I found out just a few days ago, chatting with one of my Mercy Ships friends over the telephone. We were rejoicing over Abe's recent reunion with his family after months of surgery and physical therapy, overjoyed that he finally made it home. He is walking and running again, with chicken legs now straight like any little boy's legs should be. I can see him beaming at me from bed 5 in B ward, drumming away happily on the djembe with two crochet hooks for drumsticks, patiently waiting for the day that he would be able to play football with other boys again. He's there, he's home...excitedly showing off his new straight legs to the village, a living testament of God's healing power.
And then she said it. "I don't know if you heard, Laura, but Mariam died at home a few weeks ago. Her husband called the ship to let them know." No, I hadn't heard. Mariam was the little mother we had given a pint of my blood just a few months ago in April, a fixture in our ICU for weeks as the doctors struggled for a diagnosis. Her husband read his bible over her and prayed as the nurses flowed around him in the choreographed dance of IVs and fluids, monitors and medications. We sent her home with a tracheotomy - still not knowing why she couldn't breathe when we took out the tube.
I flashed back for a quick second to the night I met her - the concerned voice of the charge nurse asking for an ER nurse to start an IV as I untied my lappa and gave away the baby on my back, the pale resigned face in the bed, the one small vein I carefully slid the IV catheter into, the smell of benzoin and alcohol, the voice of our translator/pastor Yaovi telling me "I don't need to explain to her what you will do, Afua, the other nurses have tried this already. But I told her God gave you magic eyes to see the veins that no one else can."
I can see her smile around the endotracheal tube that allowed her to breathe those first few days, hear her husband greet me by name as I come back to start another IV, and another, and another over the weeks that followed, feel the tears on her cheeks and mine as she hugged us good bye and mouthed "akbe, akbekaka" as she walked home - breathing from a hole in her throat, but definitely breathing on her own.
I'm happy for her to finally dance free, to sing again in praise, to breathe without anything to hold her back. I grieve for her husband and little boy. Please pray for them as they face a life without her...with her gone home ahead of them.
Pray also for the Mercy Ships crew - finishing up the outreach and headed home all over the world. Pray for strength, for patience, for love and for a sense of wonder at home as well as in Africa. It is so easy to wonder at the clear evidence of God at work there in the bright sunshine, to dance in praise to the beat of the djembe, to love on the little ones that have lost so much and yet still smile and hope. Sometimes things are not so clear here; sometimes it is hard to see through the fog.
