Glimpses of Victory

Jim Wood often shares a favorite quote from Trevor Hudson;

“everyone sits next to their own pool of tears.”

Some people’s pools, however, are more immediately visible than others.

Today I accompanied Zacchaeus, one of the health care workers at the Holy Family Center, on his home visits in the Kaiwaida neighborhood.  Each client (patient) we visited was HIV positive, and our mission was to check on their health, determine whether they were taking their medicines, and offer support related to their disease.

For every family we met, HIV/AIDS was their least pressing concern.

The first client, Elizabeth, was not able to afford her hypertension medication ($10 a month).  Her blood pressure was 220/120.  After explaining the seriousness of her situation, we left her with instructions to go to Nazareth Hospital immediately.

Peter and Lois, the second family we met, were both HIV positive, as is their 3-year-old son Martin.  Henry, the adorable 14-month-old who sat on my lap, is testing negative but  that’s still tentative until he’s 18 months.  Peter is unemployed and unable to provide food for his wife and five children, and they are two months behind in rent on their tiny, dirt-floor home.

Esther is a single mom of four; her husband left when he found out she was HIV positive and he was not.  Her home is a single room with no bed, so she has constant health issues from sleeping on the floor.  Like Peter, she expected that her family would have nothing to eat tonight.

The last client, Lois, was perhaps the most secure financially.  However, her husband, who was just released from prison, has taken a second wife, and spends most of his time with his new family (in Kenya, polygamy is not uncommon).  Between caring for her four-month-old, managing her disease, and trying to talk to her husband about HIV (a topic he refuses to discuss), her situation was every bit as overwhelming as each of the others.

The brightest spot on a bleak day was the extraordinary witness of Zacchaeus and Jin, the volunteer worker who accompanied us.  Like everyone I’ve met here at Nazareth, their ministry was bigger than their mission.  They treat people, not diseases, and that makes all the difference.  Because of their ministry, two families will have dinner tonight for the first time in days; a woman has bus fare to reach the hospital, and a support group in Kaiwaida will welcome a new member at their next meeting.  Not a victory – tomorrow will be a new set of life-threatening challenges for each of those families – but perhaps a glimpse of one.

by Jim Gates, Associate Pastor for Evangelism at First Presbyterian Church in Norfolk, Virginia.