six inches above the mud

This is Mumbere and his grandmother, one of my favorite patient pairs.  If anyone recalls, she is the old lady who took over care of her grandson when his mother Dorothy died of AIDS and TB and he was well on the way to dying himself.  She commented he was the only picture she had of her daughter.  Now that he is four, and on the miraculous ARV's, he does look remarkably like his mom when she was a recalcitrant teenager who refused to acknowledge her positive HIV test.  We have been through a lot together.  Last visit this tiny lady, who can't weigh more than 70 pounds herself, told me she wished for a mattress, because she and Mumbere sleep on dried banana leaves on the mud floor of their home.  She is not in great health herself, has a husband who is probably dying of heart failure and in the meantime stole and ate the goat she got from our project.  She faithfully walks miles to come for care each month.  I tried to help her by giving her money for a boda, but there she was on her bare feet again today, finally admitting she spent the transport on the simple necessity of salt for cooking.   Sleeping on a mattress doesn't seem like a lot to ask from life.   In the spirit of one of the main characters in Blue Clay People, I decided to give her one of ours (this is a book about Liberia, aid, cross-cultural stress, war, poverty, and life in Africa, and in it one of the somewhat wild CRS staffers sums up his philosophy of development as giving everyone a mattress to raise them 6 inches above the mud of life).

So hopefully tonight Mumbere and his grandmother will luxuriate, probably for the first time in their lives, sleeping on foam.  I hope they can keep it from the rats and rain, and enjoy a few hours a day of repose.  And I would not be surprised if in Heaven, this little old lady who plods through life with her grandson on her back, won't get a queen-sized bed in a palace from which she rules over a whole tribe of bankers, analysts, doctors, missionaries, and others who now sleep in comfort.