Walking along the hospital corridors you see people lining the walls waiting to see a doctor. Hospital waiting rooms filled to overflowing with people just waiting to be seen. As you walk further into the hospital you find yourselves in hallways lined with doctors, and nurses bustling around in a hurry to go from room to room to see as many patients as possible. Kenyan doctors will stop to say hello and greet us, while American doctors who are volunteering will give us quizzical looks as to why a group of Americans are wandering the hospital everyday. It is a chaotic blur of events that is occurring all around us at any given point.
We are there to get to know people, love on them, shadow doctors and transform to become anything they need at any given moment. In a single day you can witness a surgery, assist a doctor in taking off a cast, pray with people, draw on a blackboard with children, work in the kitchen, do rounds, work in the marketing department, give a sermon, sing, sew or a countless number of other things.
On my first day in the wards, I was a bit overwhelmed with the amount of stuff that was happening around me. We walked into the annex, where mothers were lying in beds with their babies who have spin bifida and whose brains are enlarged from swelling. All I could do was walk around and pray, to listen to what the Lord was saying over the children who lye waiting around for surgery or who just received surgery. I walked around listening, taking it all in, and letting my heart feel the Lords heart in that place.
When we were returning from lunch I was praying that God would highlight someone for me to talk to. As soon as I walked through the doors to the hospital I was met with the same bustling scene I had encountered earlier but this time something different caught my attention. Amongst all of the bustling doctors I noticed a little boy weaving in-between them, dressed in pink hospital clothes. He immediately caught my attention, not only because of his pink hospital clothes but because of his confidence in maneuvering the halls. As we got closer I noticed their was something different about this eight year old boy. I saw the reason he was in the hospital.
He turned to shake my hand and I saw the tumor that covered his over 65% of his face, and yet it wasn’t what captured me. He was the most precious little boy I had met there. He then followed us into the pediatrics ward to the black board in the back to draw pictures with chalk. While he drew he laughed and played and was just like any other 8 year old boy. His disposition was so sweet and kind and he stole my heart. We sat and drew together and played clapping games. He would get a big smile across his face. I left that day with such a soft spot for him.
The next day, I was with one of my girls shadowing a physical therapist, when we found ourselves in Alex’s room. I waved hello to them, and followed the doctor to the patient we were there to see, but as we sat there I saw a different doctor come up to Alex with a syringe. He sat on the bed getting a shot in his arm, and after a minute or so he started crying and whincing in pain. It broke my heart to see, I just wanted to go next to him, scoop him into my arms and tell him everything was ok. I asked the doctor I was with, what he was getting done, and he told me that he was getting silicone implants in his arms so that when he had the surgery to take the tumor off of his face that they would have skin to use to graft his face with. He told me that Alex and his father had been in the hospital for over a year, getting ready for and waiting for his surgery he was going to have.
I listened intently as my heart broke for him and his family. Living in a hospital, particularly this one is not the most entertaining thing in the world. In fact it can be down right boring, and he had spent over a year there. Not only that but he is undergoing painful injections and operations on a daily basis. He had every reason to be sad and down, and yet he had so much joy. He is just like any other 8 year old boy and still is able to sit and smile and laugh and have fun, in the midst of so much.
Through him God gave me such a good depiction of what it means to not let our circumstances dictate our Joy or life that we experience through him. He is bigger then our pain, and situations. I don’t know why Alex has to deal with all of this at such a young age, or at all but I know that God is with him and will not let him go. Through all the chaos and mess of life, God is who he says he is, and he is always faithful.
Alex has stolen a place in my heart and I ask for your prayers for him also as he continues to go through the process of getting his procedure. He is such a precious child of God and I feel so blessed that I am able to spend even just a little bit of time loving on him while we are here. He is an encouragement to me.
