Pathos

Over April 01-04 we held a successful workshop for our Mustard Seed girls. It was a wonderful four days for the girls. They really took in the teaching about self worth, God’s desire for good in their lives, and making wise choices. Additionally they laughed and played together and ate until their little tummies squeaked. But, … but for me and a couple of them the weekend was framed in pathos.

As Wendy had noted in a previous entry, one of our Mustard Seed girls arrived at our house after her school day on March 31. She was worried, anxious. Her grandmother, her caregiver, had been admitted to hospital the day previously.

She had visited the grandmother the following morning, the 31^st, to find her grandmother unresponsive. Now it was past visiting hours, and she was worried about her grandmother. What could she do? All hope would be lost for her family she said, if something happened to her grandmother.

We made a plan. We would go to the hospital, visit the ward despite it not being visiting hours, and ask for an update.

Semi-private, or even Canadian style ‘ward’ care does not exist at the Queen 2 hospital in Maseru. A ‘ward’ is a long narrow room, beds lining each wall, and stretching away to a distant end wall. My best reckoning was that there was a least fifteen beds lined up on each side with a narrow space to walk between the two rows. All the beds were filled, and here and there between the beds was a foam mattress on the floor with yet another patient lying on it. We need not have worried about visiting hours because there seemed to be many visitors. Mapulane, the girl, led me about a quarter of the way down the aisle to where her grandmother lay, on her side, covered with a blanket, on a foam mattress, on the floor. Unstirring, untended, uncared for, alone, silent.

We went back to the desk and asked the nurse if she might provide us an update. She found the grandmother’s chart, left us, made her way down the same narrow aisle, checked the patient and returned. The nurse then invited us into a small consultation room where she spoke briefly to Mapulane and then sent her to phone her older brother. She then turned to me, and simply and quietly said the grandmother was ‘late’. She added that the chart indicated that a couple of hours prior the grandmother had been breathing. She had sent Mapulane to call her brother and when they returned she would advise them together.

Thirty or forty minutes later the brother arrived. Together we made our way back to the ward. The nurse was occupied for a further ten to fifteen minutes before being able to speak to the brother and sister. The grandmother’s body continued to lie on the mattress on the floor. The patients in the beds on either side had visitors. They carried on with their conversations. It was dinner time. Patients were being served. They ate. They chatted. A dead body lay on the floor. A brother and sister, no parents and now no caregiver, grieved.

Then, on the day after the workshop I had reason to visit one of the other girls at her ‘home’. Her home, at its best, is an old, run down and decrepit building with an earthen floor. The family had been chased from it earlier this year by heavy rain, but had been able to return when it had dried up. But now … , now the local water authority has a broken water line just above the house. The leaking water has turned the yard into a swamp. The house, its earthen floor covered in 6 inches of water, is again totally uninhabitable. So what is 'home' for this just turned 17 year old young woman with three younger siblings?

'Home' is one neighbor offering a small building where she can cook and keep what little food the family has. Another neighbor offers a place on the floor come bedtime, where she and her siblings sleep. During the day, when not in school, she and her siblings hang about, essentially homeless. And where are her relatives?

The local chief is holding them at bay. Their desire is simply to grab the land and house, such as it is, kick the children out, and make it their own. So the girl is afraid to leave her ‘home’ lest she have nothing to ever come back to. And the water authority?? Neighbors, the local chief, others, have repeatedly contacted the water authority to fix the leak and the repeated response is, “Tomorrow. We will be there tomorrow,” but tomorrow has yet to come.

I stood by this frail young girl. I would go home to my warm comfortable house, to hot water, to food in the fridge, and she, what did she have to look forward to. I cannot imagine the burden she carries. She stoically confirmed how difficult it is, especially the responsibility for her younger sibling. Her hope, what keeps despair from overwhelming her? “I have to trust in God,” she said. And then SHE blessed me. “God bless you,” she said, for my concern and for the few shekels I had given her. In her desperate need she remains grateful, grateful for her neighbors’ support and what little they are able to provide, grateful for the little that we at the Mustard Seed have provided, grateful that a white ‘stranger’ would visit.

My God, why? Why such disparity in our world? Why such pain and suffering for innocent children? Why?

Maybe I cannot answer why, but what I do know is that the wonderful Basotho I work with at the Mustard Seed will 'make a plan" and we will find a way to do something to foster hope from the pathos in these young lives.

~ Benno ~