Humbled By Their Faith
POSTED ON Mar 05, 2010 / UPDATED ON Jul 20, 2010
COTN medical team member Brandy Parker is a nurse from Central Florida. She recently returned from serving for about ten days in the Dominican Republic at COTN's medical clinic, caring for the Haitian children there. The following are her thoughts from one night while working the night shift at COTN's clinic.
My heart is broken into a million pieces. Tonight I am working the night shift in this clinic-turned-emergency-hospital and I am overwhelmed at the suffering I see. Suffering that pain medicine and medical intervention cannot fix.
There is a boy here who is maybe 10 years old. He and his brother were badly injured in the earthquake. His mother and brother are in another hospital. Today he faced a skin graft alone. The only way he falls asleep is if I hold him like a baby. While there in the dark, I am watching a mother sing praise songs and pray over her son in the next bed. He has devastating injuries to his leg.
A few beds over lays a girl who just told me that when the house fell on her, but the church remained standing. "Maybe if I was at church this wouldn't have happened," she said. She has one arm amputated, and a huge wound down her leg. A new girl came here today. She is fifteen years old. When the earthquake happened the eleven people in her house all died; she was the only survivor. She was given a mirror, and for the first time, spent some time examining her wounds. Her hair has been shaved off in clumps, and she has terrible scrapes all over her face, arm and hands. One arm is completely amputated. She then rolled over and wrote the names of her dead family in a notebook with colored pencils, doodling like any teenage girl.
I can't explain how hard it is to see mothers who have lost husbands and children tend to their wounded children, quietly suffering their own pain.
And yet in all of this sorrow, they praise God. Little boys with fresh amputations read Psalms by flashlight from their stretcher beds. And little girls with broken legs sing happy songs about Jesus.
I am so humbled by their faith. Although I give them pain medicine and rock them to sleep, I know I can't truly ease their pain. Only Jesus can. Oh Lord, please help these people.