2/17/05 Sadness

My first day here: uneventful, even unproductive. I couldn't get
downtown to the bank, so i have no useful money. I borrowed three
chairs from the conference center so my visitors and I won't have to
sit on the floor, but i'll have to buy my own and buy or have a table
made as soon as i can, if i want to rest my laptop on anything but my
knees. But I am not surprised. The furniture situation was my first
personal encounter with the meaning of poverty here, last time-- I am
so used to offices that always have enough extra items in the way that
you can find whatever you need, but as I discovered, it takes a lot of
work around here to find even the proverbial orange crate. No internet
or phone, so i am writing this for posting later. And the bishop was
too busy with strategy meetings in the wake of the 3-day priests'
conference that just ended as I got into town (dang! wish i'd known
about that; i would have come earlier.)

But an uneventful for me wasn't necessarily uneventful for everyone
else. We have one young priest-- a deacon last time I was here, nice
fellow, i look forward to working with him-- whose wife died today.
He'd told me just last night that she was on oxygen in the hospital
with tuberculosis, and this morning i'd visited her-- sort of stumbled
across her on the way to see Sharon, the other muzungu here from the
OCMC. Sharon is a nurse and is running the rather sizeable clinic we
operate just down the hill. I didn't recognize the dying woman-- so
pitiful, barely a skeleton, eyes rolled back, gasping for breath
despite the tube-- and she used to be sort of "pleasantly plump" a year
and a half ago, a little unusual among people here. So, after praying
(too briefly!) at her bedside and consoling her husband, i saw Sharon
and asked what was going on with her.

Aids, she said. And what's terrible is that this was totally
unexpected. Weddings in this culture tend to be huge affairs that cost
a year's wages, if not more, and our priest had had a previous
girlfriend who was unwilling to forego the big shindig and hasten their
marriage so he could get ordained. So they broke it off and he married
another woman after a short relationship. They hadn't gotten tested
when they got married and now it turns out she was Hiv+. So here she
was. He's negative, thank God, but he understandably has to deal with a
lot of anger and disappointment since he had no idea that she was
positive. And to make it all worse, besides the daughter she'd had by a
previous relationship and another they'd had a few years ago, she was
pregnant with their second child and nearing term when she took sick
and was brought to the hospital. It was a pretty bad crisis,
apparently-- he arrived only in time for them to shove some papers at
him and say either we remove the baby right now, or you lose both your
wife and your child. So they saved the child; I don't know if it's Hiv+
but I think not.

And so she died, apparently only a few minutes after I visited, as I
found out at lunch when they were taking up a collection for him. The
funeral will be tomorrow (no embalming and bronze caskets here!) in
their village, some two hours from here. I feel bad for him. I'd been
planning to gather a couple of friends and say the akathist to St John
Maximovitch for her healing, but i guess that won't be necessary now. i
suppose we should still say it for the priest and his family though.

The food at lunch-- salted fish with matooke in a peanut sauce-- was
unexpectedly delicious today. In fact, after two meals here, it seems
the cooking has improved since last time. Took three naps today and
still just dropped in my tracks at about 8:00-- missed dinner and woke
up at midnight. I guess i'll try to sleep again sometime before matins.
it will be nice when i get over the jet lag. We're 8 hours earlier than
new york, where i was only 3 days ago!