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-mother and daughter at a community bank meeting.

When I was in Malawi in 2004 our host’s wife Loveness was with child and she was nearly due to give birth.  Immediately team members began asking the typical questions that we like to ask.  “Do you think it’ll be a boy or a girl?  What names do you like?  When is your due date?”  It was quickly evident that these questions were discomforting to our friends in Malawi.  They were gracious but bashful and it was clear that they’d rather not talk about it.  The team was confounded at first.  Why wouldn’t they want to talk about the baby when back home people talk endlessly about them?  The reason is that in Malawi (and Congo) as many as one in ten babies will die either during birth or within the first two years of life.  Mothers and fathers know that there is a good chance that babies will not survive and they don’t get their hopes up, at least not publicly.  There may be excitement and joy associated with pregnancy but it’s hidden under a blanket of fear.

The medical system in Malawi is feeble and clinics are burdened by the weight of the HIV/AIDS crisis as well as other often preventable diseases like Malaria.  There are often two or three people in a bed and more on the floor.  Some clinics use bed sheets and t-shirts to dress wounds and may even reuse items like syringes and catheters that should always be disposable for good reason.  In the wealthy nations most babies are born in hospitals that are equipped to handle even the rarest of complications.  I have friends who work in care centers where premature babies unable to survive on their own are miraculously nurtured with the most delicate of care and the best that medicine has to offer.

I am not writing this to make you feel bad if you live in the wealthy world or to make you feel sorry for yourself if you live in the daily struggles of poverty.  The reality is that suffering exists everywhere from Beverly Hills, California to the slum called Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya.  (Albeit the quantity and causes of suffering do vary but are more universal than we often allow ourselves to recognize: grief, disease, loneliness, hunger, pain, abuse…)  Another powerful reality is that we are saved by One who knows suffering and who comforts the afflicted.  The One who suffered is the giver of all life.

This morning one of our staff members wasn’t her jovial self as we met to sing and pray.  Her cousin went into labor yesterday and there were serious complications.  The baby wouldn’t come and by the time the doctors could operate to remove the child, both mother and baby were lost.  May they both rest in peace.  I have to wonder how different the story could have been if modern medicine were at the ready.

Back in 2004 Loveness gave birth to a beautiful healthy baby girl in a little clinic not far from her home.  The family gave our team the honor of naming the child.  We’d already gathered that they liked the name Rhoda so we named her Rhoda Chimwemwe.  The second name means “joy” in Chichewa, a primary language of Malawi.  We named her Joy because of the joy that we shared at the moment of her healthy birth.  She should be celebrating her second birthday next month.