Two stories from today.  The first involves the Catholic hospital in Alepe.  It’s a place of healing, with nuns who are doctors and a clean, well-organized pharmacy.  They don’t turn anyone away, even if they can’t pay.  There isn’t a way I can describe the agony of seeing people suffering from malaria (and other things too, at the same time), but the heartbreaking scenes happened in the pediatric wing.  One child, no more than two, was suffering from 104 degree fever, and had anemia on top of his malaria.  An 18 month old had malaria-related pneumonia so bad that you couldn’t tell there was a lung on one side from the x-ray.  So we said a prayer and left with heavy hearts and tears in our eyes.  We came to Alepe in the hope that no parent will ever have to sit with their child and worry if they will live through malaria again.

Another story of hope centered around our Gendarmie (national police) officer accompanying us.  He has heard our interpreter explain the importance of nets hundreds of times by now, so when someone said they had their net but were waiting to use it, he lost his patience.  “Are you waiting for someone to die?” he asked…and we all began laughing.  Here he was, living in Abidjan, with small kids of his own.  He couldn’t get a net for them because the Abidjan district didn’t get nets.  And he was so irritated that there was someone who had one and wasn’t using it.  He had hope for what the nets would be used for.

May we have the same contagious hope which Silva caught for his own kids and for these villagers, that life will be better because of the work of Jesus Christ being brought to fruitiion through us.