Day 24: I Just Can’t Quite Wrap My Mind Around It.

My body is incapable of sleeping in so I was wide awake at 6:45 this morning. It was still nice to be able to lay under the covers and read for a little while before wandering downstairs for breakfast. I had intentionally made no plans for today so I could take some time to do much of nothing. So after getting food in my stomach I headed back to my room where until lunchtime I was able to organize my stuff, get a load of clothes washed, and start reading Pride And Prejudice (I’m trying to branch out. I need to read things other than depressing memoirs!). It was very relaxing and helped me catch up on some things I hadn’t gotten around to in the past few days.

 

            At lunchtime we sat down to eat and got the devastating news that our coworker had just passed away. Hannatu was not a woman I knew well but I had heard of her before coming here from my friends Val and Char who had worked at Faith Alive last spring. She had worked at the Clinic for a few years with the financial aspect of things and everyone enjoyed being around her. She had been away at a conference the past few days and decided to take public transportation back to Jos. I don’t know the details, but there was a bad accident and she passed away a few hours later in the hospital. Travel can be dangerous if you take public transportation because there are no traffic laws. People can cram fifteen adults into a minivan and it is not uncommon to see commercial trucks plowing down the highway with four or five teenage boys holding onto the back. Yesterday I saw a woman seated with three children behind the driver of a motorbike. Biana was very upset and spent much of the afternoon without saying much. When we spoke in the living room we remembered that life does not end with death for us as believers but is actually the beginning. Unfortunately it still leaves behind sorrow--the Faith Alive staff will need time to recover and heal.

 

            The rest of the day was a little more low-key than other Saturdays. Adrie and I each read our books and watched part of the original Planet of the Apes, we ate dinner together, and spent time speaking of happier subjects around the table. After laughing through stories about Kristen’s family cruise episodes we decided it would be an early night.

 

            Encountering death is always difficult. In Nigeria it is an aspect of life that people must deal with more often and more intimately than I am used to. With the strong presence of disease and malnutrition here many people born into poverty don’t expect to live a full productive life. And sadly the rest of the world believes the same thing. Many of the patients I see in the hospital each morning are living in the shadow of death, diagnosed with a virus that will allow illness to attack their body. It is hard to have hope when you spend time with a man suffering from HIV and TB with bedsores on his back from lack of strength to turn his own body. It is hard to give a smile to a woman who has just heard that the dreaded condition that has weakened the bodies and spirits of people important in her life is also living in her. It is hard to be okay with death when it chooses to dwell among the people with so little in life, the people who are trying their best to live a normal life day to day. I just have to trust that God knows what is going on, even if I don’t.