Helpless

Water flows out of the well and onto the dusty hands of 50 or so laughing school children who crowd in to get a drink during a break between classes.  The school is a cinder-block shell along a sandy road deep in the bush of southern Mozambique and the very fact that it exists at all seems in itself a minor miracle.  A few girls play jump rope games with long bands woven from rubber strips cut from bicycle tubes, and a pack of boys play soccer in a sandy patch of schoolyard with a ball assembled from plastic bags.  All together there are nearly 300 students, but the face that captures me does not belong in any of the classes, but rather to a little girl, barely three years old.  Amid the commotion of laughter she stands silently beside the well clutching a water jug that comes nearly to her waist.  Her eyes gaze off into the distance at the setting sun, and she seems lost in her own world, oblivious to the chaos around her.  It seems unimaginable that such a small child would be out collecting water alone and I inquire to one of our partners about her.

Her name is Eliné Hohwana and she is an orphan living with her grandmother in a nearby village.  She lost both her parents last year to AIDS and now spends most of her time collecting water for her grandmother from this well, which had been newly repaired through our help.  She has not been tested for HIV and to the best of my understanding she possesses no other surviving family, nor brothers or sisters.  She is the victim of the plague that has devastated so much of sub-Saharan African and I now understand why her her face reflects so much sadness. 

Hers is not the only story.  According to studies there are over 326,000 AIDS orphans in Mozambique, which has the 8th highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the world (16.2%).  Somehow these numbers always seem so meaningless; that is until you attach them to the sightless gaze of a 3-year old child alone at a well.  I think to my own daughter, scarcely a year older, and I can’t help but wonder how many nights Eliné has cried herself to sleep at the loss of her parents, failing to understand their losing battle against a disease that has claimed more than 32 million lives to date.  Suddenly 326,000 orphans seems like a number of deplorable proportions, knowing that tears from so many are uncountable.

Standing here watching Eliné I am at a loss for words.  We have fulfilled our mission – the provision of clean water to a school and a community – the impacts of which will be far-reaching to these children who suffer from unending boughs of typhoid and amoebic dysentery, missing weeks and months of school every year, and untold hours of productivity.  And yet it doesn’t seem like enough.  Water will never wash away the pain of this small child nor satisfy the loneliness of her soul.  There is no amount of money nor efforts of man which will change the past.  To remove her from her current situation will simply cause her more damage, and the interventions of programs like ours and others will take decades to fully transform the poverty of this harsh land.  I cannot even give her a simple hug since my large white form would probably terrify her, and any words of comfort I could offer would not even be in a language she would understand.  My helplessness to intervene is absolute at every level, and I want to scream in frustration…

Instead I can only walk away with inexpressible sadness and a desperate cry that God will find a way to heal the heart of this small child.

This is the work we engage in my friends.  At one point a well spring of joy and at other times a hole of unspeakable sadness.  We can each only do our best in the moment and pray that God will bring about the restoration of human kind that so relentlessly eludes us.

But for today, I weep for the orphans of Africa.