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November 2, 2001
Dear Friends,
My heart sank when she told me what had happened: the 8-year-old
daughter of a neighbor died last week of hemorrhagic dengue. "It
was the fifth day of the girl’s fever," she said. "Her
parents had taken her to the local health center twice, and all
they gave them was acetaminophen for her fever, never diagnosing
dengue. On the fifth day of her fever they took her to a hospital,
but when they arrived it was too late. The girl had a heart attack
and died. The public hospitals did not have the necessary equipment
to give her a chance to live."
Dengue fever, transmitted by mosquitoes, is rarely fatal, but
more likely to cause death by hemorrhaging in the very young,
the very old, or the malnourished.
This loss, the death of my friend Maria’s neighbor, did
not have to happen. After my immediate reaction of sorrow I found
myself asking angry questions: Who was to blame? Was it negligence
on the part of the health center staff, a fatal oversight? Was
it the fault of an ill-equipped hospital, or hospital personnel
too slow to respond? Were the parents to blame? Were they unable
to sense the gravity of the situation, or was it unclear to them
that their daughter was dying? Or was their poverty to blame,
their young daughter weakened first by malnourishment and then
killed by dengue?
"As Christians," my friend Maria told me, "we
accept the lot in life that God gives us. Whether we are rich
or poor, whether we live or we die." This is a common belief
among Nicaraguan Christians—that whether we are born into
conditions that bear life or not is all part of God’s plan.
This is a hard concept for me to swallow. A sudden, senseless
death of a child. Probably a preventable death. A death that I
attribute, at least in part, to a world in which two-thirds of
the world’s population lives in conditions of poverty which
simply do not sustain life. A world governed by a global economic
order that obligates poorer nations to pay unpayable debts to
wealthy nations and international banking institutions governed
primarily by those same nations. Health care is one area that
suffers when countries like Nicaragua are pushed to cut back on
social programs in order to make debt payments. As a result, public
health services in Nicaragua are totally inadequate. The death
of this 8-year-old child is testimony to this fact.
Perhaps hearing about the death of Maria’s neighbor hit
closer to home now that I am a parent. This year on April 28th
our baby Galen Ariel Zavala Sherby was born. He is six months
old now, thoroughly enjoying life. My husband Elmer and I love
him unconditionally. Our mission for Galen as he grows is for
him to feel secure as a person develop qualities that allow him
to live life fully: a sense of humor, sensitivity to and compassion
for others, and inquisitiveness, among others. As I hold Galen,
play with him, and cuddle him to sleep, I can hardly bring myself
to imagine the terror and grief one must feel upon losing her
or his own child. This is a monumentally painful kind of loss.
Becoming a parent gives us a sense of what God might "feel"
for us. God is our Heavenly Parent, and through Jesus’s testimony
and the sweet, often subtle guidance of the Holy Spirit, we Christians
try to understand what God’s mission for us is in our lives.
With the tragic losses of September 11 we have entered into a
new age of globalized terror and violence. What does God require
of us? What is God’s mission for us in this new context?
We are anxious to find someone at fault when we suffer loss,
and it is indeed important to bring to justice those responsible
for acts of terror—be they intentionally and deliberately
harmful acts such as those carried out on September 11, or acts
born out of negligence, indifference, ignorance, or due to systemic
injustices. Both a global economic system that grants privileges
to a precious few, as well as terrorists with an undetermined
scope of ability to wreak violence and no fixed national headquarters,
are difficult enemies to bring to justice. We need to find the
responsible parties in order to bring them to trial in our national
and world courts. And at the same time we must
continue to ask that ever-important question "What does God
require of me?" (Micah 6:8).
The fundamental sacredness of each and every life is at the
core of this question. Terror comes in many forms, and the terror
of loss of life brings despair, sorrow, and rage. Now I reflect
on so many losses which have occurred during the last several
weeks: losses suffered by so many on September 11 in the U.S.
Losses suffered by so many in Afghanistan. The loss of the life
of a little girl in Nicaragua, who was born into local, national,
and international contexts which did not allow her to live to
see her ninth birthday this past October 28th.
We need not measure one terror against another, one untimely
and unjust loss of life against another, which would imply that
one life were more valuable than another. As people of conscience—Christians
or not—we must begin to reflect anew and in more challenging
ways about how we can sow seeds of love in this fresh and painful
world post-September 11. The vulnerability and uncertainty of
life has always been there, but now we U.S. citizens, not having
suffered this magnitude of casualties on our own soil since the
1860s, feel this fragility more keenly.
We must sow seeds to grow a more just world in which we will
not be moved to launch missiles and drop bombs, in which fewer
children will die from curable diseases, and terror will diminish
because the world has sufficient resources and love. I pray that
we sow seeds that bear fruits of life for many, the world over,
being angels of transformation for ourselves, our families, and
for strangers in faraway lands. And I pray that we might always
find "signposts" of hope amidst the tragedies that crush
our spirits.
God bless our world, every life.
Ellen Sherby
The 2001 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 251
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