My God is Big Enough for This

This is Prudence and her daughter Sihle (Seeshlay).  They have stolen away my heart.  I met them at the hospital about a month ago but in the last few weeks I have gotten very close with Prudence.  She is 17 years old and her daughter is 10 months old.  She was in school until she got pregnant with Sihle but in Swaziland if a girl gets pregnant her education is over.  She is immediately put out of school.  She was in the equivalent of what would be 9^th grade in the States.  That is pretty good, most people in Swazi don’t make it that far.  She is very smart, she could of finished school easily.

I visited the room that she and her baby are in every time we went to the hospital but we didn’t get close until she wrote me a note asking me if I could help her with English.  We had already given her a English Bible so on the note she copied Bible verses for me.  I was so confused because I’m usually the one giving Bible verses to the people, I don’t often receive them back.  Since then I started writing English lessons for her to do when I was there.  That was how I started to learn her story.  Her boyfriend, the father of the baby, died January 6^th, 2008.  Two weeks after that Sihle started vomiting every time she ate so she brought her to the hospital and she has been there since then.  Her parents live 2 hours from the hospital so they have only visited her once the whole time she has been there.  At 17 years old, her life now consists of sitting all day and all night at the hospital, in her room there is another 12 or 13 babies and their mothers.  They all sleep on the floor underneath their babies’ cribs with the cockroaches climbing all over them.  I can’t imagine what the cockroaches are like at nighttime because during the day while I’m there I probably see at least 1 or 2 a minute.  I cannot completely say what is wrong with Sihle because every time you ask any of the mothers what’s wrong with their child they only tell you symptoms like vomiting or diarrhea, never the cause of the symptoms because frankly the doctors don’t do test to find out what’s wrong, they just treat the symptoms and probably just figure the baby either has HIV or TB.  What I do know is that Sihle weighs 3.2K’s and the target weight the doctor has set is 4.5k’s.  It doesn’t sound like a lot but since she has been in the hospital she has only gained .8k’s but then lost .3K’s again.  I started buying her some baby growth yoghurt and baby food since what the hospital provides for them is only a fortified formula and normal food.  The mothers have to try to mash up the food and feed it to the babies but seriously sometimes it is fried fish, I just don’t understand their thinking processes sometimes.  I guess what really prompted me to write this blog is the news I happened upon Thursday.  Sihle got some new medicine and I saw it sitting in a bag under her bed so I asked Prudence if I could look at it she said yes so I started reading the medicine bottle.  The bottle had no information on it telling me what it was so I searched for the drug sheet in the box it came in.  I realized the medicine is an antibiotic for HIV.  In Swaziland everyone knows the statistics that more then half of the people have HIV and it’s sad but when you read it in black and white sitting beside of the bed of someone you care about so much it means something completely different.  There is really only one way for a 10 month old baby to acquire HIV, her mother must have it.  What is left for me to do?  I guess it hasn’t completely hit me yet.  Pray, that is all there is to do and then pray again.  So, please pray with me.  God is a big God, I know.