In Praise of Fathers

Today I was struck by the love of several fathers for their children. Men in Africa, as elsewhere, do not always get a great reputation for parenting, too often absent or uninvolved. But today I noticed some amazing fathering. One-year-old Rick Thomas was one of the last patients I saw mid day, newly admitted to a mattress on the floor of the overflowing ward. I recalled months ago how he had revived from a dwindly danger to blossom into a smiling kid when his TB was treated and he was given food. Sadly his mom defaulted on the last month of his six-month medicine course, and he came back severely anemic, febrile, barely alive. His depressed mother had just buried her own father over the weekend, and now her son was slipping away. With a hemoglobin of 2.2 gm/dl he needed an urgent transfusion, but there was no blood of his type in the fridge, and after phone calls I ascertained there was none in the whole district. He would not survive transfer. The lab explained it was against policy to transfuse unbanked blood, and I generally agree, but this child was clearly dying, soon. I offered my own blood, but they wanted to test the parents first, for a better match. His mother did not match, but his father did. He tested negative for HIV and agreed to donate. A father can't go much beyond giving his own blood directly to his child. I'm praying he makes it through the night. When I got home, I found Nkabona Robert in the kitubbi with is parents. HIs articulate and smiling father had been extremely dedicated during Nkabona's two week admission last month for encephalitis. This boy had also been on the verge of death repeatedly, and we were all amazed that he survived. But he bears the neurologic scars of his brain's inflammation, a seven-year old whose speech does not quite make sense and who's restlessness may indicate hearing and vision deficits. While we were traveling with my mom, a European woman approached us after seeing the World Harvest sticker on our truck, and asked if I was Dr. Jennifer. She runs a rehab center through the Church of Uganda for kids with disabilities in Mbarara, and had seen my name on patient referrals and followed our blog and prayed for us during ebola. She encouraged me to send patients for occupational and physical therapy, so I decided to start with Nkabona. I offered transport costs and half of the nominal admission fee, asking the father to raise the rest. He said he could not feel "settled" until his son was improving, and agreed to take him. This will involve considerable effort and significant cost, but his concern is for his child. While we were organizing this, another father came with his 21-year-old son. This man is older (our age!), has started two schools himself and is now working at another as a teacher of geography. When his son Baluku was in primary school here, all of his teachers told his father that he should get him into the best school he could, because Baluku had real talent. So this father worked and saved and worked and paid, and managed to fund a really decent secondary education for his son in Fort Portal and Mbarara. Baluku had great scores, probably the best I've ever seen in math an science from a Bundibugyo-born student. He had been admitted to medical school, which was his father's dream (the father told a story about taking a pregnant woman with a partially delivered dead baby to the hospital in Bundi and watching her wait in pain and neglect for 8 hours to see a doctor, and his vow to do something about that). The LC5 referred him to us looking for scholarships. Because of his great potential we were going to personally pay half his med school costs, but the father could not raise the other half, having pretty much expended himself on the secondary fees. So they had decided to settle on a cheaper course for nursing. They came to bring Scott a rooster and thank him for his help thus far. It was a real dilemma, but this dad seemed genuinely involved and disciplined and responsible, and the boy pleasant and eager, so we agreed to try and find more funding to put him in medical school. Three fathers, each willing to do whatever it takes to help his son. And one more. Scott has done an amazing job of getting Luke ready for RVA, ordering the required clothing and reading through all the paperwork, making sure we have the fees, and providing the little extras (like a phone) that will make Luke feel settled. Tonight he went further. I had lost the name tags we are required to sew INTO EVERY ITEM of clothing, bedding, linens, etc. Though I had finished about 2/3 of the task, I still had a long way to go, dozens of socks and pairs of underwear, and no name tags. We thought they had been accidentally thrown away. Our trash goes into a deep smelly pit, 20 feet deep, steep dirt walls and rotting gunk on the bottom. Scott took a ladder and climbed down in to look for the tags. That's a real father. Sadly he could not find them. We asked our team to pray and scoured the house one more time, and there they were, right in the box where they should have been, previously unseen though almost everyone in the family had looked there already. It was a relief and a good faith-shoring-up experience to pray and then find them. Scott's experience, and the other three dads, point out that it is more the effort, the willingness to sacrifice, to get dirty, to be inconvenienced or poorer for the good of one's child, that defines fatherhood, not necessarily the successful outcome. Because love is in the action, whatever the result. Rick Thomas may still die. Nkabona Robert will probably never be normal. Baluku may or may not become a doctor. And the foray into the trash pit was heroic but ultimately fruitless. Still each self-sacrificing action was memorable and meaningful, because each embodied real love.