My hands shake when I am nervous. Sometimes when I am not.

I can never tell.

As I leaned over the seven-year-old Hazara boy with bandages wrapped around his entire head, I saw my hands tremble. Unwrapping the bandages to uncover his eyes made him moan. One swollen shut, purple and blue, oozing fluid and blood. The other blood-shot, vacant, distant.

As if he was staring into his own future.

And my hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Here he was, a Hazara boy born around the fall of the Taliban when his father was probably beaten, maybe killed by soldiers, and left to rot in the streets as dogs fed on his body. The other people groups of Afghanistan spit upon his entire race. His mother stood near me and spoke quick, fluent Dari, so fast that because of my limited knowledge of her language I could not quite follow her own story. Something about falling off a roof at home and the child hitting his head. He groaned a little as I examined him, and I stopped and just held his hand. I wondered then what he thought about me touching him.

What could an American boy fresh from the beaches of Florida do for this child?

To my amazement, they weren’t shaking anymore.

His mother reached out and touched my arm in a moment that shocked me. I realized as she spoke to me earnestly, looking me directly in the eye, how much she loved her child. She was touching me – a man – looking into my eyes, and unequivocally and unashamedly violating so many of her cultural taboos. I could hear begging, a plea for help, a sadness in her voice as if I was the only medical staff that would be able to help her boy. Speechless at how moved I felt, and how I felt like my heart was breaking into pieces, I saw the vacant eye of the child with his wide-bridged nose and dirt around his mouth. The blood pouring down his cheeks. I wanted to speak words of comfort and peace so badly to him in that instant, but I did not know the words in his own language. His arm warm to my touch and his mother’s hand gripping mine as if I was the only thing holding them together in those few minutes in a hot, desert hospital. I turned and gripped her hand back.

My hands were shaking again.