A BROKEN LAMB

While I was working for an international AID organisation, the overwhelming exposure to poverty, pain, putrid conditions and hideous cruelty had me wanting to turn a blind eye and walk away – pretend it didn’t exist.

But, then, unexpectedly, an angel would turn up.

The most beautiful one I ever met was on the Cape flats – a little ‘Coloured’ (mixed race) girl whom I called Michelle in the original story that I wrote for the agency.

Her little bushy pigtails showed someone had cared enough, for a while at least, to dress her hair sometime in the not too distant past.

The rags she wore were as filthy as she. A club foot,  ruined face – eyes too wide apart, flattened nose, cleft palate – and the worst, urine trickling uncontrolled down her misshapen little legs. How raw and burnt she must have been, this ruined angel.

She was sitting on the pavement with her feet in the gutter along with three other urchins when we got out of the vehicle. But, she was the one who got up, hobbled towards me and tried to smile a greeting.

There was one last lollipop in my pocket. I unwrapped it and handed it to her. Her eyes lit up with delighted surprise as she thanked me wordlessly. Then, she crossed to the other little urchins and gave each a lick first before savouring the rare treat herself.

For a brief moment our Creator and Saviour let me see with His eyes and I understood why He still has patience with us – it’s because of His special lambs.

MA MOHAU

She was a tiny, wizened woman when I met her many years ago. Sister Enid Barber. An Anglican nun and nurse in the African township near Bloemfontein. Aids had just made its scrofulous and leprous appearance and was claiming its first victims.

Sister Enid had started with a handcart when she was a young nursing and religious sister fresh from England at the end of the Great War to end all wars – yeah right! Apartheid had not been born yet, but poverty had – a long, long time before, as we all know. She had come for those who were its chief victims. She took her handcart into the townships, the Black Ghettoes, dispensing medical care and the true gospel of unconditional love.

She had soon moved on to a donkey drawn cart, then a horse ambulance and finally a motorised ambulance. Meanwhile the authorities had built a hospital to which she could ferry her lambs.

Her own work, however, never changed. She tended, nursed, fed and rescued the poorest of the poor.

One of her lambs was a little boy with rickets. We visited him in ‘her’ hospital. She’d found him abandoned on the streets, like Charlie, a little boy I met in Johannesburg. But he’s another story. The spidery-limbed little boy’s face lit up with joy as the gentle nun stroked his face and spoke lovingly to him. She lingered with him, her special lamb and then moved on to others who were dying of the mystery ailment. To each one she ministered love and tenderness.

When there was rioting and it was not safe for whites to be in the African townships, she was there, still dispensing love and medicines without a thought of retiring despite approaching 90 years of age. 

She was never harmed by even the most radical and angry of rioters. She was one of the people, you see.

The Sotho people, whom she so loved that she gave her life for them, called her, Ma Mohau, Mother of Mercy.  Even the angriest and most violent of the young people recognised someone who had heard and heeded the Great Shepherd’s injunction: “Feed My Lambs!”

African Lambs

You may wonder why I write about animals. It keeps me sane.
I’ll explain.
Many years ago I was working for a GMO in Africa. One day a report
appeared on my desk. It was from an international group, a powerful and very
wealthy group.
The contents:
The world was divided into five regions – wealth the criterion.
There was the first world, of course, the second (Russia inter alia) and
the third – no explanation required.
But, then there were the fourth and fifth ‘worlds’. Couched in PC language,
it was stated that they would never catch up and so were consigned to the trash
bin. The populations of these countries would ‘die out ‘through internecine
fighting and disease.
Guess where they were?
Africa mainly, but also some countries in South East Asia.
Have you ever noticed how most of the famines, diseases and wars are in
these countries, especially Africa? Then, of course, there are the blood
diamonds, corrupt dictatorships undergirded by ? – I’m sure you can guess.
Some years later, I attended a lecture by a medical doctor from Brazil.
She had worked with an international AID organisation. She was a conspiracy
theorist and showed her map of the early AIDS areas in Africa then superimposed
over this map one of the inoculation programme of an international medical aid
organisation. Guess what – they coincided perfectly! Co-incidence?
Others seems to share this
conspiracy theory mindset as the film, The Constant Gardener, based on John le
Carre’s novel, demonstrates. Here, the
Africans (as happens in India) are unwitting guinea-pigs for pharmaceutical
giants.
So you see, the African lambs have been, are and will continue to be led
unknowingly to the slaughter, collateral damage in the great quest for wealth -
for the few – and medical miracles, again for the few.