08/09/2026
UPDATE TO THIS SHORT STORY. THE WRITING IS DIFFICULT.
He Is Matada
“He is Matada.”
I looked down at the little boy curled into a tight ball on a stretcher in the emergency department at Knysna Provincial Hospital.
He was four years old.
He wasn’t crying. He wasn’t speaking. He was all eyes. Terrified eyes.
I had only been in South Africa for a couple of weeks. I was new to social work and new to the country.
My first instinct was to pick him up.
I took a step forward.
He shrank.
I stopped.
The ceiling fans didn’t cool the room. They carried the smells of vomit, disinfectant, sweat, and flies from one end of the emergency department to the other. Every stretcher was full. Patients lined the walls. Families waited wherever they could find space.
A girl of about twelve was watching me.
She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t asking for help.
She walked over, took my hand, and said, “He is Matada.”
Then she said, “I am Amahle.”
“I’m Tammi,” I replied. “How can I help?”
She lowered her eyes to her hands.
“He was hurt by bad men.”
I waited.
She said nothing else.
I didn’t yet understand everything those four words meant.
Matada was bleeding.
One hour passed.
Then another.
Then another.
Around us, the emergency department never stopped. New patients arrived. Others were treated and discharged. Some eventually gave up and left without ever being seen. Others died.
During my months there, I would learn that this was simply the rhythm of the emergency department. The dead were taken away. Another patient was placed on the same stretcher. There was rarely time to clean it before the next emergency arrived.
Matada waited.
More than three hours after he arrived, a man in jeans and a dirty T-shirt finally approached the stretcher. He looked exhausted, with tears seemingly always on the brink of spilling. There was care in his face, but anger too, an anger I couldn’t quite explain.
He leaned against the wall and rested one hand on the stretcher, well away from Matada. He didn’t look directly at him.
“I’m Dr. Jeff. I can help.”
And then he waited.
We all did.
It seemed like a lifetime, but Jeff appeared to have an endless resource of waiting. He didn’t move toward Matada or try to coax him closer. Eventually, Matada moved instead, scooching a little nearer to Amahle and toward Dr. Jeff.
“Yes. Help,” he said.
Jeff’s voice was extraordinarily soft, almost mesmerizing in its calmness. In an emergency department filled with voices, cries, movement, and noise, he spoke so quietly that Matada had to lean toward him a little to hear. Jeff never leaned toward Matada.
“Can you show me your hands?”
Matada did.
Jeff mostly looked. Then he asked to see his feet, his ears and eyes, and his back. He moved slowly through the examination, asking rather than taking, never touching Matada when looking was enough. Eventually, he examined where Matada had been hurt.
Only then did I begin to understand the enormity of Amahle’s four quiet words.
“He was hurt by bad men.”
When he had finished, Jeff told Matada that he was a brave young man and that he was going to be okay. He was also honest with him. He would feel “the pain, the ouch” for a while.
Jeff asked about their parents and both children immediately withdrew. He didn’t press them. He simply let the question go. Amahle moved to her brother’s side and held him.
I would learn later that there was no father and that their mother was actively dying of AIDS. But standing in that emergency department that morning, I knew none of that.
Jeff asked if I was new. I told him I was. It was only my second time at the hospital.
He was new too.
A short while later, Jeff asked Matada if he would go with him to have some X-rays. I was amazed when he agreed. Only hours earlier, the slightest movement toward him had made him shrink into himself. Now he was willing to leave his sister and go with a man he had only just met.
Jeff wheeled the stretcher himself.
I watched the two of them disappear down the corridor toward X-ray.
Amahle and I stayed behind
