the sort of place we live in

I loaded up Iri this afternoon for a walk so T could get some sleep. We headed down the stairs, out the heavy iron gate and onto the trail that leads away from our flat. There I found an “ambulance” at the gate of the flat opposite ours. I might have been alarmed but I sensed no urgency among those gathered; only a lightheartedness about the tragedy that was. Curious, I asked a middle-aged woman what was going on. She said a person died. I asked how old, assuming it was probably an elderly person. She said twenty-two. Before I could ask more I saw two men carrying a body in a white sheet out of the flat toward me. Women threw rice on the body. One man following behind carried a smoldering bowl of incense; another, a long branch of evergreen topped with a white prayer flag. As they loaded the body onto the ambulance it rolled and almost fell onto the floor. The men laughed. As the ambulance drove away I found my friend among those gathered and asked him who the person was and what the cause of death was. My friend told me, with the same lightheartedness I had sensed among the others, that it was his friend’s sister…she was diagnosed with TB three months earlier…the doctor gave her medicine but it didn’t work…so she died. In the emotional sense it is unbelievable to me; that a twenty-two year old woman spent the last three months dying an unnecessary death from a treatable disease right across the trail from me. But I understand it too. She died of TB, but she also died because of the fatalism and apathy toward life and even death that have so permeated the lives of the people in this place. This place desperately needs the hope of Christ. Please pray.

-J