Broken Hearts

As I sit here contemplating
what to write about, I am overwhelmed with so many different things I want to
share. Each day in Africa is so
different from the next. We never know
what to expect when we show up at each place and that has definitely tested my
patience. There is a thing here called
“Swazi time.” This basically
means that you may be told something will start at 10:00 but no one even shows
up until 11:00 or later. Back home I’m
definitely not the first person to show up anywhere but here I am always
early. But this is just one more way the
Lord is teaching me patience. 

On Wednesday we went to the
hospital in Manzini with our two translators, Titi and Zanelle. We split up into 3 different groups: one for
the men’s ward, women’s ward and children’s ward. I went with the group to the children’s
ward. I was pleasantly surprised by the
amount of children there, because I was expecting many more. But the ones that were there were very
sick. It was so hard to see these babies
in the hospital for such preventable things like pneumonia, malnutrition and
many other things. Seeing the babies so
malnourished, with their ribs poking out and their bloated stomachs broke
me. This is even a common sight at the
care points we go to. One baby in the children’s
wing had been abandoned by her mom. The
mother had gone up to a stranger and asked them to hold her baby while she went
to the restroom, and never came back. I
wanted to take here home with me. After
we had prayed in that wing, we were able to go to the maternity wing. Let me just give you an idea of what the
hospital looked like. Each of the beds
is lined up one after the other with just enough space for one person to walk
between them, there are no curtains which means there is no privacy and it was
incredibly hot. The cleanliness of the
hospital definitely would not have met standards in the States. Also it is crazy how the head of the hospital
will just let a big group of Americans walk around the hospital and they said
we could “do whatever we wanted to.” My group split up into even smaller in the maternity wing and walked bed
to bed talking to the women and praying for them. Towards the end, my translator Zanelle and I
walked up to a woman who looked very sad and was sitting alone. The sadness on her face was also common
because I noticed in that the experience of having a new baby is so different
here. In America everyone is so happy
and excited, and will have friends and family come up to visit, but most of
these women didn’t look happy and were completely alone. This woman in particular looked sad for a
different reason. Zanelle looked up at
me after talking with her and said “Can we pray for her? She just lost her baby.” My heart broke. This is obviously not the first time I have
heard of a woman losing her baby but I was completely overwhelmed with deep
sadness for this woman. So we prayed and
the longer we prayed, the more we cried together. I’m not even sure if she understood what I
was saying but all I wanted to do was keep praying for her. Zanelle had to walk out because she was
crying so hard. So, pray for this woman
who’s name I don’t even know, but I do know the sadness I saw in her eyes. Being here is incredibly draining emotionally
but I’m so thankful Jesus has given me a heart that can hurt for others. He has taught me so much about prayer and the
power of it. I love to pray for people
here, which is something unfortunately I was timid to do back home and know
that I will continue to learn so much more the longer I am here.