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Sometimes you experience things that make you feel profoundly grateful to your brothers and sisters as you see how God is creating a better world through them.
Life in the Congo is not easy. The Jesuit Refugee Service has a health project in the area of Wanie-Rukula, near Kisangani. Recently I found myself passing through that place, visiting a site where a health centre was being built. I was able to speak to the team and enjoy the company of the local people. The day was coming to a close; we had visited all the health centres on our agenda, and were on our way home. When we reached a crossroads, the project director asked us if we wanted to make a detour in order to see one last centre that had been finished just a few months ago and was already functioning. We said we'd be delighted.
When we arrived everything seemed normal. We visited the facilities and greeted the personnel; but then one of the nurses took the director aside and whispered something into her ear. It appeared that a very sick child had just arrived and they did not know what to do with him. He was in the last stages of malaria: he could hardly breathe, his little heart was beating rapidly, and he was on the verge of a coma. If he had arrived at the centre only a few hours earlier, they would have given him the appropriate medication and he would have recovered without a problem, but the family lived at quite a distance; there was a delay in bringing him since they had first taken him to a healer, who had resorted to magic in an attempt to cure him.
The only solution at that moment was a transfusion but the nearest blood bank was in the hospital of Kisangani, 20 kilometers away. We made the journey there with the mother and the boy, looking at one another anxiously, not knowing if he would be alive when we got there. At such moments time becomes eternal, and the vehicle seemed to move much too slowly. When we arrived at the hospital, they told us that the refrigeration system wasn't working and they had no blood. We silently cursed under our breath. We asked for a transfusion bag, thinking that one of us might be able to donate. They said there were no bags; they had used the last one the day before. We were gripped with desperation, thinking that in Europe such a thing would never be allowed to happen. Finally, someone appeared with a bag belonging to a patient who had died that morning without being able to use it. Once again there was hope, but now it was the doctor who was refusing to let us donate because he wanted to do an analysis of the boy's blood group. Given the dire situation, either the boy had to have an immediate transfusion or he would die. There was no time for analysis. The project director told the doctor she was a universal donor and managed to convince him to accept her blood for the boy.
It was the first time that I had ever found myself in such a situation. The people who work on the health project tell us that they experience things like this every day. Lack of education and lack of means make life and death dance together in a grim tango. Is it chance? Is it fate? God? If we had not made that detour in our car, if the transfusion bag had not appeared, if our friend had not been a universal donor... later we learned that the boy had recuperated and been discharged from the hospital.
Being a part of JRS does not mean just work. It means letting go of health, life, and even blood if need be, but that is where you see the seeds of hope; that is where you find people capable of letting go without thinking of saving their own skin, convinced to the last that another world is possible and that God's reign is nigh.