“What’s it really like?”
I get asked that about my life as a missionary more and more often. I appreciate the question; it implies that
people understand that even though my location is exotic, it isn’t all fun
and games. I’m not Indiana Jones with a
Bible. People seem to really want to
know the good, the bad, and even the ugly.
The good and the bad aren’t difficult to articulate; the ugly is. The ugly is like a weight…a nameless heaviness. I can’t define it, but I know I’m not alone in
it; lots of my fellow missionaries feel
it too. It’s like guilt, grief, anger, deep
sadness, and fatigue all rolled into one. This weight
is always there; what changes is how heavy it feels. Some days it's a pebble; other days it's a boulder. Yesterday was a boulder, and I can't seem to shake it today.
Yesterday I saw her.
It had been over a year since the last time. I was walking off the property and back to my
car. I was happy. Then I rounded the
corner, and there she was. She saw me and broke into a huge grin; I saw her and
my stomach dropped. She’s only about 10
years old, but she had her littlest baby brother on her back and her next
oldest brother by the hand. She looked
like a tiny little mother standing there buying a few groceries at the
tienda with babies in tow. I guess she has to be the mother
now. Her mother is dead. Cue the guilt.
This is Herminia. This picture of her hangs in my bedroom. She
was in Loving InDeed its first year.
When the program changed to include only widows or abandoned women with
little ones, she remained since she qualified; she and her six kids were some of the most malnourished I had. A few months later I heard that Herminia had
remarried. I wanted to apply the rules
fairly, so since Herminia had a new man to help provide for her I let her go.
Loving InDeed is not a registered NGO; Loving InDeed is me. While I get lots of input from wise people I
trust, I don’t have a board. Ultimately I make the
rules. I could have chosen to break them for her. I didn’t.
I could have pretended I didn’t know about her new husband. I didn’t do that either.
Instead I made the decision to let her go, and in hindsight…well, there’s a
reason they say hindsight’s 20/20.
It wasn’t long after Herminia got remarried that she got
pregnant again. I didn’t know. I had my hands full with the new changes to
the program and lost touch with her. I had
made the assumption that my friends would keep me apprised
of anything important, but I have since learned that what's important to me is not necessarily what's important to them. No one is permanent in rural areas here. People come; people go. People and organizations give up trying to help, and they
leave. (Hence their distrust of me. No one who has come to help in Santa Barbara has ever stayed.) Neighbors get frustrated, and they run
away or migrate. Family, particularly husbands and fathers, get bored and move on to greener pastures. Friends get sick, and they
die. Relationships are fluid because no
one ever sticks around. A person can only be
abandoned so many times before they learn to flip that switch pretty quick. You were here; now you’re gone. Flip. End of story. You are no longer relevant. Herminia was no
longer a part of our picture so no one thought to tell me she was
pregnant. I didn’t know until I was
driving around with Marina one day and saw a bunch of people at Herminia’s
house.
“What’s going on up
there?”
“Herminia’s funeral.”
“What? OUR Herminia?
She’s so young! That can't be! What happened?”
“She went into labor and struggled for more than a day. She
said she knew something wasn’t right, but they had no one to take her to the hospital. The baby boy was born, and Herminia died a minute
later.”
“WHY DID NO ONE CALL ME?!
WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME SHE WAS PREGNANT?
I COULD HAVE….”
...and so began the mental list I’ve been keeping of things I
could have done to prevent this from happening...to stop a young woman from dying from something probably preventable...to keep seven children from being orphaned.
A month later I was at the local church’s outdoor evangelistic
campaign. It was dark, and the place was
packed. I sat on the ground in the way
back just taking it all in. It wasn’t long before I felt eyes on me.
I looked up, and there she was--Herminia’s oldest daughter. Her face
was vacant. She came over and sat beside
me, careful to keep a few inches between us.
Every couple of minutes she would scoot a tiny bit closer. After a while, she was close enough that I just reached out my arm and drew her to me.
She laid her head in my lap, and I stroked her hair and rubbed her back. We never spoke a single word. She stayed that way for over an hour. My mind flooded with all the things I wanted to say but couldn’t because I don’t speak Mam: I’m so
sorry about your mom. You’re beautiful
just like her, you know. I have pictures of her
that I’ll give you someday. How are you
doing? Is your grandmother treating you
ok? Do the men at her bar bother you? How is your baby
brother? Is he eating? So many things, but holding
her had to be enough. I have not seen
her since that night. Until
yesterday.
She knew me instantly and was clearly happy to see me. I tentatively asked her how she was, hoping
she spoke a bit of Spanish by now. She said
she was doing fine. All her siblings
were fine. Everything was fine. I wondered if any of it was true. I wondered again if there was anything I could
have done to save her mother. I wondered
if I made the right call when I let them go from the program. Then I wondered about all the other
families I have said no to. I can’t take
everyone; there has to be a limit. And suddenly the weight of all those decisions came crashing down on me.
I know that I am not God.
I am not the Savior of the world.
I don’t get to decide who lives and who dies. That knowledge doesn't seem make this job less heavy though. It used to be that when I pondered the bigness of God I thought about creation…how He holds the whole universe in His hand
and keeps it running. That's a pretty big Person, but I can almost wrap my head around that. What I can't fathom these days is Someone SO big that He can hold all the hurts and all the trauma of everyone in the whole world. Lately I see one pitiful street dog and am completely undone. It's a rough place to be in since they're everywhere around here. I saw one the other day while I was driving--the same day I met baby Kevin--and I got mad. The combination of emaciated, dying child
and emaciated, dying dog on the same day just pushed me over the edge. I
yelled at God in the car, “How am I supposed to carry all of this? It’s too heavy!” And He said, “I never asked you to.” I have been thinking about that for a couple
weeks now. It rings in my head. “I don’t have to carry this. He’s not asking me to.” But I’m not sure how to put it down. None of
my missionary friends seem to know either.
So there it is: the ugly.
That’s what it’s really like.
