“And I believe that ‘impossible’ is just a fancy word for ‘I haven’t lost enough sleep yet.’”
“Yahweh. What do you believe in?”
She stops scrubbing. Looks directly into the lens. Her eyes are so tired they seem to belong to a much older woman, but there is something behind them—a pressure, like the moment before a storm breaks.
The footage was grainy, shot on a shoulder-mounted Betacam. The setting was a field hospital in Goma, Zaire, during the dying gasp of a refugee crisis. Tents sagged under a brown sky. In the foreground, a nurse moved.
“Day forty. The Red Cross left. MSF left. She stayed. She doesn’t sleep. I’ve watched her do chest compressions for two hours straight on a boy who was already cold. When I asked why, she looked at me like I’d asked why water is wet.”
The man stops seizing.
“Nurse Yahweh is on shift. Rest in peace is off the menu.”
The video was shot by a French journalist, Marc Duval, who was documenting the cholera outbreak. His off-camera narration is a whisper.