “Please — we have no food. Help us.”

Could you tell her no? That you were focusing on the greater good?

Then the phone calls began, voicemail left in the middle of the night: Please help us, brother. Again, I left them unanswered, lying awake in bed, biting my lip against the sharpening pain taking form in the small of my back. Doubt rose to haunt me in the night: Was I really serving the greater good? Or was I simply Poe’s Montresor, turning my back and hardening my heart against human pity? The pain grew sharper.

Last month, a call came from George’s phone, but this time there was a different voice on the recording. It was his wife, Bethany. She regretted to inform me, the voicemail said, that my friend George had died from Ebola. She and Joy were without support — please, she asked, could I help them? The faceless multitude of my bed of nails was now reduced to a single point: that one little impish girl, peering from behind her mother’s legs, fearful, but oh so curious about the man her father has introduced as her “American uncle.”

And what was her mother telling her now? “Don’t worry — I have left a message with your American uncle; I am sure he will be able to help us.” And here I was, lying on my bed of nails in silence, a single agonizing point tearing into me.

There were more calls and more text messages, each more urgent than the one before. The last came seven days ago. It was Bethany again, but this time there was no plea for money. She just repeated her name and her daughter’s over and over again: This is Bethany and Joy. Bethany and Joy. Bethany and Joy. She said it like she was beyond expecting any response, like she was leaving this message as a memory, as a hope that, if nothing else, her name and the name of her daughter might be remembered by someone beyond the pit of despair that their lives had become. Again, I told myself of the greater good and did not answer. But that night, I cried myself to sleep — Liberia had pierced me clear through.

Epilogue: A friend who works closely with Liberian non-profits helped me identify a nearby clinic (supported, it turns out, by our donations) that provides trauma counseling, emergency food and clothing and job placement services. I have reached out to Bethany and put her in contact with them. Joy is well, she says; they still lack the money to pay school fees, but for now, she is hopeful about the future.