prayer

Oh, today. Today was perfect in such a typically African way. From start to finish, it was everything that I miss when the place is packed up and tied down to bolts in the floor. I could tell you so many stories, but I'll stick with two, both awesome for different reasons.

First the funny. The patient in Bed Fifteen has her sister staying with her to help care for her and her little baby. Sister is slightly demanding, albeit in a rather endearing way; she's definitely the bossier of the two. Yesterday in the evening Sister came to me and asked if she could leave for a little while this morning to buy shoes for the pikin. Despite the fact that said pikin is no more than three months old and nowhere near walking, I told her she could definitely be released for a while.

This morning she came to me when she was ready to leave, and asked for one of the many little pieces of scrap paper that live in the top desk drawer. I handed her one, not sure what she might need it for, and sent her up to the gangway with one of the translators.

I thought no more of it for another couple hours until I got a call from the gurkha guarding the entrance. Atypically, he was laughing pretty hard, and it took me a minute to realize he wanted me to send someone up for Sister. She arrived down to the ward a minute or so later, a bundle the size of a wadded-up king-size duvet wrapped in plastic balanced on her head, (definitely more than one pikin-sized pair of shoes in there, I'm pretty sure) and immediately started waving the scrap of paper at me and yelling in her tribal language.

If you've never been yelled at by a tiny little African lady with a huge bundle wobbling on her head with every shake of her little fist, you've never really lived.

She eventually surrendered the paper, which I unfolded to find just as blank as when I gave it to her. Dis papah no good! No good! It turned out, after a good bit of translation, that she thought she was asking me for a signed permission slip to leave and come back. She had presented the blank scrap to the gurkha, intently demanding to be let in as a result, which caused the normally serious guy to laugh nearly as hard as I was right at that moment. Regardless of the fact that she can neither read nor write, I would have expected the utter blankness of the paper to clue her in to the fact that it wasn't going to give her permission for much.

I think I expect too much.

Or, as it turns out, maybe I don't expect enough.

We stood together at handover, and Natalie (the current Team Leader who's been training me to step into her shoes next year) brought us a challenge. What if these wounds haven't healed because we haven't asked? What if God is waiting for us to speak out our requests, to rest in expectation on His power?

And so we did a different kind of rounds today at two o'clock. Instead of discussing drainage and fevers and what the inside of mouths looked like, we gathered at each bedside and prayed our way around D Ward.

I've been present for a lot of handovers here on the ship; I don't know if I've never been at one this powerful.

I don't know what it was, but taking that time to lay hands on these precious people and pray in faith for their healing, one at a time, leaving no one out, filled me with a sense of awe I don't normally have amidst the busyness of my shifts here.

One by one the patients bowed their heads. Some held out their hands to receive blessing, some snuggled further into the arms of the nurse holding them, some wrapped their arms around our waists as we stood at their bedsides and we prayed. We prayed for our sisters and brothers and grandmas and the pikins whose presence in our lives has become the standard by which we mark our days.

Tomorrow most of them will go in the wee hours of the morning. Just a few will stay one more night and then we'll close down for the year and somehow we'll go back to sleeping at night without lying awake wondering how they're doing downstairs.

These ones will go buoyed by prayer, surrounded by the angels we called down for them, filled with the comfort of the Spirit.

We should round like this more often.