The Faces of Poverty

I thought I have seen real poverty in the years that I have been in the Philippine health care industry. I've seen parents manually ambubagging their babies because there were no ventilators available. From sheer exhaustion, a parent would fall asleep and inadvertently cause her baby to stop breathing, then be awakened angrily by the nurse for falling asleep on her baby. As student nurses, we were luxurious helps to these parents when we volunteer to take their places so they could take a nap or two. I've seen several patients hooked to a single oxygen tank in an octopus-like fashion, sharing precious air because there were not enough tanks to provide each patient with. I've seen two mothers swim in a bed wet with each others' amniotic fluid, sharing a most precious space in order to bring out their babies into the world and five babies share one bassinet sucking each others' extremities. And I thought I have seen poverty.

Then I was confronted by an old man, lying in his own automated bed, with nurses asking him, "can I get you anything else?", looking at me with eyes filled with emptiness, hopelessness and despair. "I have no one with me. I want to die," he said. He lives alone and the last time he saw his son was five years ago. Then I see a different kind of poverty, far from the material poverty that I was accustomed to. It's a poverty that is more difficult to address, or so I thought. For how can you give faith to someone who has lost it? Hope to someone who does not believe? Love to someone who has no one to hold? Nurses who listen with their hearts are luxuries to these patients. Immersed in the business of charting and carrying out doctors' orders, the thirty minutes spent at bedside are hard to go by but may just be the kind of fresh air that this patient needs in his lonely world of existence. And I have that kind of luxury, having only two pieces of papers to chart on and three to four hours of bedside monitoring.

"Tell me what does God have to say to me, if there was a God?" he asked, in a plea of despair. I see a beggar pleading for the smallest grace that he can hold. And I find myself totally unprepared, the greater beggar that I am. Then I realized that I cannot be one of those girls caught by the bridegroom without oil in their lamps. In the health care industry that I am now in, the patients are hungry for the word of God. And although this man was receptive and wanted to believe, I could see the great struggle in him. The second time that he challenged me to let God speak to him, I was more prepared. I asked him to repeat after me. "Jesus, I accept you as my healer right now because I have no one else to turn to. I feel so crappy and sick. Please help me. In your name I pray." He obeyed like a small child, it almost made me cry. I realized that it takes as much generosity in my part to address this kind of poverty as the kind of poverty I see in my country. Time and presence are luxuries in this kind of world. The greater luxury is to share my faith to someone who is running empty because I needed to empty myself in order to allow the Spirit to move. In this kind of situation, I cannot depend on human wisdom and reasoning alone. It will take years for faith to grow that way. This is the kind of situation which needed divine intervention pronto because this man is nearing the end of the road. He needed the kind of opportunity given to the robber beside the Crucified Christ who stole heaven in a split second. And I think that moment of confession may just have been his moment. And even if I left him that day still hearing some harsh words coming out of his mouth, the apology that came after the act was enough for me to realize that the seed was planted. And in the kingdom of heaven, even a faith as small as a mustard seed will bear much fruit in the end. For it is the Divine Gardener who will make sure that the seed that was sown is not sown in vain.