More paradox on a Friday . . . .

In honor of Birungi Suizen’s discharge home today, a whopping 8.45 kg and one day short of a full two months in the hospital . . . I led the staff Bible study on Rev 21. Behold, I make all things new. Birungi is a first-fruit of the new world where hunger and tears are no more. He has a long way to go of course. Heidi baked muffins and we had a little party on his corner of the ward, with the seven nutrition patients and their moms that were his neighbors. The rest of the ward, however, is not exactly partying. 35 patients this morning, with two more sets of twins admitted before noon. There is still a little floor space but it is diminishing. By the second hour I was holding onto the fact that I know people are praying for Bundibugyo and praying for me, and I know that Jesus will make it all new, in spite of the misery which seemed to wash and swirl around me. Begging a young mother of a child with AIDS to get tested, to not run away from the hospital with her wilty sad little daughter, to have hope. Ludicrously asking a blind mother of malnourished twins to take them to the lab, as their odd orange starvation hair mingled in their push and shove on her lap for her tired breasts. Trying to engage little Robbinah, who seems to slip downward daily, with sickle cell disease and malnutrition and a mother with AIDS, stick-thin arms holding her cup of milk in her dingy dress that has “I love my Mommy” embroidered on the collar, a costume from another world. Pushing my thumb into the spongy edema that makes a malnourished 5 year old girl’s legs look like they could burst. Tracking down the absent lab man and the key so a deathly ill 3 year old just admitted could be tested for malaria. And on and on and on. Just as we came to the end of the long morning of desperation punctuated by the small rejoicing with Birungi . . . There was a commotion. I came to the door of the ward to find a mildly inebriated teenager holding a very pale boy, the young man sweating with the effort of having carried the kid as quickly as possible for help. “He’s dead, doctor” Margaret sighed as I listened to his chest hoping to hear a heart beat. Nothing. The boy was wearing a school uniform, and missing his front teeth, just like any 7 or 8 year old . . . But he was dead, limp, pale. His mother lay screaming and writhing on the floor, and when I looked up I realized that fighting off tears to the side was the same man Scott wrote about a few days ago (ironically in a post entitled "The Poor Never Get Sick"), a neighbor who just inherited the children of his brother who died of alcoholism. . . This was his actual son, his oldest, named Dan after Dan Herron, a kid whom I’ve treated many times, whom we’ve lived near his whole life. Tragically this was the healthiest kid in the family, there are others who have died or who barely manage to make it through another year with sickle cell, but Dan was tested negative. It seems he was taken to the grandmother’s house this week because school was essentially out . . But not until this morning did the parents learn that he’d had a fever for three days. Malaria most likely, we are having a deadly season of it. So this morning we celebrated one child rescued from the Destroyer, and mourned another who had no time to fight back, who was snatched before we could even enter the battle. Living here, I sense the appropriateness of the last words of the Bible: COME, Lord Jesus.