Christmas Angels

Last Saturday, we had a MAF Christmas party for all staff. It was a lovely way to celebrate Christmas with the staff team!
From 08:30 until 3pm, the celebration included breakfast and lunch together, time to sing some Carols, presentations for staff, testimonies, speeches...all sheltered from the hot sun in this marvellously colourful and cool tent:

There was even a home-bred version of the Nativity, in which the Juba pilots, including Andrew, made wonderful angels (!!):

We had a Mary and Joseph too, who did a great job with their roles:

Here, you can see Aunty Susan again (see previous blog from Ben's birthday), who did us proud last Saturday in her starring role as a beautiful Mary:

But today, Susan is not standing.
I have just been to visit her within the dire confines of Juba Hospital, Susan is lying on her hospital bed with a painful gun-shot wound where she was shot through the top of her leg two nights ago.

Four robbers broke into Susan's home in the dead of Wednesday night. Two of them were armed and did not hesitate to use their guns. Susan now bears the mark of that, as she lies on her side, a bullet-shaped hole ripped through the top of her leg. Blood-soaked bandages bear testimony to the places where the bullet entered and then left her body, from the top of her left leg, torn right through to her buttock.

Amazingly, Susan can still smile, but the drip in her hand helps to administer painkillers to dull the ache from her injury. She told us that the robbers got away with her brother's motorbike, but little else. However, they have taken so much more than that from Susan, as she lives with the pain and the memories from that horrible night.

Thankfully, Susan has many caring friends and family members to help care for her as she lies on her rickety, metal hospital bed in the crowded ward. I met several of her family and friends around her bedside as we visited this morning. They bring her food and care for her needs as she lies immobilised on the sagging mattress of a dirty bed, surrounded by the beds of other patients, all of whom had bloodied bandages or wounds, lying around in a ward where dirtied, blood-stained cotton wool lies abandoned on the concrete floor. The lack of hygiene is a cause for concern, I didn't even dare to ask what the toilet facilities must be like.

Outside the shabby hospital wards, relatives camp out with their cooking pots and plastic buckets, lighting fires to cook food for their family or friends in the hospital. Children play or sleep nearby, having to come along with their mothers. Impromptu laundry and cooking areas are scattered about, under the shade of trees and along the metal fence on the grassy verges between the single-storey brick wards.

But what of the other patients who have nobody to care for them? Everywhere I turned this morning I felt a sense of helplessness as my eyes discovered sights that shocked and saddened me and left my heart with a heaviness that is hard to shift.
What of the old man on a soiled mattress lying on the floor in the corridor, just outside Susan's ward, curled in a foetal position, vacant eyes devoid of hope as he stared at the brick wall...?

...what of the patient opposite Susan, a middle-aged man, with his ankle secured in handcuffs to the leg of the hospital bed and squirming on a thin mat on the floor, half of his face blown off, skin and bloody tissue hanging where his jaw used to be... ?
His story is tragic. He found out he had AIDS and in horror, shot his wife and girlfriend, then, not meaning to, he also shot his child. Feeling deep regret, he then tried to shoot himself. He failed. Now his face is shattered and torn open. He cannot eat, He cannot speak. HIV is rampant in his body. How much longer will he survive? And what of the deep torture in his mind and heart, never mind the painful suffering of his body and the shame of being chained to the leg of a hospital bed? Puddles of water surrounded him where he had attempted to drink water and missed, as it splashed out of the hole where his throat once was, water dribbling in undignified streams down his body and onto the dirty hospital floor.

...what of the young lady in a bed diagonally opposite Susan's, who arrived with no-one to care for her? Actual treatment at the hospital is free, but if you have no relatives or friends with you, you have no-one to provide food, water, soap or even clean bedding or clothes for you. Laundry is not provided at the hospital, so if you want a sheet or blanket to lie down on the well-used mattress, you have to bring it yourself.
I went to speak to this lonely girl, but it was difficult with the language barrier. "Lucy" showed me her right shin, where a deep wound festers, full of yellow pus and dried blood. The flies buzzed incessantly around her, frenzied with the odour of rotting flesh.
The male trainee nurse told me that Lucy has cancer in her leg and the doctors will clean the wound then let her go. Apparently the cancer has not spread. I asked what happened if patients like her have no-one to care for them. In Dodoma, the hospital provided a basic gruel-type meal for such patients, as far as I was told. In Juba, no food is provided. So you go without. Imagine if the NHS scrapped all food and relatives had to provide it all? There would be outrage. In Juba there is no outrage, Just hunger.
All I had to give to Lucy was a bottle of water, a banana and a small bread roll, She ate and drank hurriedly, seeming very thirsty and hungry. But it is so little in the face of such great need.

Christmas angels brought a message of hope and peace all those many years ago. For so many this Christmas it will be hard to find that hope and peace. So if you are a praying person, please pray for people like Lucy. For the man hand-cuffed to a hospital bed with so much pain and so little hope in his troubled mind. For Susan as she recovers. For the message of the Christmas angels to become real for them this Christmas.