The consequences of desperation...

I am spending a couple of days with some fantastic ladies and cool teenage boys at a ministry called the Street Child Project. They have been wonderfully welcoming and have made me feel at home. And once again, it’s great to see people loving on others who need it. I met one of the missionaries, Tracy, in town last week and we became quick friends. The other two missionaries are a mother/daughter team who are unbelievably kind. Of course, I am insanely jealous that Jenny gets to have her momma, Ms. June, here with her every day!

This afternoon, I went to the children’s hospital with Ms. June to check on a malnourished baby and to meet another missionary there to see what could be done for the baby. Mrs. June told me about how malnourished the baby was, but there was no way to prepare for meeting him. When I saw him I was appalled at how a baby could be in his condition. His legs and arms were as thin as the bone. His normal sized head looked gigantic on his little 19 month old body. If it were not for his distended belly, he could not have weighed more than 10 pounds. The worst part is that his malnourished state was completely preventable. His mother used him to beg for money. She purposefully withheld food from him to gain more money. As she stood beside her baby, who was somehow sitting up on a mat underneath a tree in the backyard of the hospital, I compared her healthy body to his broken and struggling body. I wondered how a mother could watch her baby boy grow closer and closer to death everyday in order to get money. I wondered how she could feed herself and withhold food from the baby who was created in her own womb. I wondered how that precious child’s mother had so miscalculated her plan that he had come so close to death. I listened as the missionary who had met us there devised a plan of action. A plan that includes an HIV test, TB test, looking at his charts, and considering the funding for his hospital stay. As I became overwhelmed about the future of this precious one and my anger at his mother grew, I realized that the place that she had come to in life, where she was willing to starve her son to the brink of death, is a place that I will never understand. It’s a place of desperation that I don’t understand. In that mother’s desperation she saw the only way out to be starving her baby so that they could essentially survive. And while I still don’t think it was the right thing to do, I have to remind myself that I don’t understand her desperation and I pray I never do.