In the midst of the chaos of clinic on Wednesday, one of our church leaders who comes to minister hope to AIDS patients at the hospital pulled me aside and asked as a favor that I look at the sick baby of . . . Well, our English language is poor in the specificity of relationship words, but this young woman was related to his wife’s family, a sister to his wife’s parent of some sort. I agreed, in most cases friends of friends turn out to be not very sick consults who just want the extra authoritative touch of the doctor, so I let her wait in the line of patients waiting for me. About noon I realized this quiet young woman was constantly being superseded by more aggressive moms who were used to the clinic, so I stopped the line and let her in. Bundled in a deceptively white cloth on the outside was a baby with a putrid odor on the inside. One eye was completely swollen shut, boils covered her whole scalp, and a festering open wound oozed on her neck. She weighed less than 5 pounds though tomorrow will be her 1 month birthday. The mother, K.R., rubbed her sore breast and said quietly that she did not have enough milk to feed the baby. I admitted them emergently, to treat the mother’s infected breast and the baby’s infected body with our best antibiotics. Today I pieced together her story, which is perhaps sadly representative of all too many young women in Bundibugyo.
K.R. Grew up in Izahurra, a village ridge outside Bundibugyo town. She attended primary school until P4 but at age 13 her father died, and she dropped out. Three years later her mother also died, so she was left at age 16 in the care of an older brother. She got a job in Bundibugyo town serving food at a “hotel”, which is a one-room cramped cement shop that caters hot meals to men working in town. Soon she developed a sexual relationship with a man who frequented the hotel and worked as a truck driver. He gave her small amounts of money for the things she needed, they met in town, but she never “married” him, meaning she never went to stay at his home and her brother never received any bride price. When she became pregnant and told him, he wanted nothing else to do with her, and stopped giving her any money. Around this time her brother moved the family further from town. So last month she ended up delivering her firstborn baby, a little girl, alone. When her labor came on everyone else was gone to the garden, so she stayed in the mud house by herself until the baby dropped out onto the floor. She couldn’t even cut the umbilical cord.
Not a promising start in life for this baby, Masika. Masika is a shrively reddish-yellow, irritated, cooler than she should feel, loose skin on bones, opening one eye anxiously. She is not a cute baby, and I have to remind myself to touch her and smile. K.R made three prenatal visits (but lab tests were unavailable on all three occasions) and has brought her baby for help two times since birth. She is a caring mother. Twice in the last two days I’ve watched her hunched over her baby as silent tears slip down her face. So today it was with a heavy heart that I had to tell her that we had tested her blood, and she is HIV positive. Her reaction: Does that mean my baby will die? She seemed to have little concern for herself, but a heartbreaking hope that her baby can survive. Perhaps those years of exchanging sex for survival eroded too completely her sense of value in who she is, but she hasn’t given up on this child.
This baby and her mother remind me of Ezekiel 16, where God uses the image of the pitiful unwashed baby as a symbol of His helpless people whom He then protects, grows, loves, clothes and adorns. It’s a shocking chapter to find in a book like the Bible. I would love to see both the 1 month old and the 19 year old girls, mother and child, wearing silk and eating pastries (v. 13), famed for their beauty. And someday I believe I will. In the meantime we offer prayers for healing of body and soul, we offer food for putting flesh back on the bones, we offer the good news that Jesus seeks out the skinny and scabby and smelly, and we humbly acknowledge that we are all the same.
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