Angel of Mercy

by Lurlene McDaniel

In the distance, she saw the glow of campfires lit by all the people still waiting to be treated. How long had some of them been there? Days? Weeks? How many had babies who wouldn’t make it through the night?

  “The first time I saw a person die, it affected me too, lass. Death is never an easy thing to accept. Doctors are supposed to chase death away. So we always feel defeated when it wins a round.”

  “I should have done something for her,” Heather said quietly. “All afternoon, while I sat there with her, I kept thinking, Why didn’t I go get help sooner? Why didn’t I grab the baby and run for help? Maybe the doctors could have given her CPR. Maybe they could have gotten her breathing again. If I’d acted faster, maybe we could have saved her.”

  “You heard Dr. Henry say she was too far gone.”

  “He was trying to make me feel better.”

  “Heather, listen to me, you cannot let this defeat you.”

  “You tried to warn me, didn’t you?”

  “Warn you about what?”

  “On the ship, every time we talked about my ‘enthusiasm,’ you tried to tell me that dreams and reality are two different things. You tried to tell me that we can’t save everybody. I feel stupid. And I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you.” She thought back to the girl she’d been just a short time ago, when she’d first climbed aboard the Mercy Ship. Naive. Starry-eyed. Confident. So sure that she could make a positive contribution to the world. And today she had been powerless to get one tiny baby to medical help. So much for saving the world.

  “I don’t think you’re stupid. And I think your dreams are good dreams. You cannot see yourself as a failure. We cannot come over here and heal every person who’s ill. Why, we can’t do that even in our own countries. We can only help one person at a time. And then another. And another. You will make a difference, Heather Barlow. Just maybe not in the way you once thought.”

  Ian could not take away the shame she felt, but his words had reached inside her and soothed the gnawing pain of self-doubt. She was grateful. “Thank you for being so nice to me.”

  He smiled tenderly. “It’s not a hard thing to do, lass. We have months ahead of us on this trip. We have Uganda next and work there waiting for us. You cannot give up now.”

  Wrapping her arms around herself, Heather drew in a long shuddering breath. “I’m not giving up, Ian.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  No, she wasn’t giving up. But she wasn’t the same person she’d been when she’d first climbed aboard the ship. Or even the same one who had lain looking up at the stars the night before, believing that she was God’s hands on Earth. Yesterday she had faced a long line of people whom she could help and had felt good about herself. Today she’d held a baby she could never help again. It had been life-changing.

  “Will you come to the funeral with me?” she asked.

  “Yes. I’ll be there. And think on this, Heather. Perhaps at this very moment, that little one is in the arms of angels, near the throne of God. Could there be a better place for her to be?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Then let her go in peace.”

  Before dawn the next morning, Heather gathered with her friends to pray and to watch Dr. Henry put the shroud-wrapped infant into the ground. “We are all saddened by the loss of this little one,” Dr. Henry said to them. “We cannot understand why the Father has taken her home to be with him so soon. But take her he has. And all we can do is trust in his wisdom, which is far above ours. Let me read from Isaiah forty-one, verse ten:

  ‘So do not fear, for I am with you;

  do not be dismayed, for I am your God.

  I will strengthen you and help you,

  I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.’ ”

  Heather felt Ian’s hand slip into hers.

  Dr. Henry continued. “This promise from God was given thousands of years ago, as a comfort to his people. And this next promise was given several thousand years later. I read now from Revelation twenty-one, verses three and four.

  ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’ ”

  Dr. Henry closed his Bible. “I read these two passages because I want you to understand that God is faithful from age to age, and that his Word can be trusted. And now, we entrust the soul of this little one to the arms of a loving, faithful God. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”

  In the silence that followed, Heather struggled against the lump clogging her throat. It was over. The baby was gone. Now dirt would fill the grave, and once it was trampled down, no one would know the hole’s secret. For they had buried the baby deep to keep animals away once the facility was dismantled.

  Heather had no flowers to give, but she had shaped a crude cross from a branch of the tree that had sheltered her and the baby the day before. She bent and placed it on top of the freshly turned soil. Then she stepped away. As the group dispersed, she watched the sun break over the horizon. It rose over the dry, grassy plain like a great orange ball, larger than a mountain, older than life itself.

  10

  The airport in Entebbe, Uganda, was less than an hour’s flight from Nairobi, and from the air Uganda looked lush and green, different from Kenya’s stark plains and grasslands. At the airport, Heather’s group was met by two Ugandans sent by Paul Warring, the missionary in charge of the Kasana Children’s Home. After they had cleared customs, the men drove them into Kampala, the capital. As they wove their way down the crowded streets, Heather was struck by the vivid contrasts between the rural and the modern in the teeming city.

  Vans and late-model cars, high-rise buildings under construction, rows of shops and bazaars lined the streets, while cattle roamed the median strips along thoroughfares where makeshift tents and cardboard dwellings had been erected. The cattle, large, reddish brown animals with expansive horns, looked more like Texas longhorns than the docile milk cows she was familiar with and seemed oblivious to the noise of city life. “So those cows are what I need to find a good husband?” she asked Ian as she pointed out the window.

