A dear friend of mine is currently teaching in the Congo and her most recent update has left me in shock. I share it to provide the rawness of life there.
….
For a while, I’ve been meaning to sit down and write an email about the women I work with here during the afternoons. And then one of my students died today. She had just arrived last week, sent down from one of the villages because she had been so severely raped that she needed surgery. She was so slight and frail, obviously HIV positive. She had walked to the hospital in the evening, just as lyn and I were leaving, and we gave her a blanket and a luna bar to last until morning. In class she was very bright, wrote well, but so quiet and hung out in bed the rest of the day. She hadn’t been able to sit in class the last few days and, when I came to say hi today, I found out that she died last night. Its left me shaky and sad but also looking, with new eyes, at the other women and what this little-hospital-that-could is doing for them.