Tragedy next door

Late last night, the one-year-old child of our neighbors fell into a fire and burned to death.
It’s days like this that make me wonder if my heart can take Africa.
Sure, kids die all the time here. But this particular case really has me paralyzed with emotion, because in it, I’m forced to recognize certain realities of this place.
The child fell into a cooking fire inside the hut—they keep their fires in holes about a foot or so deep. The parents didn’t wake up to the child’s screams. But we’re not talking a typical two-story suburban home here, where the parents could have legitimately (or at least more believably) been far enough away not to hear the kid screaming. We’re talking a grass hut, perhaps 12 feet in diameter, where they’re all sleeping. So how can a parent not wake up? Most likely because they were passed out from drinking balu (beer) and dancing to the rainmaker all night. That’s how it goes around here—all day in the fields, all night drinking beer, often as your children wonder around with their agemates, the youngest of the children strapped to their backs. (You see a lot, too, the results of the drunk mothers dropping their babies off their backs and into fires—horrible burns and disfigurations.)
They say it’s Jok. I guess you could call him the bad god. When something bad happens, it’s Jok and he takes when he wants, they say. If he’s hungry and he wants meat, he takes. So they have no control, you see. It’s a very fatalist way of thinking—if he wants you dead, you died. And so there’s no concern for safety or prevention. Why put a fence or stones around the fireplace? If Jok wants to take the baby with fire, he’ll take it anyway.
As I sit here, filled with emotion, Im’ made to wonder what or if these people are feeling. This may sound strange, but it’s easy to see the Lopit (or many Africans) as devoid of all feelings. And, surely, this is because we experience and handle feelings differently. But you can’t help but wonder. Late night, the village was going nuts, wailing and screaming, mourning the baby’s death. And this morning, Husa and all the surrounding villages are somber. That’s nice to see, because I know they’re feeling. Part of me wonders, too, if it’s not a more genuine, human kind of mourning—this wailing and screaming—than our custom of quietly sniffing as we pass by a coffin and family members, somberly delivering our condolences with measured emotion. But it’s in other things that I want to know what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling.
We went to the funeral and as I sat there, I looked inside the hut.
And I saw the firepit—the same firepit the baby had burned in not 14 hours earlier.
And they were cooking over it.
My whole body felt sick. My senses revolted against me—I swore I could smell the burning flesh—and it was so hard to keep it together.
And then I wondered—how can they not feel this, think this?
Someday I hope to be able to ask them that, to talk with the women in Lopit.
For now, I’ll pray for the gospel to renew this place.
I guess the whole thing—as much as it makes me think perhaps my heart is not strong enough—reminds me why I’m here. These people need the gospel. They need a hope that can be for more than for rain or against the whim of some meat-hungry god. And they need renewed minds. Not Western minds, but minds transformed by the gospel of Jesus Christ. And, really, that’s where it has to start.
And so I pray that you’ll believe God for that with me, that He’ll transform this community with the gospel. Because, truly, truly, He is able.