  “Yes, there’s your dowry.”

  “I guess I’ll stay single, then. All Daddy has is cars.”

  He grinned. “That’s a pity, lass.”

  “Do people really live on the median?”

  “People live wherever they can. Kampala is home to a million Ugandans, most of whom have come to the city hoping to find a better life. But there’s little work here, so they have nothing to do. They get up, grub for a day’s living, sleep wherever they can.”

  The city didn’t appear crowded. It was noon, and traffic flowed smoothly. In Miami, downtown would be filled with workers heading off to lunch, and traffic would be thick on the freeways. Here the people moved in no particular hurry. Many sat on benches or in front of stores, reading newspapers and sipping coffee. Most were dressed in Western clothing, but Heather saw several women wearing colorful Ugandan dresses and carrying large bundles balanced on their heads. Blaring radios poured sound through open shop doorways. She wondered how so many survived without jobs, how they got along from day to day.

  The vans climbed up a winding, rutted road into hilly terrain. The sun shone brightly under a canopy of bright blue sky, and the air felt warm, but not steamy as it was in Miami. Banana trees and thick hedges, bright with exotic flowers, dotted the roadside, where the earth had a reddish hue.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear I was back in my home in Alabama,” Boyce drawled from a seat behind Heather’s. “We have red dirt too.”

  The vans turned down a dusty road and pulled inside a compound surrounded by a low concrete wall. A large sign announced Namirembe Guest House. The L-shaped building was made of cinder block, painted white and bright blue, with a porch that ran its length. The vans parked and
everyone piled out.

  Ugandan women emerged from the building and greeted Dr. Henry warmly. He turned to his group and introduced the women as friends who would show them to their quarters. Once the vans were unloaded, Heather scooped up her bags and followed a woman named Ruth into a room that she would be sharing with Ingrid and two others, Cynthia and Debbie. The room’s concrete floor was painted gray and the walls a pale green. A window with wooden shutters that could be closed at night let in warm sunlight. The beds were covered with clean sheets and old British army blankets. A wooden cross hung on one wall; a photo of an African Anglican bishop dressed in red robes hung on another.

  Ruth pointed to a lone dresser and said, “You each have a bottle of boiled water. Use it for everything, even for brushing your teeth. The water closet is down the hall and turn right.”

  “Water closet?” Heather whispered to Ingrid.

  “Bathroom,” Ingrid whispered back.

  “You should shower early because the water from the city is turned off every day to conserve, and sometimes it stays off for many hours. Hot water is scarce, so use it with care.” Ruth smiled. “And there is water in buckets by the door you can use to flush the toilets when the water is off.”

  Heather had learned at boot camp about the primitive conditions she would face. She told herself that taking a warm shower and washing and blow-drying her hair every day were Western luxuries she’d willingly forgo in Uganda. It was a small price to pay for helping children who had never even seen the simple pleasures of life she and her friends took for granted.

  “Dinner is from five until six o’clock in the dining hall,” Ruth added. “And breakfast is served from seven until eight each morning. We wish that all of you have a pleasant and joyful stay at the guest house. I will help you, whatever your needs.”

  Once Ruth had gone, Cynthia said, “I’m crashing.”

  “Me too,” echoed Debbie.

  “I must write home,” Ingrid announced. “Better to do it now.”

  Heather was in no mood to rest. She wanted to explore. She walked outside and took a stroll around the grounds, stopping at the perimeter wall to gaze down at the city below. She remembered Dr. Henry saying that once, Kampala had been pristine and beautiful— “the pearl of Africa.” But after decades of military rule, it looked dingy and ruined. Heather heard a whooshing sound and turned to see two men cutting hedges and grass with long, thick-bladed machetes. Their swinging, singing blades glinted in the sunlight, mowing and pruning as machetes had done since ancient times.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Ian asked, coming up beside her.

  “Yes, it is. And it sure beats being blasted awake on a Saturday morning by a lawn mower.” She closed her eyes and inhaled. The air smelled of freshly mown grass, tinged with lemon and charcoal.

  “You smell lemon grass,” Ian said. “It mingles with the scent of the charcoal cooking fires. It’s a perfume that belongs only to the air of Africa.”

  She saw that his eyes wore a distant, longing look. “Do you like it as much as the smell of Scottish lavender?”

  “A hard question, lass. Both are beautiful. Scotland is my home, but Africa has slipped inside my head and heart, and I have come to love it.”

  And she realized then that despite all that had happened to her in Kenya, she loved Africa too. “I’m glad I came,” she said.

  “Are you all right?”

  Both of them knew what he was asking her about. “I still feel terrible about the baby,” she said. “But I make myself think of something else whenever the bad thoughts come. I think about the look on the children’s faces when I gave them candy after their shots. I think about how their smiles break out. I think about trying to make a difference in their lives.”

  She turned toward Ian. His red hair ruffled in the slight breeze. “On the road from the airport, I saw women walking with huge bundles on their heads,” she said. “Some had babies strapped around their waists and little children following behind them. And I saw the cows walking around with only ropes around their necks to keep them from wandering off. And I wondered why the cows weren’t carrying the bundles instead of the women. Why is that, Ian?”

