Loving the Least of These

After we left Good Shepherd we headed out for Hospital Escuela, which is a hospital where medical students go for their internships, they have real doctors on staff, but their are a lot of students who fill the role of doctor. This is by far one of the hardest places for me to go. It is the hospital where the poorest of the poor go for medical help, since it is a free hospital. But they have very little supplies, no air conditioning, dirty rooms and hallways, and so many patients. The patients that go there, go because they have no other option, so they have to settle for medical care that is nothing close to what we have in the States. People in the states wouldn't send their dog to this hospital. When we first got to the hospital we went to the cancer ward where children are laying in rows of beds receiving chemo. They literally lay there for hours while they get chemo through an IV, and they are usually there for several days. After that we went up to a room where a 15 year old boy laid in a bed all alone. We soon found out that he had been attacked by a family member with a machete on the back of his neck. He was a perfectly healthy teenager before he was attacked and now he can't talk, or breathe correctly. His family abandoned him in the hospital. While we were there he whispered to Jen that he just wanted to see his daddy. He was in so much pain, physical and emotional.  Two beds over in the same room was a little girl who had been shot in the head by someone with a pistol, she was asleep while we were there. She was also alone, no family members were around. After that we went to the floor with the newborn babies, and girls whose babies didn't survive. In one room was a lady who had a baby that was just a few days old, and in the next bed over was a young girl, Teresa who had had a miscarriage. Teresa had been in this hospital for nine days because she hadn't fully delivered her baby, and she was waiting on surgery. She told us that she was scared about the surgery. And honestly, I would be terrified if I were having surgery in this hospital. It's a scary place. We prayed over her and as we turned to leave the room the girl who had just had a baby stopped us and asked us to pray over her and her baby too. As we prayed in English she said her own prayer in Spanish, and as I listened to what she was saying I heard her thanking God over and over again for her child, and for life itself. This lady really doesn't have much, and now she has a baby to care for, but all she could do was thank God for all the ways he had blessed her.  As we left this room my heart ached for both of those girls and I walked out of the room feeling like we should have been able to do more for them. I hated that they had to lay in those hospital beds for days on end, where it was just as hot in those rooms as it was outside and where the medical help was far from what it should be. And as I walked down the hallway I realized that when we come to this hospital, we come with our backpacks full of toys and little things to give away but when we go into a room like that with so much hurt we better come with more than just the things in our backpacks. We had better come offering hope to these people who feel so hopeless. The only thing that we can really do for them is pray and remind them that the God of the universe loves them more than they will ever know. So as you go about your day today, I would beg you to pray for the people in this hospital, thats really the only hope they have.