Running Between Trees

Though I’m wearing only my work T-shirt and jeans, this deliciously warm December in Pittsburgh has kept us all from freezing out here on the wet grass.

Feels like it’s been about twenty minutes, I think, praying Dorcy will de-escalate soon. At least he’s taking longer breaks between outbursts.

“Aren’t you tired, Dorcy?” I whisper. “I know I am.” Simone purses her lips in a forced smile as our eyes meet, and her expression looks sad and tired. My colleagues have told me privately that they hate these restraints, as I do. It seems violent to use our bodies against these children.

Restraints are used only in response to aggressive behaviours, my supervisor had assured me when I expressed concern.

I twist my neck far away enough to look up at the night sky. A scattering of silent, celestial stars twinkles back at me, seeming to ask, “What are you doing?”

Sometimes I’m not sure, but it’s for his safety and ours.

To think that just about an hour ago, we were all inside the common room watching Dorcy play with three other children who are younger than him. In what seemed like a flash, he went from mimicking train sounds to knocking down one of the other boys over a brief misunderstanding. The speed and ease with which all three of us scuttled the other kids to safety and ran after Dorcy as he stormed outside demonstrated just how precise and finely tuned our process has become. We knew the drill all too well.

A swift kick to my rib cage brings me back into the chaos. I shift from looking heavenward to face him, arms locking in tighter around his legs. I study his small frame. For a minute he stops struggling and looks at Derrick on the left. He starts to bang his head on the dirt ground, and the soft thud echoes through the crisp night air. Simone puts her hand under his head, and Dorcy immediately starts biting the skin off his hand. We all groan and look away so that we don’t lose our grips in an attempt to stop him. If we let go of him, he’ll do far more harm to himself.

“Calm down, buddy,” I call to him, wondering if he had noticed the stars. Perhaps they could help him get out of this torture.

Watching him cry in physical and emotional pain, I realize how foolish it was to tell him to calm down. When he gets this escalated, he only wants everything around him to burn, himself especially, and if the stars managed to come down, they would have to burn as well. What trauma had fractured this boy’s mind so much that he would immediately start to pound his fist into his own eye or bite the skin off his hands, not to mention bang that small head mercilessly against the ground? My Nigerian brain would say the boy is clearly possessed by a particularly perverted marine spirit and that being this close to him is the one thing not to do. Of course, I know that’s not the case. I can recite psychological theories that explain such self-harming behaviours in my sleep. Yet nothing in all of my schooling prepared me for the strangeness of actually watching a person impose such pain on himself.