heartbreak and providence

i’m sitting in the dark. the rain, whose steady falling creates a musical symphony to the percussion of my typing, has driven all vestiges of the sun from view. it normally gets fairly dark around this time of night – 18:15 or so – but never is it so dark that you must almost grope from room to room. but the dark is actually very nice. a comforting peace after long days full of busy-ness and heartbreak.

that really describes today for me. that and providence. a bit of an oxymoron: heartbreak and providence, but let me explain.

the morning opened up beautifully. following a plan of forty days of prayer for sierra leone and the looming political elections, i opened the morning praying for god to dispel the clouds of corruption from this beautiful country. walking out into sunshine instead of rain was such a blessing to my poor human mind which gropes for signs on which to hang my faith. the first item on the agenda, after opening the admin office, making coffee, and then going to devotions, was to take two of our patients in for hiv testing at connaught, the government hospital. i was thankful for the opportunity to see again the centre that i had visited with harriet and abibatu upon first arriving. the trouble was that the girls spoke limba and fullah respectively and about a drop of krio between them. thankfully, francis, one of the drivers, was taking us, and whether or not either woman was able to understand him, his confident, authoritative manner was easy enough to understand.

the testing went well enough without too much of a wait for the test results. thankfully, both girls were negative! such a praise...while i was in the office, i wished so badly that i could take a picture or maybe just be able to download the experience from my brain to my computer so that i could share it with you all. there are so many memories of sierra leone that are like that. i wish that i had more patience for writing so that i could sit and record every detail faithfully, but it’s not really my personal gifting. ah well... :)

in any case, the trip into town took most of the morning, but we were back to the centre by lunch. the girls were so relieved to be back. apparently when they saw the big land cruiser they had come in, they thought that they were being taken back home, without warning to pack any of their personal belongings and without having surgery!

right as i walked in the door, i saw my friend, seray, laying on her bed. i went over to say hello, but noticed that she was quite out of sorts. when i asked her why she was sad, she finally looked at me and told me that she had woken up wet that morning. completely thunderstruck, i struggled to say anything at all. when i took her hand, we both began to cry. in seray, i have experienced a true understanding of what it means to be afflicted by fistula in sierra leone. we are told how it ostracizes the woman from her community, how devastating it is, how life-changing the surgery can be, but that doesn’t really mean anything. it all stays up in your head and becomes another fact that you spit out in your carefully organized spiel. with seray, it struck right to my heart. i saw the utter devastation in her face, and i couldn’t stand up to it. nothing i can do or say will take that pain away from her. so i didn’t say anything.

when we both settled down a bit, after seray had poured out to me the woes of her journey with this condition and her bitter disappointment, i looked through the doctor’s notes and explained to her what was recorded there, and how there was still hope for full healing and recovery. she understood, and we moved on to other things, namely her education.

i have felt a burden for a while for seray’s education. she is so bright, and she really gets it. after talking with her, she told me that she would like to finish secondary school, but she thinks that it would be better to go to a vocational school instead and learn a trade which she can continue on in. she also told me that she would be coming back to freetown sometime soon. that she would only be visiting kabala for a few weeks. her mother kicked her out of the house when she lost the baby and started leaking urine, and now that her mother is re-married following the sudden death of seray’s father, there are plenty of new little ones to keep her mother occupied.

so i was well on my way to trying to sort out some sort of way that i could set up a trust fund of sorts for her education, when god really landed everything in my lap. when i asked her where in freetown she was staying, she told me that she was in fact going to be living with one of the nurses, fatmata. when i checked with fatmata, and she is, in fact, taking seray in, and she had already begun looking into a vocational school that is right down the street. such a blessing!

heartbreak and providence. you can’t tell me that god doesn’t exist...