baby clinic

So I was reading over a journal entry I made while sitting in Jackie and Hida's baby clinic at Maforga in Mozambique.

Imagine being in a single room through which hundreds of badly malnourished, aids-infected children under 6 years of age are continuously circulating; each staring with vaguely curious eyes at your healthy body draped in its foreign white skin, perforated by wittingly sharp and relatively clear blue eyes. I try to imagine they see. I wonder if any light makes it through those eyes so clouded by pain and want? In some I can see nothing behind their emaciated stares, its like looking into the eyes of a comatose. Their minds have resigned, refusing to participate in a world so clearly at odds with their existence. In others the anguish is more acute. They reflect the pain with their anger, their suffering takes on the expression of rage and spills back out into the spinning Earth that so arbitrarily positioned them to suffer. These angry ones will cry sometimes, screaming with pain-inspired malice at an intangible oppressor and flailing their impotent limbs against another onslaught of agony. They are at once begging and demanding that peace and justice be established. When they lack the energy to express their hurt with violence they just stare, etching their scarred vision into the forsaken world around them with eyes emblazoned by tormented fury.
Then there are those like little Pashqua. The pain and fear in her face are not disguised, but neither do they dominate. Curiosity as much as concern springs her eyes from a foreign face to humming ceiling fan to colorful picture and on to the next face. The pain fights for her attention and tears well up in her eyes but the darkness doesn't come. She takes in every searing moment as it scalds her soul, not scarring it; purifying. She engages the world that has condemned her, searching out the exception, the relief, the redemption. Her hope is rewarded as the nurses bath her in kisses and hugs and loving caresses. She returns the smiles showered down upon her and receives the comfort of the loving embrace. For a moment she has been found and her problems forgotten. But the moment is brief and even this joy is haunted with pain. She leaves with her eyes open, chewing on a ripe banana, likely to be the 4th person in her family to die of aids.
I sit here helplessly healthy. But I recognize Pashqua. She is my savior, my king. She is the redeemer of the world. She is the one they are worshiping at church, though they have her face all wrong. All hope, all humanity is in her. I forgot to thank her. I'll pray to her tonight, 'protect me as I sleep, bless me when I wake'. She'll look down at me through her tears. I'll give her a banana. She'll nail my sins to a cross. I'll burn the cross. And we'll laugh. Pashqua... Pashqua