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I was thinking of waiting a little while before visiting the hospital again. I’m trying to do things one at a time and my first project is sorting out the work at the mountain. However, an abandoned baby girl drew me back to the paediatric ward a little sooner. Here is the story of little baby Flor. Please be warned that it is rather sad.
Lucy, who is here with us for 8 months from Latin Link, has started going to the hospital once a week with my Australian friend, Robyn. It’s great as with Robyn’s Occupational Therapy background and Lucy’s Paediatric Nurse training they can do a lot to help the kids. Robyn particularly helps in the burns unit where there are not enough staff to help the children with the exercises they need to do. She also helps the poorest families with the special cream they need to buy but can’t afford (it can be something like £10 every couple of weeks which is totally impossible for most families in the state hospital). Robyn and Lucy also spend time with children who are alone either because they are from children’s homes or they have parents living far away that can’t visit much, or they have actually been abandoned at the hospital.
Three weeks ago they met Flor, a tiny little baby who had been brought from a town some hours away and left at the hospital. The nurses were told that her parents couldn’t keep her and she had been brought to the hospital because she wasn’t breathing properly. I went with Lucy one Sunday morning to help her change her clothes and nappy and be with her for a little while. Someone visiting from the States had kindly brought her some premature baby clothes – she wasn’t actually premature but was absolutely tiny. At first there didn’t look as though there was much else wrong but as Lucy changed her I could see she didn’t have all her fingers on one hand. A trainee doctor told us that neither her heart nor lungs had developed properly. She was on oxygen and was being tube-fed. Lucy, with her nursing training, was rather concerned that she wasn’t being cared for very well at the hospital.
Lucy continued to visit Flor the following week but the Monday after Easter she and Robyn went with more nappies for her and were told that she had died over the weekend. It was so sad to think of her having spent most of her month of life alone in a big cot in the hospital belonging to no one. Lucy and Robyn had been wonderful to her but to them of course what they had been able to do seemed woefully inadequate.
The next question was Flor’s funeral. With no relatives and nobody responsible it seems that nothing would have happened. Her body would just have been put into a common grave. To us who knew her that seemed awful, so Robyn, who knows the hospital well, set about trying to organise something. After several days of getting nowhere, due to the death certificate not having been signed, she eventually obtained permission to take Flor’s body. The very basic state insurance would provide a little coffin and there was a place reserved in the ‘poor people’s cemetery’ for people in Flor’s situation. We would have to do everything ourselves though. This meant going to the morgue to collect her body (to our relief the staff there put her into the coffin for us). We then had to take the tiny white coffin in Robyn’s car to the cemetery. There was a grave prepared for the coffin there, and it was actually a very beautiful location on the side of a hill on the edge of town. Lucy, her husband Tim, Joel (who is the pastor of our San Blas English-speaking church here) and myself accompanied Robyn. As we watched, two cemetery staff buried the coffin at the top end of a huge section of little child graves. We then planted flowers that Lucy had brought and Joel helped us with a short time of thanksgiving for her life. I thought it was actually the most beautiful little funeral I had ever been to, and it was very special, even though it was so sad.
It is hard to put into words how this experience has been for us. We have many unanswerable questions. Sitting on the hillside beside Flor’s grave I think we all hoped that we will never have to do the same thing again. Realistically, it is likely that we will. The child mortality statistics of developing countries have suddenly become personal to us. The rows of little graves we saw are the result of poor health care and poverty, and are only representative of the other little children who die in the countryside miles from proper medical care. All this can be a little overwhelming. The needs are so great here and what we can do seems so small.
However, Flor’s life has inspired us. We know that there is more we can do for the kids in the hospital and whatever we do, however small, is always valuable.
But now in a single victorious stroke of Life, all three—sin, guilt, death—are gone, the gift of our Master, Jesus Christ. Thank God! With all this going for us, my dear, dear friends, stand your ground. And don't hold back. Throw yourselves into the work of the Master, confident that nothing you do for him is a waste of time or effort. (1 Corinthians 15:57-58, The Message, part of what I read at Flor’s burial)
