For the past few weeks, I’ve been watching a small child starve to death.
And that’s been hard.
There’s a woman in LH, Aquam, who apparently came from another tribe. There’s different stories about how she ended up here, but the short of it is that she’s a bit mentally handicapped and wanders around the main village in the valley.
Sometime along the way, Aquam was raped and got pregnant, and had her baby maybe a year or a year and a half ago.
I think about that man sometimes when I see her sitting on the path with her baby. I think about that man, or the any number of men who had a hand in this poor woman’s situation. And I will tell you that these are not nice or friendly thoughts that I’m thinking about said man/men. In fact, I will also tell you that I actually swore under my breath at that man/those men the entire way up the mountain the other day, and might have pummeled him/them, had I the chance, with my tiny, ineffectual fists.
But, um, that’s enough of that. I pray God would give me the grace to deal with such a situation in love…
The point is, the woman did well for a while, feeding the baby and getting help from Iris and some of the neighbors. But now the child is starving to death, because Aquam doesn’t know to feed her or have the food to feed her with. Her skin is just sagging off her at some points; her little spine juts out; her eyes look like they’re bulging a bit. She looks sad, so sad. And helpless.
And it kills me. It absolutely kills me to see her.
People have tried to help, but most have given up after being spurned by Aquam. They’ve tried to admit her to the clinic; Aquam steals her away. She just doesn’t get it. And it’s easy to get frustrated with her, as misplaced as that frustration may be.
The child’s name is Sarah, and I’d appreciate it if you’d pray for her, that somehow she’d overcome the seemingly impossible odds against her and live. The team and the church are doing what we can to help; just pray God would bless those efforts.
No comments:
Post a Comment