Dear Friends,

The Sweet Taste of Sugar

On my way back from Asrang last month, I was asked to stop by the home of one of our staff, Beni Bahadur. His 97-year-old father had fallen and for several weeks had been unable to get up off his bed on the floor. Since I was traveling with two Western doctors, it was clear that Beni was hoping for a consultation and diagnosis from them, and that I was invited mainly to help with communication. At any rate, we agreed to see his father.

Several men sat outside on the veranda of the house, a typical two-story mud-brick structure with a tin roof. This was a Tamang family, members of an ethnic group common to the central hilly region of Nepal, such as this part of Lalitpur district where our project works. They must be fairly prosperous, I thought, as I observed a stall full of water buffalo and cows next to the house. The men were arranging flowers in little bunches and smoking a long pipe, or hookka. We soon learned that these were some of Beni’s brothers, and they happened to be traditional healers, Jhankris, as well. They didn’t greet us as we walked up, but also didn’t seem to care that we had come to see their father and patient. I figured that Beni’s family was probably used to the fact that Beni had Western friends. After all, he has worked for the mission’s Community Development and Health Project for many years, and dozens of missionaries have come and gone. But I still felt a little uneasy.

We ducked through the low door and entered a large, windowless room. This was the kitchen and all-purpose room, where children and chickens usually wandered in and out, and where Beni’s aging mother spent most of her day. Today it was quiet, somber, almost tomb-like. The old man lay on a tattered cotton mattress on the dirt floor. The smoke from the wood stove swirled lazily around him, and only his face reflected the rays of light creeping through another open doorway. His wife squatted between him and the stove. She looked up as we huddled in closer to see her husband, but she didn’t say a word. She probably doesn’t speak Nepali, I thought. She is close to ninety herself, and never went to school. Tamang people have their own language of which I can speak only one word, Lah-so, which means "Greetings," so I whispered it and smiled. She didn’t smile back.

My Norwegian and German colleagues examined the old man and concluded that he had probably fractured his hip. He was in great pain but didn’t speak. Beni said that he had fallen from the veranda—about a two-foot drop—and since then he had really changed. "What do you mean, ‘changed’?" I asked. One of the brothers moved in from the veranda to elaborate. "Our father doesn’t talk sense anymore," he said. "He mumbles and forgets things; he acts confused and child-like." I interpreted this information to the doctors, thinking to myself that it sounded like the old man had had a stroke. At that point we were interrupted by the old woman. She leaned over and gently pushed something into her partner’s shriveled mouth. A little bit fell out onto his chin, glittering in the sunlight. It was sugar. She was feeding him sugar. I felt tears starting to prick the corners of my eyes. Her eyes were dry.

Beni wanted us to tell him whether it was worth taking his father to the hospital. His question was a difficult one, considering the circumstances. Asrang is only 20 miles from the capital city—as the crow flies—but by land it requires covering a distance of about 80 miles. And since only a small portion of this road is motorable, a great deal of walking is involved. The trail is steep and rocky, crossing the streams and climbing the mountains of Lalitpur. It takes an average person two days to reach the city of Patan, where Patan Hospital is located. Beni’s father would have to be carried in a stretcher and then taken by truck to the hospital. The family was concerned. Their fear wasn’t whether he’d survive the necessary medical procedures at the hospital, but if he’d survive the journey. What could we say? There was no way he could be treated in Asrang—our health post is a basic primary health care facility staffed by community health workers. But could we really recommend that such a fragile old man with a fractured hip and likely heart problems be carried out, only to possibly die on the road or die in the city far from his home of 90 years? What would you advise?

Ironically, my father, who also serves with the United Mission Nepal, had just left for the United States to see his mother. "Gram," as we call her, is 94, and she had a stroke in August. I figured out that both she and Beni’s father had "fallen down" at about the same time that month. An interesting coincidence, I thought, as I was kneeling next to the old man on the dirt floor. At that very moment, Gram was lying on crisp white sheets in a pristine room in the cardiac unit of a modern American hospital, with abundant medical expertise and technology at her fingertips. She had been rushed in an ambulance to the facility, only three minutes down a smoothly paved street from the house where she has lived, alone, for many years. Her three children and several grandchildren arranged to be with her at the hospital—some driving up the interstate, others flying in from out-of-state and even out-of-country. There they were, half way around the world, and here we were….

The contrast was almost too much to bear. And yet it is only one example of the constant experiences we face when we live and work in a developing country. It tears at my heartstrings; it makes me angry; it makes me wonder whether our efforts here are worthwhile. And then finally, it makes me have to pray. Sometimes that’s the only thing I can do.

I covet your prayers for the people of Nepal, so many of whom, like Beni’s father, are at the mercy of a country besieged with obstacles—geographical, political, economical and social—that plague them generation after generation. Pray that they will have rays of hope for the future, like the rays of sunshine that forced themselves into the dark room where the old man lay. Was he hoping, perhaps, that he would live to see the source of that light once again? Or was he ready to die, there, on the dirt floor, with the sweet taste of sugar lingering in his mouth? I will never know. He died yesterday.

God bless you!

Ellen "Jyoti" Collins

The 2000 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 146