Day 8: The Final Pushes

November 17, 1678

Dear brother,

My birthday passed just yesterday. I actually lived to see my 13th birthday. With everything that has been going on this year at home, I never imagined that I would actually live. Many things around town are starting to get better, but there are other things that could definitely become better.

Building the new well is taking much longer than we had anticipated. We haven’t even started breaking ground. The European people have come and gone many times to try and help us fix our issue. We live near the Buriganga River, which is where all the traders come to trade, but we have a branch off where the water from the well is from. Right now, everyone at Dada’s work is trying to figure out if there is another branch off for our source of water. The European people in connection to the people from Dada’s work are trying to figure out why the arsenic from the water is still there.

Thomas tried explaining it to me a couple days ago. The powders that someone bought from the Asians were really potent in arsenic (that’s a new word he taught me. A lot of people in Europe use that word when describing something that’s really strong). We don’t know who bought it or why the Asians would sell us something like that, but they did. But, because we can’t even build the new well, people are still getting sick.

Now, the people all over the town who aren’t sick (currently) are trying to get harder restrictions on traders. If it hadn’t been for the little girl and her father coming when they came, our town would’ve been dead by the end of the year.

Mommy and Auntie are still sick. They are finally better than before. Now that they have hope that they will get better, they have actually started getting better. However, they are still very weak and fragile. On the other hand, I feel amazing. I still have those bumps in my mouth, but they don’t hurt as much as they used to. I don’t cough blood up as often as I used to, which is also a good thing because I will be starting to work on the well again as soon as they figure out what was wrong in the first place.

Thomas’s father knows an English doctor who has decided that he will come down to Dhaka to examine all of us and see what was really wrong with our town. He also agreed to look at my toe and try to figure out why my toe started turning green and eventually had to be cut off as a result.

All in all, everything is at a standstill. We still have traders coming here, but they’re much more careful with what they sell to us than they had been before. Any trading stall that sells food doesn’t sell to us kids anymore because they are afraid that we will get sick. To be honest, things since you’ve left have gotten much worse. I really wish you were still here, even though now we don’t really have that big of a threat anymore as long as we fix it soon. Write back soon! And thanks for the birthday candies you sent back!

Love,

Chayana