Beatrice

In 2007 I was invited to go to Kitale, Kenya (situated in Rift Valley) with a family who helps support a pre-school called Graceway. They support this school financially (basic school supplies), physically (food and clothing) and even spiritually (Bible teaching, praying). They invited me because I had previously been to South Africa and had a small understanding of African culture. They wanted me to see the work that was going on in the school, and help out in any way I could. I was very excited to go, and at the same time, I was trying to prepare myself for the things I would see there.

Graceway was located in the largest slum (Tuwani) in Kitale. I was told about the poverty we would come across, and all I could think about were the commercials I had seen on TV or the articles I had read about Africa. Commercials and articles so often give you the statistics on death, disease, malnutrition, and the list goes on (I hadn’t seen this level of poverty in South Africa). Without even realizing it I had let those things shape my view of poverty. I thought poverty equaled misery. I thought it would be really hard to be in the slums and see how some people have to live. But what really struck me once I got there was not the misery but the joy I saw in the people I met. Many of them possessed more joy than I see in a lot of people in America.

One of my favorite families to visit in Tuwani was Beatrice and her five kids. Beatrice was around 25 and a widow, so she had to raise her four daughters and one son by herself. This is a somewhat common picture of what a family looks like in Africa. Many women are widows. Many children are fatherless, motherless or both. And that’s usually where the story ends. You don’t get to see inside their little mud huts where they somehow still find things to laugh about. But this is what I saw every time I was with Beatrice and her kids.

I met Beatrice and her kids through Graceway. Her three oldest girls attend school there. Because Graceway has a feeding program these three girls were getting enough food, but Beatrice’s daughter, Esther, was too young to go to school. Her baby brother was still young enough to be breast fed, but Esther wasn’t getting the food she needed. Her hands, feet, face and belly were swollen, and she wouldn’t eat although she would drink a little bit. She barely had energy to move, and you could tell she was uncomfortable. We didn’t realize she was malnourished until she was brought to the hospital. She needed more protein in her diet, but Beatrice wasn’t award of that.

Families rarely have enough money to bring someone to the hospital, so my friends took Esther in. They spent much of their time with her there since Beatrice also had to take care of her four other children and couldn’t be with Esther all the time. Another friend and I went to visit her shortly after she was brought in. I had never seen such a dirty hospital before! I was surprised that people could actually be helped there. Patients were treated in the same areas with nothing being washed or cleaned in between each one who came in. Children were being laid on top of a counter that had no sheet, no paper, no anything to cover the counter with. Doctors would check them, stick a needle in them (sometimes IVs were inserted into their heads), do whatever they needed to do, and then bring in the next child and lay them on the same spot. It was strange to see a hospital able to function like that. The floors were dirty, the walls were stained with I don’t know what, and it smelled pretty much everywhere you walked, especially near the choos (a choo is a Kenyan toilet…a rectangular hole in the ground/floor). As many as three families were assigned to one bed, and there were multiple beds in each sectioned off room. It was crowded everywhere. Families would spend days or weeks in these conditions depending on how long someone needed to be in the hospital. Sometimes you could wait a whole night at the hospital (the top half of your shirt stained with blood - I saw this), in a waiting area, before you were even seen or attended to. The hallways and waiting areas were all out doors, but at least they had tin roofs covering them. They had a children’s ward, maternity ward, and a few other wards that were inside with walls around them.

So, that is what I walked into the day Esther was brought in. The workers in the hospital knew right away that she was malnourished. They said she would have to stay in the hospital for a week, but agreed to release her after a few days since they explained to us what to feed her in order to get her healthy again. So, thankfully, only a few nights were spent there before they let her go home early.

I had known Esther for a few weeks before I saw her smile for the first time. It was after she came home from the hospital, and my friends and I were visiting them. Beatrice’s older girls are some of the most joyful kids I remember meeting while I was in Kenya, yet I had never seen Esther as happy or as energetic as they were. On this particular day, as we were there playing and laughing with the kids, something made Esther smile…and we even saw her teeth! We talk about this day even now because it was so good to see her happy. I don’t remember what it was that made her smile, but we even got a picture. It was wonderful to see the change in her as she began to get healthier.

But it wasn’t just Esther’s smile that made us happy. It was being with that family. Here is a mom with five kids, living in a tiny mud hut, struggling to even be able to feed them everyday. You would never know by their attitudes or actions how hard things were for them though. As we were walking to their house that day the older girls came running out to meet us. They jumped on us, hugged us, and brought us inside. I think we laughed the entire time we were there. And we don’t even speak the same language! I know at one point the girls were making fun of us, I think just because we were white (and we had ‘small eyes’), but even that made us laugh with them! And it was so good to see how Beatrice interacted with her kids. She knew how to make them laugh, and you could tell that they had fun together. They would only have to say a few words to each other before the giggles started. She struggled to provide for them, but she loved them! I just never expected to see that kind of joy, and hear that kind of laughter in such hard circumstances. It was so different to be in a place where people’s joy is not dependent on the things they possess.

There was another day, towards the end of our stay, when my friend and I visited their home. Only Beatrice was there with her two youngest kids, because the others were in school. When we walked in, they were eating the powder out of vitamin packets. I wasn’t sure why they were doing that at first, but after a little while, we realized she didn’t have any food in the house. I asked her two or three times if she had anything at all, and her answer was always, “No”. I kept asking her because I just couldn’t grasp not having food. It’s hard to understand poverty without seeing it, but I had actually stepped into it, at least physically. I could see and smell the trash all around, I could see how people were living, but I still could not comprehend waking up without any food. And there was Beatrice, smiling and welcoming us into her home. Her smile was always so big and came so freely. She must have been wondering where the next meal was going to come from and what she could feed her kids, but she was calm as she was telling us she had no food. The only reason I didn’t start crying when she said that was because she was somehow okay. We left, bought some food, and brought it back to her. She just smiled and said ‘Asante’ (thank you) over and over.

Meeting Beatrice and her family made me think about why I don’t smile as much as them, and when I do, if it comes from a true appreciation of God’s grace in my own life. I was reminded, for the hundredth time while I was in Africa, that you can find joy in the most unexpected places. There is always something to smile about. Always something to be thankful for - by the grace of God. There is no other way to explain their smiles, laughter and hospitality alongside the physical destitution of their lives. God’s grace, His undeserved goodness to us, is a free gift that we cannot earn. Some have much, others have barely anything. But when He gives anyone any good thing to even smile about, it’s a gift from Him. I don’t know how conscious Beatrice was of God’s grace, but her smiles proved that it exists even in the midst of human suffering.