The Child in No. 17

In crib No. 17 of the spartan but crowded children's ward at the Church of Scotland Hospital in KwaZulu-Natal, a tiny, staring child lies dying. She is three and has hardly known a day of good health. Now her skin wrinkles around her body like an oversize unit, and her twig-size bones can barely hold her vertical as nurses search for a vein to take blood. In the frail arms hooked up to transfusion tubes, her veins have collapsed. The nurses palpate a threadlike vessel on the child's forehead. She mews like a wounded animal as one tightens a rubber band around her head to raise the vein. Tears pour unnoticed from her mother's eyes as she watches the needle tap-tap at her daughter's temple. Each time the whimpering child lifts a wan hand to brush away the pain, her mother gently lowers it. Drop by drop, the nurses manage to collect 1 cc of blood in five minutes.

The child in crib No. 17 has had TB, oral thrush, chronic diarrhea, malnutrition, severe vomiting. The vial of blood reveals her real ailment, AIDS, but the disease is not listed on her chart, and her mother says she has no idea why her child is so ill. She breast-fed her for two years, but once the little girl was weaned, she could not keep solid food down. For a long time, her mother thought something was wrong with the food. Now the child is afflicted with so many symptoms that her mother had to bring her to the hospital, from which sicks babies rarely return."

The aWAKE Project has my reading attention. 3 years ago or so, Thomas Nelson published their promotional/informational book, complete with World Vision photos to break your heart, essays from George Bush, Nelson Mandela, Kevin Maz, Philip Yancey, Danny Glover. Economists, Journalists, Musicians, Presidents, Reverends--perspectives fit for each readers taste.

The statistics stagger my attempt at living a day without thinking about this. I woke up this morning totally normal in thought, almost selfish because I was thinking about past things or hurts or people--something I haven't done in a few days. And then I sat down this morning and something inside of me was whispering "africa" again and again as I tried to read my bible and write in my journal. In conversation with my friend Ryan, while going on a nature walk collecting fall leaves with Jake Severino, during my picnic lunch, while trying to work on the Sweet Sleep newsletter---it's like, regardless of what I'm trying to do, and as much as I enjoy doing that thing I find myself doing, I've still got this little voice whispering in my head "africa."
And then I run into people who are hearing that whisper too. Or I get an email from John Thomas in Cape Town, South Africa telling me about the job opportunites at his community center. Or I read the word of God and I see verses that remind me of Africa:

and so i sit here thinking about africa. please tell me you are thinking about it, too.