hope

one week ago lilian sat on her friends couch, with her huge pregnant belly, watching her neighbor loudly mourning her just lost son timothy. she sat there holding her stomach, her own kicking child inside. she sat there as the hope- as the future- her body full of life and promise.

yesterday she buried that life.

yesterday i rode back from another village, from another burial, with another mother who had just buried her first born son.  this son was only 2 days old when he died of complications from his delivery.  a preventable death. an unexpected and preventable death.

they carried the body from the hospital straight to the village.  i arrived to his young mother lilian in her traditional gomesi dress stained with her weeping breast milk. the baby lay covered inside the house beside the smallest coffin i'd ever seen.  women sat on mats all around the baby and the house in bright colored cloth like flowers- their faces, some young and wondering, some old and knowing. a baby is supposed to be hope and life and light and purity and future and joy and expectancy.  a baby is not supposed to be dead.

at the burial, i sat on an old cemented grave and looked away over the banana plant covered hills and i listened.  the people sang and sang in luganda. there is something about song that reaches the spirit in a way that only words can't - and that music carried me. it carried me to places of long ago and far away. places of beginning dreams and plans.  places of hope and wonder. here i am, where i always somehow thought i'd be, yet also swallowed by it. 

i love this place uganda. i do.  the red dust and the bumpy roads and the patchwork everything. the resilience. the continuing. the randomness. the always bright sun. the endless green. the intensity of color. the contrast. the quickness of laughter-- despite. the willingness.  the giving.  the ease of conversation.  the sameness of each morning.  the constancy of sunset.

but woven between the papyrus reeds and elephant grass is loss.  loss sits in the middle of all the beauty and all the mess.  it is a part of life.  it's acknowledged. it's accepted. even that part of loss that is a loss of control. this is still hard for me, and this past week i felt devoured - or at least chewed up and spit out. left in pieces. 

but like africa- your pieces get up and go on.  what is left, eats something, sleeps for a while and starts over the next day.  you suffer together, eat porridge and cry, and then you stay and sit and be.  you don't leave people alone with their loss- you band together- you feel it and hold it and share it- instead of isolating it actually unites. and that. is. beautiful.  that is what makes it bearable.

that is what makes it more than bearable but hopeful. because if there is no hope than why am i here? why are any of us anywhere, doing anything? and i do have hope- not in my ability, but in Gods love that reaches down.  hope that things can get better.  that cancer care will improve.  that babies and mothers won't die in childbirth. that roads will be fixed. that voices will be heard. that black and white won't matter. hope that i may be an instrument in those hands of love. 

because if there is one thing i've learned- it's that love is what matters- perhaps here more than anywhere.  if there is one thing i've learned it's that there are many things here i can't fix.  some illnesses are incurable, some treatments are unavailable, sometimes even the most basic things are just not. this feels really unfair and unjust and can make me really mad and i can use that to motivate me  to work for change and betterment.  but at the end of the day- what matters- is how i loved.  what matters is how we love each other.  do we turn away at the injustice of it all? or do we pull up a mat and sit?  do we just show up and be with each other when the hour is so dark- even when the darkness is unfair?  yes,  because that is love, that is what we are called into, that is what we are all capable of.  that is what brings the hope.