The temperature was just so. The sky was blue. The cottonwood trees had dropped their downy, seeded snowballs onto the path, and the sound of the breeze drifted down to me from the tall heights of eucalyptus trees, gentle watchmen, softly lemony.
I was by myself walking and the aloneness was like a icon I keep beside my desk of the Virgin Mary, dressed in black but at ease, composed, smiling, against a rich red backdrop. I am a person who needs people tremendously, but there are times when the easy solitude of the earth, not human beings, is the biggest gift there is. Today I was pleased to Let it be unto me as You have said. And the crispy golden grass reaching over my head responded: YesYesYesYesYes.
I thought about how I get to do and see the most amazing things. How I work alongside the most extraordinary women there at the clinic. And how Moz is more beautiful and painful and satisfying than people who don't live here realize.
I get to pick up and weigh naked little brown babies, who frequently pee on me.
I get to hold Belusha's tiny hand when her bandages are changed every two days, and now the tumor is progressing so aggressively that her face is even more misshapen, her nose almost gone completely, her skull visibly changing shape, and she cries as the cloths are removed even though she is on pain medication, even though she has no eyes from which tears can exit. We laugh and sing to her, call her Belusha Bonita, rain down affection, all of us clucking around her, flapping with devotion - but really, we are silent on a starless night. I look up at her sweet mother, whose heart is gripped now, hovering on a dangerous cliff's edge, staring, mirthless, into the face of tribulation. Belusha, who is blind, disappearing, wordless, who normally is motionless, suddenly squeezes my hand, not in pain, but in gentle recognition. Time suspends. Who am I that the mother of my Lord should visit me?
I get to help treat a young man with elephantiasis, which I've talked about before, me, except this time it is located in his testicles, and he suffers - oh! so - and I go home and cannot shake the trauma of what I've seen. The nurses bring me a book of tropical diseases, all no-nonsense photos with lots of of succinct text, and then we discuss his treatment together, though I contribute nothing to this conversation except nods and murmurs.
A meter long snake, emerald and slender, venomous they say, slithers up to the side of the clinic. There are more than 45 people milling about in front, half of them under two years old and padding around barefoot, stuffing rocks and sticks and each other into their mouths. Jacqui, Heide, Elisabeth and I gather to watch the elegant curvy creature, frozen with his head erect, and communally flinch as the workman deftly chops him in half with a rough-hewn shovel. "Nothing to be done," Heide sighs.
And sometimes when I'm sitting organizing a patient file - shaggy piles of regular notebook paper filled with handwritten notes - Jacqui reaches past me to grab something else and as she does, she rests her hand on the back of my neck for a second. It's such a fleeting thing. But I look up to and admire her and Katie and Heide so much - these South African, British, and German women, such nurses, such "tough minds and tender hearts" as MLK Jr said - and her plain touch somehow conveys gratitude and even a whiff of love, a mutual understanding of what we're trying to do, faltering though we be. I feel sisterly interdependence in that hand, and exasperation and anger at the world with all its sicknesses and mankind stumbling to wade through them. I do not forget it.
When the day ends, I step out of the small clinic and walk the kilometers back to the highway, by myself in the thin forest of Mozambique, and a bird which is not a lilac-breasted roller though I imagine it to be, flitters on some branches a few feet in front of me. The field rustles with small creatures unseen. And, this time, on this day, there is no loneliness in the aloneness. Just gladness.
banks of the Rio Zambezi, in Sena, Sofala Province
2 comments:
Brooke- I hope you publish some day. I would eat up your book and buy my friends copies.
That is very inspiring. whispers from a distant land. Thank you.
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