Yarrindi

It's 3am.  I wake from my sleep to the sound of a terrible wailing.  Eerie and seemingly unending, at first I cannot understand what I am hearing.  Then I realise... it means Mohammed has died. Mohammed was a young boy who had been bed bound since before I knew him.  Very sick from a very young age.  One evening I took him and his mother to another Doctor.   The Doctor examined him and told me in English, so the mother wouldn't understand, that this young boy was riddled with cancer, that the huge swelling was not infection, but out of control cancer cells, that he was going to die.   He refused to tell the mother this bad news, believing it too much for her to handle.  In such situations to tell someone such terrible news directly was seen as 'wrong'.  The news needed to be shared in a gentle, indirect way,  What should I say, and to who?  What should I do? Now, two weeks later....   the terrible sound, of ‘mourning and great weeping’, the sound of a mother ‘refus

The boys were aged between 14 and 18.  All had chosen to live at the centre instead of the streets. As part of a reward system for good behaviour, I decided I would take a few of the boys fishing. I knew nothing about fishing, and they didn't know much either. I went to the market and found some fish hooks and fishing line and hoped the boys would know what to do with it! Friday morning we set off.  One of the boys had collected worms from the 'garden' next to the centre.  We weren't far from the Nile, probably 10 minutes walk from the bank.  We cut through by the church, and went off into the farm land,  quickly coming to the brickworks.  All along the Nile, after the yearly flood water went down, men would set up brickworks where they would make bricks from the Nile mud.  The bricks would then be sold and used to build houses. It was probably a very strange sight - a young, white woman walking with a bunch of teenage Sudanese boys, most of whom were taller tha

I had known John for some years.  I knew him first as a teenager, now he was a young man and currently worked as a guard on a building site.  Living and sleeping there, he made sure no-one just walked off with construction material, or set up house there in absence of anyone else.  John had some severe difficulties with his legs, and struggled to find work.  When he was younger and was one of the teenagers I worked with, I went with him several times to a special clinic to get braces and shoes to help him.  He really wanted work and was happy to have this work on the site.  We also give him odd jobs to do and enjoyed him visiting us most days for a meal.  Later he lived by our house, and was more part of our family. Coming to our house late one evening, he is extremely upset.   Having argued with the site engineer, he doesn't want to go back. John is sick with a bad cold and chesty cough, his head hurts, he has chills, he doesn't have a blanket.   I go to the pharmacy

Sometimes we (the single women living together in the 'girls house') borrowed a friend's car.  It was older and occasionally had problems starting, but once it got going worked well. One morning we were on our way to school.  Just after we got onto the main road the car suddenly stopped.  I couldn't re-start it. We prayed for it.  We tried everything we could think of.  I assumed it had run out of gas.  The fuel gauge was a bit tempermental so it was kind of a guessing game as to how full the tank might be.  The thought of figuring out how to get diesel from a gas station and get it in the car was not appealing.  I put the key in one last time....and this time the car started immediately.  We had been stopped about 10 minutes. Less than five minutes down the road the traffic was at a standstill, there had been a serious car accident.  As we drove past we realised it had just happened. Our delay had meant we missed it. Nothing is a surprise to God.  I was thankful.

Mahmoud lives with his two unmarried sisters, his nephew and his nephew’s family. An old man, he sits outside his house dressed in a white Jallabiya, watching the world pass by. His chair has a battered metal frame, and is strung with thin plastic rope.  Comfortable and cool it is also getting old and the strings are starting to stretch and snap.  There is a man who goes around knocking on doors offering to restring beds and chairs, but he is too expensive.  In any case, the chair still has some life in it, strings can be tied back together, and Mahmoud is happy with it. On the way to the market my husband, as always, stops to chat with him.   Mahmoud is ill with a nasty cough and cold.  Flu like symptoms.   He allows my husband to pray for his healing in the name of Jesus.   The following day my husband sees him again. ‘I am better,’ Mahmoud announces happily, ‘It is because you prayed for me in Jesus name.’ My husband is amazed, and thinks this is at the least the start of a

I'd never really learnt a foreign language. "I would like a kilo of apples, and a strawberry ice-cream" in French, and "I am 12 years old" in German.  Literally those were pretty much the only 'foreign language' phrases I could remember, so I was excited to be learning Arabic. 'I have a little Arabic'  - this was one of the first phrases I learnt before class started. Trying to cobble together some words I had picked up, I went around saying this to anyone who attempted to talk to me, or who I was trying to communicate with. It was slightly unfortunate that what I was actually saying was "I have a small car". One day I was surprised to hear my Muslim friend say something to her daughter about getting the "pastor on the wall".  Not pastor, but actually a glass bottle - the two words being very close sounding. 'Cat' and 'church' were more close sounding words to my inexperienced ears.  I told the teenag

The electricity cut.  I assumed it was just a normal power cut, that the power would come back fairly shortly.  It didn't. We had battery backup.  I could run a fan and a couple of lights for a few hours, but not the fridge or an air cooler.  I was hoping the fridge would stay cool enough that the food wouldn't go off.  My husband was away for a few days with the car.  Pots, Chops and Moo were aged 3, 2 and 0 - the afternoon went slowly. Later that evening, looking out of the gate and seeing that all my neighbours had electricity, I realised it wasn't a power cut.  Somehow it was just our house that was affected. Maybe the boys playing football in the maydan had knocked a wire by mistake, and somehow disconnected the electricity.  It was a long, uncomfortable night. I wanted to be at the electricity office as early as possible so as to be first in line to report a problem. With the temperature already over 90F and Moo in my arms, Chops and Pots toddled along beside m

When it occasionally rained, the maydan (dirt area outside our house) would flood. People would place rocks to join the areas of dryish dirt together. From their gate women would hoist up their skirts, trying hard to stay clean - washing clothes was hard work, why make more hard work even if you were exposing more leg than was considered polite - and use the stepping stones to get out to the main street. Perhaps to catch the bus, or to go to the dukaan to buy the expected bottle of coke for a visitor. The water dried up pretty quickly and the maydan was soon back to a sandy dry wasteland. One year some of the neighbours were doing construction. It rained hard and Pots was very excited, as were all the kids in the neighbourhood. Pots climbed up the sand/gravel hill with her friends, 2 girls and 2 boys that she often played with. A great adventure.

"Beautiful beautiful. Delicious. Sweet." He's perched up on his donkey.  Small and slim with a wrinkled, well weathered face.  An assortment of (mostly missing) brown teeth. A unusually yellowish jellabiya.  Unusually yellowish because most men pride themselves on having nice bright white jellabiyas.  On either side of his donkey is big metal milk churn.  Our milk for the day has arrived.  I give him my pan and he pours the creamy liquid in. In retrospect it probably wasn't the best idea.  I'd been excited to see him delivering milk to some of our neighbours on the maydan.The milk in the shops was all long life (UHT) milk, not fresh milk, and to us it didn't taste very nice.  I had other Western friends who bought milk for their local milkman.  As long as it was boiled before we used it, the milk (and cream off the top) would be a delicious addition to our meals. The thing was, that when he was saying, 'Beautiful, beautiful, delicious sweet', wh