Returning to the World

One of those rarely noticed  flowers I saw along the path that I think about often

While in Kenya, in one of the coastal district villages, I experienced an encounter that made a lasting impression on me. There in  this plush jungle village, filled with nutritious food that could be picked from a tree or greens pulled up by for its leaves and roots, was a woman sitting by the road. Not only did she have her lethargic and dehydrated  child  at her breast, the clinic was directly across the road.

Most alarming to me was observing that no one was paying any attention to the suffering of this mother and child. I walked up to her and knelt down so our eyes were level with each other. She seemed not to notice that I was there even when I said, "Habari". I looked closely at the infant at her breast. The skin of both was laying over bones, with no fat whatsoever, and very little muscle. I thought perhaps the infant was dead and the mother too weak to cross the road to the clinic.

She was not able to get up and walk with me across the road.  I summoned two young men standing close by. They carried her to the clinic steps and put her down.  I caught the attention of someone in white - nurse or doctor, I didn't much care. The voice in the body dressed in white curtly informed me that we would have to wait our turn.

There was no one else waiting at this clinic.

Not being one to stir things up in a strange place, I sat for awhile while the man in white went about his business.  Finally, I went inside, determined to have him acknowledge this obvious suffering. I also let him know it was getting dark soon and I needed to be on my way to make it to my destination.

He and I carried the woman and her baby, still at her breast, into the clinic and onto a table covered with a white sheet.The building was rudimentary. There were windowed cupboards full of supplies.  The man said he was a doctor and had been there for twenty-five years, emphasizing his history there with, "I've seen it all!".

It's as if he had read my mind and the questions it was asking about his apathetic demeanor.

He pronounced the infant dead and predicted that the woman would soon be dead, showing me a festering wound on her leg. The doctor said, "It is a snake bite and that she was already in a weakened condition when it bit."

I asked him,  "How might she have come to be so weakened?"

His reply was a lengthy monologue about the multiple causes that might result in her emaciated condition..  I listened to him tell of the extent of physical problems he had encountered in these 25 years in this jungle and of the many he had trained who had left to seek better wages.

He said his wife had left because, "She couldn't take it anymore." What I learned, as he talked,  was she couldn't take a sense of not being able to cut down the amount of physical ailments - and she feared for the health of their two children.

I thanked him for his dedication and for sharing his saga with me, said my good-byes to the doctor and the woman,  and walked on down the road to my intended destination.

I was on my way to train village residents to work together on their community's development. I felt, like the doctor, that what I was doing was worth my life.

But, as I walked down the road, I felt my whole self-story fall apart, leaving all purpose behind, It was like stripping myself of my clothes as  I went. I was feeling more like the doctor's wife.

When I arrived in the village,I was  greeted with  welcome enthusiasm. I took one deep breath, realizing that fortunately I had not actually left my clothes on the road, and was suddenly so grateful for people in this world who respond to human suffering with such hope.


when have you encountered the hopelessness of human suffering and then experienced the signs of hope beyond hope, and then experienced a renewed sense of purpose?