Today is the last day we look back on countries we've already served before setting our sights ahead to Congo. Benin is all a bit hazy in my memory; I had just gotten married, the hospital was running at full capacity for the first time, and I was moving into a leadership position on the wards in the midst of one of the hardest field services I've been a part of here. It's no surprise I've allowed time to dull the sharp corners of some of those memories; they're a little too much to handle on a daily basis.
But I don't want to leave you with heartbreak at the end of this journey; there's been enough of that to last for several sails over. Today I want to tell you one of my favourite stories from the past five and a half years. I want to tell you about Wasti.
Wasti came to us from the far north of Benin where he lived with his mama, his sister and his papa's other wives and children. His sister had something wrong with her eyes, and when Wasti was born with a cleft lip, there just wasn't any money left over from paying the doctors for his sister to even dream of surgery. Wasti's mama was thrown out; a woman who made nothing but broken babies wasn't worth anything and certainly didn't deserve a place in the family.
The situation seemed hopeless.
But then Wasti's mama heard about a ship docked in the port in Cotonou, a ship that would operate on her baby for free, and she knew that she had to make the journey. She sold the only thing she had left, the cow her husband had given her when he added her to his collection of wives, and used the money to make the long journey south with her little boy on her back.
They arrived to the ship at the eleventh hour. We had already filled the surgery schedule and were starting to turn our eyes towards packing up and sailing away when Wasti and his mama showed up on the dock. Our initial reaction was to turn them away. It was too late. Wasti had a respiratory infection that meant he couldn't go under anesthesia. There was something not quite right about the shape of his face, and we suspected (and later confirmed) a neurological disorder that would make the surgery even more of a gamble. The reasons to say no added up enough to tip the scale, and we sent Wasti to a local hospital where he could be treated for his infection.
A week later, I heard that there was a baby on the dock and ran out into the hot night to find Wasti and his mama there, determination stamped across her face. She knew that it was her last chance, that the ship was going to be sailing soon, and she had brought him back in the wild hope that we'd say yes this time.
After much prayer and discussion, it was decided to go ahead with the surgery. We knew that, because of Wasti's brain abnormality, he wasn't going to lead a normal life, and we couldn't send them back to their village with a baby still so broken; maybe if we fixed his lip his mama would have a chance at being allowed back into the family.
Wasti's surgery was the very last one we did that field service, a short half hour in the operating room held out to his mama as a promise of better things to come. He recovered perfectly, watched over by his mama and everyone else that came through the ward.
And when it came time for them to leave, on the morning we sent the last patients home, Wasti's mama took with her more than just her baby. In a little pouch, tied around her neck and hidden under her dress, was money collected from all the nurses and doctors who had cared for Wasti, enough so that she would be able to buy a new cow when she arrived back home. Because it wasn't enough just to do the surgery and send her back to nothing; she had only the clothes on her back when she came to us and would have had no way to provide for herself and her children without the cow she'd sold before she made the journey.
Mercy Ships talks a lot about bringing hope and healing. For Wasti and his mama, it was hope, healing, and a new cow. I think about them often, and every time I remember them I'm reminded that we are not called to help every person in the world. We're simply called to be faithful to the ones God places in front of us. For Wasti and his mama, that meant one more late-night prayer meeting, one more difficult discussion about how to proceed, one more surgery in a field service that had already seen us do so many.
There will always be one more.
And that's why we can't stop, why we're sailing towards Congo right now, ready to drop anchor and welcome all the ones that God is already preparing for us in this upcoming field service.
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