If you could turn back the clock 24 hours, you would find a
baby girl growing inside of her mom.
With a month before her scheduled entrance into the world, she was
trying to develop as much as she could. Without
warning, this little girl’s life was altered forever. There was screaming and loud noises coming
from the outside, it sounded like her mom’s voice yelling out. Then there was pain as a sharp hot object
touched her neck, after that there was nothing. This little girl, who hadn’t even taken a
breath in the world that we know, who was innocent of all wrong doing, had her
life taken from her before she could even really start to live it.
The call came at 0245 from the medical student that a woman
was in labor and they needed our help. We
walked past the 3 empty labor and delivery bays and made our way to the last
one where we found 4 nurses huddled around a woman who was wrapped almost head
to toe in bandages. She was tortured
less than 24 hrs previously by her husband’s family for suspicion of
witchcraft. She suffered significant
burns to most of her body, the bandages, our attempt to keep her burns
clean. The torture and burnings she
endured didn’t just permanently scar her, but her unborn child as well. On her arrival to our emergency department,
the ultrasound showed her unborn baby did not have a heartbeat and had died
during the torture, but she still had to deliver her, which was the reason for
the phone call.
Every movement she made shot pains through her body from her
fresh burns. Each contraction not only
served as a reminder of the torture that she suffered, but also caused it’s own
pain and torture as her daughter worked it’s way closer and closer into the
outside world through her burned and damaged birth canal. As I examined her and found out more of what
happened, I felt helpless. How do I
help this women who has experienced more terror and grief in 24 hours than I
have in my 34 years of life?
Helping her deliver her baby was the obvious way to help, so
we prayed and I gave her some meds as we helped to deliver her baby. She never breathed and her heart never beat,
but she was beautiful even with the burn on her neck. Her life ended before she even had a chance
to experience the world outside of her mom, but was it better? If being inside
her mom couldn’t protect her from the evil around us, I am not sure anything
could have. Rapes, tortures, suicides,
machete chops, stabbings, and domestic violence make up a large part of the
patient population that we serve here at Kudjip Nazarene Hospital.
As I went home that night, I couldn’t stop thinking and
praying for this women and her dead daughter.
What will make all the violence in PNG stop? How does she move on? How does she find comfort and peace after
what has happened to her? She knows the
Lord, but pray for her to find her peace in Him and that He would comfort her
in a way that my words cannot. Obviously
there is more work to be done here. Pray
that we would continue to have compassion on all who come, sharing Christ and
allowing Him to change the culture that is so destructive around us.
Matt 9:35-38 “Jesus went through all the towns and villages,
teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and
healing every disease and sickness. When
he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and
helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
Then he said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is plentiful but the workers
are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest,
therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.’”