This is my processing of my experience yesterday. It helps to write, it is a part of debriefing. But this is also rally raw, friends, and is my experience of watching a child die, so please if that is triggering, go ahead and pass right by this one.
My teammates (dear friends) texted last night that she was taking a neighbor family to the hospital because their baby was really sick, please pray.
I go on high alert now when those types of things happen. It doesn’t just feel like a trite thing, it feels like life and death. It feels like that because I’ve lived here nearly 9 years now and repeatedly we’ve been called to help someone and found tragedy and often death. So I got in the car to join my friend so that if this baby died, she’d have a friend with her. And that’s what happened. On the way to the hospital I just knew that’s what I was walking into. I just knew.
Sometimes, because of all the tragedy, people think we have no medical care here. But we do. This family had just come down from their mountain village when the baby got sick a week ago. They were actually in town, the place where people go to find help. They did eventually go to a clinic, and then my friend took them to the hospital. They actually DID see a doctor, they had the baby hooked to oxygen. But it was too late. They tried and tried to find a vein on those tiny three-month-old hands. But baby died.
We are in the developing world, our medical care is limited, but it is present. Why is infant mortality rate so high? Why have I seen so many babies die of dehydration and fevers? There are hospitals, there is medicine, there are IVs. Is it because of lack of medical knowledge that keeps these moms at home as baby gets sicker? This baby had never been to the local moms and babies clinic, had never been weighed, never had the immunizations that actually are available here. The nurse pulled my friend and I aside and said this death was preventable if they had just come earlier, and that it’s the second death they’ve recently seen like this from that same little neighborhood. She said the local clinic needs to teach young moms.
But my friend volunteers at that clinic and they ARE teaching young moms, but this mom has never come. Some moms don’t come because, well, poverty. It seems intimidating, and also why walk a mile with an infant to a clinic in the tropical heat when you are a tired young mom?
Is it because in these tribal cultures there must be someone to blame for a death, so extended families and clans will go after anyone related to the situation, including the other side of the family? People do nothing, afraid to be blamed. The baby in my church community that died in the Fall was the same thing, died of dehydration after days of fevers. The father’s family came and raised a ruckus with machetes, blaming the mother’s family, until someone raised an exorbitant amount of money to pacify them. Someone told me today that it was so good that we missionaries took them to the hospital, because no one else would do it (fearing blame), but no one will blame us missionaries. And then I feel angry. The injustice of blaming a mother who has just had her heart pulled from her chest when she is only doing what she knows to do – mothering.
The doctors said they needed to change the baby but hospitals here don’t keep many supplies on hand, so sometimes the supplies you need you buy at a drugstore and bring back for the doctors to use. The family had to scurry off to find a place to buy a diaper. I had wipes in my bag and handed them over. It was those wet wipes that they used to wipe down the baby before he died. He was on the hospital bed where my son has laid, receiving nebulizer treatments, my daughter has sat there being examined for mystery rashes. The baby died there, was wrapped, the death certificate filled out.
I watched this baby, alive but gasping for breath. I watched life fade, breath stop. I kept saying over and over, “God, help. Lord, have mercy. God help, Lord have mercy!” I watched the doctors give infant CPR, which I was trained to do last Fall. The family watched, unsure what was happening, but the tears rolled down my friend’s and my faces because we knew that meant these were the last moments. It is the second time I’ve watched a body grow cold during CPR. I know what it looks like when someone dies now, it is familiar to me. I’m the only one who has to adjust to this reality, everyone else here has seen death many times. I thought of Jesus’ words on the cross, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”
I am sad.
I am angry.
The mother crumpled to the ground and wailed, wailed until they tried to load her into a car to take her home, and then she fought, flinging herself around, kicking, until the crowd of the whole extended family that was there could together manage to push her into their pickup truck and close the door after her. The father was the one who had laid his head beside the baby and held it close and cried.
In America people ask, how do I love my neighbor when I hardly see my neighbors, we leave in the morning for school and work and come home and wave on our way in for the evening? Here my friend, in being a good neighbor, took her weeping neighbor and the body of his dead child and drove them home to be prepared for the funeral that will happen today. Her car was the hearse.
I have no conclusion here. This morning was Sunday morning, and the tears rolled down my face during worship. The songs about entering gates with thanksgiving fall flat for me today, but it doesn’t matter, I still weep because music is always where all the emotion comes out for me. God and I had a whole conversation and in truth I don’t have to have all the answers but I have to be able to ask the questions, and I am glad that I am free before a loving Father to do that. I am thankful to cry out for justice, to rage against a world were mothers lose babies, to call for all of this to be made right.
One day.
Depart, O child, out of this world;
In the Name of God the Father Almighty who created you;
In the Name of Jesus Christ who redeemed you;
In the Name of the Holy Spirit who sanctifies you.
May your rest be this day in peace,
and your dwelling place in the Paradise of God.