There is a scary tendency to become drawn into the sheer quantity of people becoming ill with cholera without making it personal, to see the numbers and not the individuals. But for the Samaritan’s Purse staff battling the growing outbreak in Haiti, it has become extremely personal.
It’s impossible to be so near when they are in their hour of need without becoming fully vested in their survival. This is what our staff is doing 24 hours a day here.
I wonder if it is possible for a heart to become overwhelmed from fullness of emotion. I felt this today as I watched a mother’s love manifest itself in ways that only God could instill inside someone. The gentleness and tenderness from the day replays as I write these words.
Mothers laid on soiled beds next to their sick children who were hooked up to an IV, watching over them. They weren’t afraid of getting cholera. They just knew they needed to be near their little one as their chests moved up and down quickly, trying to recover from their sickness.
Mothers sang over their children, and caressed their backs as they vomited repeatedly. Mothers rode in the back of pick-up truck beds and motorbikes seats, pulling their loved ones close as they drove for help.
Each story we heard from a mother shared their laments that they thought their child was going to die. Cholera is miserably quick to attack.
Today, the beds at our Bercy cholera treatment center were full. This makeshift hospital tells the story of cholera. Family members hold their sick, rocking them as they moan in pain.
In another tent, a mother fans the flies away from her infant’s sleeping bodies. A wife clasps her husband’s frail hand. Daughters pour water over an elderly mother’s face as she hangs her head back in despair.
Bed by bed, we listen to each story and watch love make a way. There is something very healing and validating when you are present and listen to someone share their story. They should matter, and they do. We want them to know that God is bigger than this.
Cholera becomes very personal when each patient begins to matter more than just a number on a checklist. I watched Lesley live this out as she comforted a sick child getting an IV. She has a special way of drawing them to her. Although he was in pain he felt safe, because he trusted her when she said it was going to be okay. This is the kind of thing that happens here.
There is an ebb and flow of feeling as you watch the cholera epidemic unfold. Heartbreak as you watch the sick be carried in, or as you look into the vastness of a child’s sad eyes as they wait out the hours. But then comes the joy, as you see a young woman like Vanessa, smiling brightly and sitting up in her bed.
“I thought I might die when I came in here Wednesday,” she shares confidently. “I was very sick. But the staff here has brought me back to life, they have been kind to me. Now I am going home and I can see my child. And now I know what to do to prevent her from getting ill.”
Or like Matilde, who watched her son bounce back overnight.
“I am so happy today. I didn’t think he was going to make it. Now I can smile, because he has life again,” she said.
Then are these God-sized miracles that happen. Like the IV that wouldn’t go in to a child who came in close to death. Dr. John, Mike, and Tiffany tried every vein to get a line started and they couldn’t. They decided to do an IV into his bone, and couldn’t find the spot. It was tense and the child was close to slipping away. “We need to pray.” They pleaded that God would intercede and immediately the IV went in and the child begin receiving life-giving fluid. They knew, instantly, that God had intervened.
And yet another story, of a 64-year-old woman who came in comatose and near death. She received fluids for over a day, and this afternoon she was completely unresponsive. She was near death, and Dr. Chuck couldn’t get a pulse. They thought this was the end. Our team of Haitian pastors and BGEA chaplains prayed and sang over her. They watched her revive, sit up, and begin talking. They said it was a miracle. She was on the ledge of death and came off it.
At the same time an hour away, our team was doing an assessment in a mountain community where several people had fallen ill overnight. We were returning from dropping off supplies when we stumbled across a woman being carried on a rusty bed frame up a bumpy dirt road. She was incredibly sick, and it was clear they had been carrying her for a long way.
We got her into the truck bed and her elderly mother held her in her lap as we drove her to our clinic, rushing to get here in time. This fight for survival is in the soil, in the air here. The Haitian people are so resilient, even in the face of cholera. Our team was there to receive her and started an IV on her immediately. We stopped and thank God that He had brought her to us.
I smiled thinking about this group of people, struggling to carry their loved one in her bed, when suddenly a carload doctors who were heading toward a cholera clinic pulled up. How much more proof is there that God is here, fighting with us?
These are just a few of the things that happened in one day. If I could share them all, they would fill many more pages. I pray you are encouraged by what God is doing here, and know that your prayers and support are a critical part of the healing that is taking place here.
May God bless you today.
November 15th~I'm thankful that I live in a country where I have opportunities and my hard work pays off. This isn't the situation for people living in third world countries. A lot of times their hard work isn't rewarded but they do it day in and day out to survive.
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