  A brightly colored bird landed on a tree branch and sent a shrill whistle into the sky.

  “Perhaps you know the answer to that already, lass.”

  She nodded slowly. “It’s because the animals have more value than the women, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe not more. But a different value, surely. Do not judge them for this difference, Heather. The animals are their livelihood, and a family without a cow has no milk to feed its children. Yet they want for their children what every parent wants—an easier life, a gentler way to take a living from the land.”

  Remembering what Patrick had told her on the ship, she said, “I guess a man can get another wife, but another cow . . .” She let the sentence trail off.

  “You can’t measure their world by our standards. These people have lived for centuries with war, famine, pestilence, and death—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Revelation. In our countries, we believe we have conquered them, but we haven’t. It’s just that over here, we see them more clearly, more violently. That’s what frightened you so in Kenya, Heather. You saw the baby in all its beauty. You saw death in all its ugliness. You saw how the two things do not go together, and it broke your heart.”

  She thought again about her parents, about how their medical skills went to fix people’s physical imperfections and make them lovely once more. But people like Ian and Dr. Henry saw beyond the outside of a person. They saw with eyes of compassion to the inside, to the dark places. Places where hate and murder and sickness dwelled. Where the Four Horsemen wielded their swords as deftly as the workmen wielded their machetes on the grass.

  She bit her lower lip. “I thought I could come and work and feel good about it and go back home and put this away in my scrapbook like I do other things in my life. But I don’t think I can, Ian.”

  He grinned and touched her cheek. “That’s the way it happened for me, too. I came once. It changed me. And now I come again. But this time, you have come.”

  “And that makes you happy?”

  “Yes. Because you see Africa not only with your eyes, but with your heart. Coming here is not about bringing people medicine and supplies. It’s not about doing good deeds for needy people. It’s not even about taking a man’s land and showing him how to plant it so that his crops grow tenfold. We do all these things, for sure. But that’s not what it’s all about.”

  He took a deep breath. “It’s about changing lives. And the first life that changes is your own.”

  She couldn’t deny anything he’d said. At the moment, all her reasons for coming seemed shallow and incomplete. They had been good reasons, but somewhere along the way, they had begun to grow roots. She didn’t know how deep the roots would go. Nor did she know how she’d ever rip them out and return to the life she’d once lived.

  On Saturday, Dr. Henry took a group into the city, and while he met with friends and church leaders, the group was free to wander. The first place Ian took Heather was Kampala’s post office. “It’s the only place that has a phone line outside the country,” he explained. “If you want to call home, you’ll have to wait in line along with all the other foreigners and make your call.”

  A foreigner. That was what Heather was in Africa. She hadn’t thought of it that way before, until he’d said it. But she was a foreigner— one who wanted to hear her family’s voices very much. “I feel like ET,” she told him wearily after an hour’s wait in line. “You know, I want to phone home, but I can’t.”

  Ian grinned. “I know what you mean. And then if no one’s home, it’s a letdown. It’s my father’s habit to prepare his sermon for Sunday on Saturday, so I know he’ll be in.”

  Heather wasn’t sure anybody would be at her house, since it was seven hours earlier in Miami. Her heart sank as she realized that Amber was probably out. “Well, I don’t
care if all I get is the answering machine. I want to hear a familiar voice.”

  When it was finally her turn, Heather stepped into the old-fashioned wooden booth and closed the door. The air hung stale and sticky. She dialed the string of numbers that would get her into the United States, then Florida, then Miami. Because of the daily power failures and lack of phone lines, she could no longer use her laptop to e-mail, so this might be her only chance to reach home for a long time. The phone rang until she was almost ready to give up.

  At last she heard a breathless “Hello.”

  “Amber? It’s Heather.”

  “Oh my gosh! Is it really you? I can’t believe it! How are you? Where are you?”

  Emotion clogged Heather’s throat. “I’m in Uganda. It’s the middle of the day and I—I have so much to tell you, but not much time to talk.” She explained her e-mail problem, then asked, “Are Mom and Dad there?”

  “No, they’re out,” Amber said.

  Heather felt the keen edge of disappointment. “Since I can’t e-mail anymore, I’ll have to start writing letters. Tell them—” Her voice cracked with emotion. “Tell them I love them and miss them.”

  “We miss you, too.”

  “I almost hung up. I thought you’d be out too.”

  “I’m grounded. Dylan and I stayed out past curfew last weekend and Dad blew a gasket. Jeez, you’d think he could cut me a little slack now and then. I’m going stir-crazy around here.” Amber paused. “Promise not to tell a secret?”

  “My lips are zipped.”

  “I sneaked Dylan in. We’re watching videos and swimming in the pool.”

  “You shouldn’t—”

  “Don’t lecture me. Dad is such a pain these days. Let me tell you what happened yesterday. And it wasn’t my fault either.”

  Heather held on to the receiver, listening but wanting to yell, “Stop! Don’t you know children are dying over here? Don’t you know that there’s something more important going on in the world than you being grounded?” But she didn’t interrupt.