Visit to Bereaved Mother

After worship last Sunday, I trekked through this neighborhood with several others from our congregation to visit a young mother who had just lost a child.  I didn’t know her, but she had visited the church for about a month during my time in the USA.  In the previous week, she had given birth to an unhealthy baby who had died within a few days.  (Here in Africa, we often don’t know the medical details behind such misfortunes.)

My companions were a young couple, their two daughters, and two other women.  As instructed, we wound our way between mud huts for about twenty minutes until we arrived at the small market, then asked people there where Jonas’s mother’s house was.  We found an older lady who knew, so we followed her for another few minutes until we arrived.  (Street names and house numbers are unknown here.)

We told the lady of the house that we wanted to visit Fátima, apparently her daughter-in-law.  She showed us into the hut where the bereaved mother was sitting on the floor staring blankly ahead.  I sat on a plastic chair while my companions sat on a bamboo mat on the floor.  We introduced ourselves, then fell silent.  (Silence is typical here on such visits.)

I felt confident enough in my grasp of the local culture to venture a guess that some counter-cultural moves on my part could be a blessing.  I broke the silence by speaking softly to Fátima about how sorry I was for her loss and how valuable the brief life of her infant was, as a human being created in God’s image.  When my companions were ready to leave, I asked them to wait as I sang “Great is Thy Faithfulness”, which I’d translated into the local language.

As we were walking out of the house without any of us having so much as shaken Fátima’s hand, I turned back to ask if I could hug her.  She scrambled to her feet, threw her arms around me as tightly as I embraced her, and sobbed on my shoulder for several moments — the first emotion she’d shown since we’d arrived.  My culturally atypical approach obviously meant a lot to her.  Walking to the bus station afterwards to head home, I purposed to continue showing the love of Christ to my neighbors even in ways that their society doesn’t consider normal.