more than worth these longings

"Those who sow in tears,
Will reap in joyful shouting..."

 

I can’t write the final posts of this blog without testifying to the entire truth, its depth and color, which is that for every child who is lost, many others are saved. FACT: the waves swoop in and grab some of us, but FACT: for yet others they inexplicably freeze, rise but fail to crash, and we pass on by, as on dry land. I like to profess that the world is full of mystery yet: this is one of the greatest.

Today a new child was brought in, Maria, our first patient of the day, and she weighed only 2.8 kg, or less than 6 lbs., though she is 1 year and 5 months old. Her mentally ill mother had been living in a cemetery, often leaving her for days at a time, until she finally ran off and never returned. A granny took her up and came to us. Looking at Maria this morning, I wanted to diminish the humanity of a creature so small, but it was impossible to do because at a year and a half years old, there is already so much tired awareness in her eyes. All I could do is lean in, ashamed, and murmur to her: “I’m sorry.”

Then I turned away, pulling out more patient files, and as I did, I noticed a mother sitting outside that I knew I remembered, though I hadn’t seen her myself for many months. She'd always been seen by one of the other nurses, and in the busyness, I'd not noticed.

This was what I wrote about her little girl, Fatima, the last time I saw her:

"The final baby happened to be a new patient, and it was with uniform dismay that we realized this 2.3 kilogram baby (or 5 pounds) was already four months old. She was in a state of severe malnutrition, sprawling naked before us.

The sweating mother holding her had a crazed sort of look in her eye, one which said in a silent heartbeat: I love this baby. I have five other children, I am HIV+, but this baby, I love this baby. As Heide said afterward, it was clear that was the reason the little girl was even still alive.

It wasn't just a matter of getting food into her. Heide is a genius nurse, honestly, and right off she noticed that the child had a cleft palate - or something like that, the opening in the back of her mouth was not formed right, too big, too high, and the net result was that nothing went down. She couldn't suck. Her stomach was full of air, a lymph node near her vagina was enflamed, absurdly swollen, and there was simply nothing to her, her little chest heaving, fluttering like a hummingbird, suffering to stay alive. Her mother patiently tried to pour milk down into her with a spoon... - look, I'm going to stop here. It was painful."

I looked at this same mother today and was dumbfounded: the brown little baby she held in her arms met my eyes and beamed, light coming from within, flirtatiously smiling, glowing with health. Exclaiming with disbelief – I had truly expected her to die - her mother glanced down, her eyes instantly filling. Then she locked eyes with me and neither of us had anything to say, just wonder at the joy and miracle of it. 

I lack the artistry to make manifest what it has meant to be part of this world, to have lived in Mozambique, to have known these women, men, children. Right now the sky out my window is thickly striped in dusky pink and purple. Lush canopies of green leaves rise and fall beneath it. The bell of somebody’s bicycle is clanging down on the street, the giant lorries are blasting past, and I can’t even type for the fullness of holiness all around me. Do you get that holiness is the molecular glue of so much rudeness and imperfection? How can it be? - things are so crappy! - and yet it’s clear it is.

I don’t know how the world works. We live in a time of plague, called HIV, we are swept along by seasons of hunger, and yet the story we exist in is bigger than either, than everything.

The page turns. After a month, five months of death, life pushes back up. You should see this country now. The final rain, three days long, at last has subsided. The fields are bearing fruit. Everywhere is the fragrance of cut grass, as men clear away the rioting green which is now higher than the top of my truck. Every day at the clinic, we are presented with the harvest offerings of grandmothers and peasant women, now thanking us with their sudden excess: plastic bags of long sleek maize, okra, bananas, squash, football-sized avocados, spiny wild cucumbers, even a giant gerbil!

Maybe the furtive advancement of life is the inevitable force, after all, not the other side of it: not the despair, suffering, or fear. I don’t have tidy resolutions about Belusha, or Maria – oh God, Maria. Except what a heart-stopping honor it was to have known her, precious child Belusha; to have acknowledged Maria, to whisper those words.

There’s a universal power I imagine as racing flat, invisible, and a resounding surge it makes – ca-foom! – when our wholly disparate lives intersect, mine with Belusha’s, Maria’s with the granny who quietly brought her in to save her. We have looked in the face of immense blackness, have we not? But then the holiness, pinprick dots of light, shimmer into physical sight for a moment, renewing our courage. And we know what holds together even the molecules of pain. We know.

Sometimes the waves freeze.


Mankind forgets about the surging power; we don’t know much about it. But it exists, sees, and knows. It tells the fuller story. It testifies to the breadth, depth, and color of what we are living.

2 Chronicles 16:9 For the eyes of the Lord range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him.

There’s more than meets the eye when you work at a place like the baby clinic. Today was my last day there, and the goodbye didn’t involve a Hollywood soundtrack cuing us to start crying. There was simply the natural rightness of a thing come to its end and the bittersweet but deep satisfaction of having passed through it together. If any unheard music played, it wasn’t a mourning song. It was music for when the rains finally end and a harvest dance begins.

At the AIDS Indaba I went to in Swaziland a couple of years ago, one of the tenacious, Big-Mama African women leaned into me at one point, and she confided:

“To sing is in Africans’ blood. But to sing without dancing…ah! is to not have sung at all.”

 

Sores like these are due to malnutrition - eating food without any nutritional value, without vitamins. Heide and Jacqui worried this baby's feet might have to be amputated.

Instead, healed.

This is the father of one of the twins I wrote about once, here looking more as a baby ought to look. Now, they're even fatter.

After the fires last year.

Now.


So often they come in like this.


But leave more like this. 

Some of our amazing single dads, fallen asleep while waiting to get formula for their kids.


The road out to Belusha's house.






My heroes, Heide and Jacqui.