A Difficult Blog to Post

I have a picture on my camera of a joyous mother swaddling her 1 hour old newborn baby. It’s the kind of heartfelt picture a proud papa would frame and set in his office. But now when I flip through my camera’s playback feature, I am ashamed of that picture; embarrassed that I have proof of one of life’s greatest celebrations turned into one of life’s heaviest sorrows.
Lillian and Simon’s son David passes away after only 19 hours of life on this earth. For some reason as a matter of circumstances of God’s timing I was very involved in Lillian’s pregnancy and birth. While Lillian was on the delivery table moments before she pushed baby David to life, she called me and told me (In between contractions) to get up to the village clinic. I walked into the delivery room minutes after he was born and was the one to break the news to Pastor Simon that his sixth child was another son. The part I am sick about is that I captured this climactic moment on film as tangible, real evidence.
The next morning Rachel and I arrived at the local health clinic to bring Lillian and her precious cargo home to meet his big brothers and sisters. But while we sat there, Lillian noticed David was throwing up and had a high temperature. The nurses at the clinic told her the baby was cold and needed to be wrapped in more blankets, although they never actually bothered to take his vitals in the 17 hours he was resting at the clinic. The nurses nonchalantly told us to take the baby to the Children’s hospital in Jinja. We sped down to town not knowing if this was serious or a small baby cold. The hospital was packed with hundreds of anxious mothers’ tending to their sick children, waiting for the attention of 2, count it, 2 doctors. I went into the very public examination room with Lillian, and because the village clinic didn’t write any proof of birth or a referral with symptoms on her medical chart, the young doctor accused Lillian of delivering at home. His harsh tactics really infuriated me standing next to a mother who was beside herself with worry. The doctor ordered Lillian to wake the baby us; but at the time either the baby was sound asleep, unconscious, or already deceased, because he wouldn’t open his eyes. Lillian looked at me with panic asking “How am I supposed to wake this baby up?” When Lillian, a mother of six asked childless me for advice, I knew the situation looked grim.
Finally Simon arrived and replaced me as Lillian’s support system. Rachel and I sat on the curb and prayed that the breath of the Lord could enter into this child. But Betty, Lillian’s friend came out with the news that David passed away. We all started bawling as we watched Simon walk out of the hospital with so much dignity carrying his deceased son David to the car. Lillian weakly stumbled out and collapsed into Rachel’s arms and lamented at her loss all the while admitting that the Lord gives and takes away.
We brought her luggage back to her home and watched helplessly at this mourning mother took 2 steps into her home and crumpled onto the ground crying out for her baby’s life.
Lillian’s husband Simon is a rare bread of Ugandan men because he received his Master’s in divinity from an American University, so he is much more progressive and supportive than most husbands here. Simon was the first to bring up the high infant mortality rate here in Uganda. And that lead’s me to why I am writing about this tragedy in such a public forum. At first I intended to keep their personal loss a private matter, but after a few conversations back at home, I realize many of you may respond by citing that Uganda’s Infant Mortality rate is at 65 per 1,000 births, so a death at birth is to be expected. Before I came here, even just before yesterday I too viewed Infant Mortality as another piece of data that tracks how developed a country is compared to America. But now I see that sure, it’s a statistical way of contrasting the 190-something countries in the world, but there are people behind the statistics. Ugandans may be more familiar with the death of a newborn, but as Lillian’s lamenting proved to me, they are no more immune to the tragic loss of their very own child. A child Lillian carried in her for close to 10 months. A child she praised God for. A child that caused her bones to grow weak and pain to flood her body for the whole last trimester of carrying him. A statistic, yes. A child? Still yes. When I said goodbye to Lillian she clung to me weeping and saying, “You saw my baby, you saw my baby while he was alive.” As if she needed the reassurance that her David would not just be one of the thousands of babies that go unremembered when the pass away at birth. That maybe because I was one of the handfuls of people who saw this baby alive, her pain and strife could be validated as real and personal.