The poor never get sick

The angel of Death has racked up a lot of frequent flier miles for visiting Bundibugyo over the years.  

Last week Issac (no real names here), a 38-year old living immediately adjacent to our mission, died of chronic alcoholism.  He led a sad life of scraping by - mostly through stealing stuff from the mission - and squandering what he managed to scrape up.  The saddest part of his tale is what he leaves behind--four healthy kids with no legacy, no nothing.  These kids have been handed over to Charles, his brother, a former house worker to a WHM missionary family who have returned to the USA.  Charles  is unemployed (like 90% of those in Bundibugyo) and scraping by with intermittent manual labor and a subsistence garden.  

Charles showed up at our door on Saturday morning and reported that he now has eighteen mouths to feed two meals a day...and nothing in his pocket with which to buy food in the Saturday market.  I would skeptically brush aside such comments from many, but Charles tends toward the truth in a culture where words are a tool of manipulation and truth is, let us say, not a core value.

Consider for a moment what such a situation must be like. No money in your wallet, no money in the bank, no food in the pantry, no check in the mail, no security whatsoever. And a huge group of people expecting you to provide their next meal.  I'm afraid that the sense of desperation that I would feel in such a situation would reveal a heart of darkness rather than of faith.

So, I asked him to bring a day's worth of elephant grass for our cow and then gave enough cash to buy a day's worth of food for his burgeoning flock...and found him back at my door on Monday morning, hopeful for more work.   Not exactly what I had in mind.   So, after several minutes of agonizing I decided to give him a couple of days more worth of work clearing weeds and brush in our pasture.  Rarely, have I seen more work accomplished per hour.  It looks like he'll finish this job in a couple of days, hoping because of his strenuous efforts that he will have earned the privilege of gaining even more employment in the future.  

While Charles was down in the pasture and I contemplated this situation a week down the road, another former mission house worker, Mark, planted himself on our porch with his tale of woe.  He's not been around he said, because he's not been feeling well.  "So," I said, "you've been in bed at home?"   

"No. Scott, you know we have a proverb in Lubswisi - The poor never get sick."

"I don't think so," I said, "confidently. If anything, the poor are more likely to get sick.  Poor nutrition.  Poor sanitation.  Unclean water.  The poor get sick all the time."

"The proverb means", he said, "that the poor have no time to lay in bed, to recover, to play the role of a sick person.  We must bear our burden of sickness and continue our struggle to feed and clothe and educate our children."

I nodded in agreement.

How long, O, Lord, how long? -Psalm 6:3