Swimming provides moments of peace...		IT HAS BEEN MANY WEEKS since we returned to Seattle. We brought home dysentery, and I was grateful for Western medicine's arsenal: three doctors, two specialists, two nurses, beeping monitors, intravenous antibiotics, four liters of Ringer's lactate, a hospital bed with white sheets, seven sets of heated flannel blankets, blood draws, stool samples, urine analysis, X-rays standing up and lying down. If only Chogali had one microscope! Would anybody there now know how to use it? Dr. Cynthia would not daydream like this, dwell on things she could not control. She would laugh and keep on treating malaria, sending medics into the jungle, writing grant proposals, starting nursery schools, delivering babies. Dr. Cynthia does so much. She gives me direction in a world that spins off balance: Do what you can do; somehow deal with the rest. Sometime soon, I must leave Chogali where it is, in occupied territory, a place I cannot go. I am here, I have a job to do, stuff to figure out. This is my week to mow the lawn. Still, I can't help wondering about the little orchid girls, what they're doing, whether it's raining, whether they have malaria, whether they'll survive. It is dusk, and I see shy Oh Mu huddled against the trunk of a coconut palm, by herself. She is crying. I could not save those girls; I could not even get back to the village. What I cling to, the last real thing I know, is that Shu Wah and Oh Mu were together at the stream, brushing their teeth with salt on their fingers. They were together. This is most important. I hope they always know each other's heart. Every day I think of them. I do not know if this makes much difference.   The orchid girls are still alive...