Last week our team was doing village ministry, (in Lesotho, a small country surrounded by South Africa) which means that we travel from house to house talking about God to who ever is present at the home. It had been a pretty uneventful day up until this point and we were traveling to our last house of the day. . . We were told that our translator needed to stop in quickly to trim an elderly woman's toenails. To me that's a little different but it's Africa, so I just went with it. When we arrived at the hut, at first only our girls went into the hut. We were told that men don't always want to go into huts uninvited of elderly woman, because sometimes you might see some body parts you don't want to see. However after a minute or 2 of standing outside we were told to come and that our eyes would not see any elderly body parts. However the actual sight inside was much. much worse.
Let me describe the hut that this woman lived in. . . It was a 10ft x 12ft dirt floored hut, with a tin roof and all her worldly possessions. . . Her worldly possessions added up to a horribly soiled sleeping mat (that means a thick blanket on the dirt floor), a blanket to cover her up, a filthy pillow, a table barely standing under its' own weight, a water bucket (just disgusting) and a food/slop bucket. . . That only helps set part of the tone. The second you walked into the hut you smelled a nasty odor of just plain human dirtiness, it wasn't her fault but that's how the hut smelled. When I entered the hut the woman was just lying on her bed just crying out in her native language for help. You could see the hurt in her eyes as she looked up to you for any kind of love/assistance. She was missing all of her teeth except for about 5 and she actually looked up at me wiggling 1 of her remaining teeth, begging me to pull it out. . . As she was lying in her bed you could count at any time up to at least 15 flies on her body. Remember that we are in Africa and there really aren't air tight houses, aka the flies weren't going anywhere. The flies would bother her 24/7, just try and picture that. . . On a side note, we were told by our contact/pastor that the woman's family starves the woman on purpose so that she wouldn't go to the bathroom as much. We filled up the woman's water bucket and prayed for her, but there really wasn't much that we could do.
I have seen many horrific pictures before (books, TV, magazines, etc.), but I have never witnessed anything worse in person. My heart was just broken when I saw this woman in her agony! There are times in your life when a moment will happen that you will never forget, for me that will definitely be 1. And now I am supposed to tell you something uplifting about this experience or quote a bible verse that makes everything better. But I've got nothing for you. . . It did reinforce why I'm here though, if I can help even one woman like her, just to relieve any of her pain if even for a short while, it would be worth it to me. Yes, that horrible image will never leave my mind, but maybe that's what God wanted. Maybe He just wanted to put a little motivation in my heart or maybe just put in a small image of what He sees on a daily basis.
