Day Four: A Difficult Trip to the Pediatric ER

"How lovely on the mountain are the feet of him who brings good news." (Isaiah 52:7)

There is a particular kind of quiet that settles into a van full of people who know exactly what is coming. This morning it found us at breakfast, and it followed us all the way to the first build site. Two homes were on the schedule before lunch, and by day four, that number lands differently depending on who you ask.

The younger team members still have enthusiasm to spare, and it shows. But enthusiasm does not un-ache a back that has been swinging a hammer since Tuesday. So we ate quietly. We rode quietly. Not out of dread, but out of the kind of focus a team develops when everyone has silently agreed to save what they have left for the work ahead.

At our first site we met a young mother whose husband works as a laborer. She watched our team arrive the way you would watch a small, determined swarm of ants descend on a dropped Cheeto.  A little unsure at first as we started to build, then unable to look away as post after post disappeared under boards.

It took about ninety minutes. In that time, the Gospel was shared, and the importance of belonging to a body of believers was gently pressed into the conversation. She told us, through tears that fell without a sound, that she had lost a baby to miscarriage some years ago, and that grief has kept her at a distance from church ever since. Prenatal care here is scarce to the point of being nearly nonexistent, and we were told that many mothers experience this kind of loss. Our interpreter carried her own share of that heaviness as she translated, and two of our team members knelt beside this young woman and prayed while her face stayed still and her tears did not. Hope is still a word she is learning to trust again. But we know the God who can bring healing to a womb and to a heart in the same breath, and we left that yard asking Him to do exactly that.

Our second build of the day explained itself the moment we arrived. After three homes built without much trouble, this one had clearly been saved for a team that had proven it could handle a tight squeeze, literally. We worked wedged between a barbed wire fences and the wall with barely a foot of clearance on either side, passing boards hand to hand like a bucket brigade because there was no room to carry them any other way.

The family receiving this home will navigate that same tight corridor every day for years to come, and if it bothered them, they never let it show. A house was still a house, and the inconvenience of its footprint was a small price against the weight of finally having one. It took a little longer than the others, mostly because getting materials to every side of the structure meant threading them through gaps built for people, not lumber. Chickens and a few well loved animals wandered through the whole process like they had been hired as inspectors, and the site was full of generations, grandparents to grandchildren, all watching the walls go up around the family they already were.

After a quick lunch and another round at the feeding kitchen, part of our team headed back to Brisa de Sur to spend the last of the afternoon just playing with the kids. It is easy to assume the teenagers and young adults on this trip earn their keep with a hammer, but afternoons like this are the reminder that their real gift is presence. They chased, they laughed, they lost every negotiation over game rules. Our translators stayed on their toes the entire time, catching half-finished sentences and turning them into full ones in whichever language the moment required. A few teachers pulled team members aside to share their own stories and asked for prayer, and we gave it gladly, right there in the same dirt where the kids had just been running.

Hopsital Escuela, people have to wait for many many hours outside

That evening after dinner at about 8 pm we left for Hospital Escuela, and if the day had been building toward something, this was it. When we arrived we quickly made our way across a busy street to where our next mission was. As Harrison and Misa preached the hope found only in Jesus, we watched the crowd for the small signs people give when something is landing. Eyes wiped, not from exhaustion exactly, but from a weariness that comes from carrying too little hope for too long.

This hospital is what "free" medical care looks like. Outside, dozens of family members sat and slept on flattened pieces of cardboard because there was no room for them inside. They are not allowed in the waiting areas, so they wait in the open air, huddled together against the cold, some of them for days, a few for weeks, watching every person who walks toward the doors in case it is finally news about the one they love. The diagnosis is free. The medicine, the equipment, the actual treatment, none of that is.

So people wait. Maylene is waiting on a surgery for her daughter that she has no way to pay for. Her daughter is 21 days old and her intestines were born outside of her body. In order to receive treatment she must bring the money for the medicine and for the tools needed for the surgery.

We met others carrying the same weight, a diagnosis in hand and no way forward from it. It is a hard thing to witness, and it is a harder thing to write about without turning it into an argument. I will only say this. It is easy to have opinions about healthcare systems from a comfortable distance. It is much harder to hold onto those opinions standing in a hallway full of people who would trade almost anything for what most of us complain about at home.

What I know is that we are not called to have the right opinion about a hospital system. We are called to show up in it with bread in our hands and prayer on our lips, and today, that is exactly what our team did.

We prayed through the pediatric unit. We prayed with families camped outside the OB unit. We handed out bags of bread and supplies to as many as we could reach, and every single face we met, no matter how many days they had already been waiting, greeted us with something between exhaustion and genuine warmth. Our team praying with a young couple, their stillborn baby laying next to them as tears were shed. Another two mothers having received Jesus during our visit and one other person choosing to accept Christ as well.  All in all, three persons prayed to receive Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. We left, our hearts very full…but also very broken.

How lovely on the mountain are the feet of him who brings good news. Today those feet were tired, sunburned, and a little sore from three days of construction. But they still climbed the hill to that hospital, because good news does not wait for comfortable feet to carry it.

Pray for Maylene and her daughter. Pray for the young mother still learning to trust God with her grief. Pray for the families still waiting on cardboard for word about the ones they love.

Until All Have Heard, Pastor Mark