The widow needed what she needed, and she camped out at the feet of the unjust judge until she got it. She simply refused to leave until he heard her.
She reminds me of the families of women patients at St. Mary's Health Center in Obido, Namibia. Our situations are so different—we go to the hospital and order food from the menu we find in our rooms, making wry comments about its blandness. It's not like that at St. Mary's where people don’t have the little things we often take for granted: if you want to eat, you'd have to bring your own food. We tug at our skimpy hospital bed sheets—why do they never seem to be wide enough? It's not like that at St. Mary's—you have to bring your own sheets. Our breezy hospital gowns, open at the back, embarrass us, but it's not like that at St. Mary's, where the only gown you're going to have will be the gown you brought with you.
And so the people who love the women in treatment there come with them, stand patiently outside the window of the ward, their bundles in their arms: food, bedding, clothing. What love—what quiet, stubborn love they have for their mothers, sisters, daughters who are so ill, when they themselves have so little.
St. Mary’s was bombed during the war that wracked Namibia, and would have closed had not the Anglican Church rebuilt it. Like its patients and their families, it has so little, but it stubbornly gives its patients everything it can. Recent visitors to St. Mary's from Episcopal Relief and Development in faraway America felt this stubborn love and the dignity, and recognized it for what it was: It is clear that the volunteers and nurses are moved by their religious faith, as much as they were motivated by the African spirit of community, said Pamela Payne, chair of the Diocese of Los Angeles's HIV/AIDS Commission.
Truly the Lord is at work here in Obiodo, and in all the isolated parishes in the Namibian bush.
To read more about the work of ERD in the midst of the AIDS epidemic in Africa, visit http://www.erd.org/reflections.htm, or telephone 1-800-334-7626, ext. 5129.
