Category: Mozambique

A Jon Post

I was going to write about having a mission team here with us and the activities we’ve been doing. But Thursday something happened that I haven’t been able to get off my heart or out of my memory.

Carrying Tomé on a Good Day

Tomé, dear sweet Tomé, had his last 5-day chemo treatment this last week. He has been here at the hospital for a year and a half now, getting this 5-day chemo every 3 weeks, for 84 weeks. Every vein in his hand, wrist, forearm and upper arm, even in both feet, has been used many, many times.  Like any other chemo course, by day 4 his body was haggard and broken by the poison dripping into it.
He had been receiving his treatment into his left foot for the first three days of treatment. One of the side effects of his treatment is that he has to urinate often and painfully. With a chemo drip in your foot, walking to a bathroom 30 yards away is not an easy task.
By this day, his foot had become swollen and painful and the chemo was no longer flowing into his shrunken vein. The nurses needed to move the needle.
Countless times they poked him, wrists, arms, even in his head… finally they found a vein in his other foot.
He was crying uncontrollably when I found him in the treatment room, gauze taped to his head, arms and left foot to cover oozing needle marks. The nurse told him he was done and could go back to his room.

So I carried him.

Crying in my arms, his weak grasp wrapped around me for balance, we made it back to his bed. At 11-years-old he’s just old enough to be ashamed of his tears when he’s in pain. This day he didn’t even make an attempt to stop them. He just leaned against me and wept softly at the pain of his final treatment.
Mustering courage he told me he had to go to the bathroom.

So I carried him.

I don’t consider myself a strong guy, but there was little that would have unsteadied my step or shaken my grip around his frail body as I made my way down that hallway to the bathroom, opened the door to the dirty stall, and knelt with him to get him close enough to the toilet.
Painful moments later, we were making our way back to his bed. I laid him down as gently as I could and covered him in his little blanket. There he lay, quivering in pain, wishing and waiting just to make it through the next day and a half.
Alice and Paula (another dear lady who comes to bless the children there), brought some milk, cookies and candy to try to help get his mind off of the pain he was in.
He closed his eyes, grimaced and tightly gripped my hand and Alice’s hand as a nurse pushed a shot into his IV in his foot.
There I sat. I knew Tomé had no words or strength to look to the Lord or ask Him to come sit in bed with him. I knew Tomé didn’t know how to approach the Lord or come before Jesus on his own.

So I carried him.

I poured out my heart to Jesus Christ, praying desperate prayers from desperate lips. No crowd around me or Tomé could keep me from carrying this suffering boy and laying him before Jesus’ feet.

So I carried him.

I know it’s a relatively cliché thing to write about the little lessons about the Lord that I’m learning from being a father but that’s what you get this week. You’ve got to give me a little grace here, she’s my firstborn and I haven’t done it yet. So here we go.

I’m going to tell you two stories. One about a 15-year-old named Nelson and one about 3-month-old named Anaya.

Nelson came to the hospital about 5 months ago. He was quiet, reluctant to talk about his life, reluctant to come sit outside with me, and mostly just sat on his hospital bed waiting for the next treatment. He rarely smiled and stayed to himself. I visited him among many others and after a few visits he became a bit more friendly but still stayed quiet, still stayed sitting on his bed. Nearly every time I approached him he would offer only a blank look, eyes that spoke only of pain and loneliness and a weak handshake. I left the hospital many times wishing I had been able to connect with him better, draw him out of his suffering and see him smile when he saw me coming.

Anaya was born almost 3 months ago and for the first 2 months and 3 weeks she occasionally smiled but more often, like any newborn, she expressed herself by screaming or soft crying (MUCH worse than the screaming for a parent). She didn’t like being left alone, didn’t like going to bed, and pouted often even though she couldn’t communicate to me why she was so frustrated. I would put her to bed and whisper my prayers over her, speak my love over her and hope that she stopped crying soon. It rends my heart every time.

Something changed.

For Nelson it was about 2 months ago.

For Anaya it was just last week.

They started smiling when they saw me coming. At last they were able to express the immediate retreat of the loneliness that surrounds when they are left in their beds. Though it rips my heart to pieces to leave this child alone in a bed, I cannot express how much breath fills my lungs when I approach Anaya first thing in the morning or Nelson early in an afternoon, and see a huge smile.

Now I cannot wait to go see my daughter in the morning, to pick her up, see her eyes squint nearly closed, her lips curl out and up, her hands joyously bat the air and hear a squeal of joy to be reunited with her daddy.
And now I cannot wait to walk up to the hospital, catch a glimpse of Nelson looking out the window and hear a loud “Tio Jon!” escape from his lips, feel his arms drape over my shoulders as embraces me from behind and see his laughing smile dance across his face.

Today, loneliness lost. Today love won. Today, a child found a reason to smile. Today I was honored to represent Christ to a lonely child.

Though the sorrow may have lasted for the night the joy came in the morning.

A Jon Post

Jonathan

Jonathan was an incredible man. I met him in September last year when he arrived in the Oncology department at the hospital. He had left his home in Manica, Mozambique, a small town on the border of Mozambique and Zimbabwe 4 months earlier, with a small tumor over his right shoulder. He first went to a hospital nearer to his home thinking he would be there for the weekend and would return home soon. They kept him there for four months analyzing and waiting for test results for his tumor. By the time he arrived in Maputo, the tumor was the size of a grapefruit and growing. In the hospital here he waited 3 months for decisions from doctors and for them to make the time to biopsy his tumor. By December of last year he had received no treatment for his cancer and his tumor was nearly the size of a bowling ball. When he finally started receiving chemotherapy in early January he had 6 other tumors protruding from his arms, legs and one on his forehead. Despite the odds, his body responded remarkably well to his chemo. His tumors receded, and, after three months of treatment, his shoulder almost looked normal again.
Before he got sick he lived most of his life in Zimbabwe and was raising two young boys to be fine men. His wife loved him and counted herself lucky to be married to a man so committed to his family. He went to a technical school after finishing high school and learned to design and build houses. He traveled through much of northern Mozambique building houses for those who had none.
Later he pursued his education even further and became a professional certified dog security trainer. When I told him of my dog Gasher he asked me to bring him to the hospital, and offered endless free advice on how to teach him to be a good guard dog for my home and family.
His smile was infectious.
He loved my daughter deeply and was eager to have a picture taken with her in his arms. He wanted to take that picture home with him so he could remember his little niece and see her every day.
He deeply desired to know God more and would press me to bring my Bible and read it to him so he could hear the Word of God. I had many Portuguese Bibles but because he spent most of his life in Zimbabwe where English is spoken he could not read Portuguese. I rooted through my old books and found a Bible I had received many years ago and had inscribed my name in when I was only 13; Jonathan. He held that Bible in his hands like it was worth more than the treatment that seemed to be saving his life.
We read together often and prayed passionate prayers to our God together, beseeching Him for mercy, His hand in our lives and in the lives of our wives and our children.
Last Tuesday night he got sick.
It may have been Malaria, or a simple flu infection.
His body, wracked by multiple chemo treatments and many tumors, could not fight for long.
Thursday night he died.
I still cry as I think and write that.
He never did get to take that picture with Anaya.

In the tears that Layne and I have shed so freely over the past few days as we remember our dear friend we have been echoing a refrain from John 6:68. “Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone have the words of eternal life.” Even in the face of death and pain and suffering,… ”Lord, to whom shall we go?” In our tears, in our breathless prayers, in our memories… “Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone… You alone… You alone have the words of eternal life.”

This is not our home. Jonathan is there waiting for us with his smile.