Fr. Hartly came and spoke at St. Michael's School 5 years ago. He had to leave the Dominican Republic because of Death Threats. He is now working in the community of Gode in Ethopia - in a mission there. He sends updates regularly - I am on his email list.
This letter came in at the beginning of Lent:
When Even the Camels Die of
Thirst
Dear Friends of the Mission,
For the last year and a half, not a drop of rain has fallen in Gode and the Somali region of Ethiopia.
Here everything is dying.
It is dramatic to see people arrive at the rickety hospital of Gode, by any means of transport, including carts driven by donkeys, carrying squalid and dying patients.
People arrive with their last breath and sometimes they die within in a few minutes, in the hands of helpless doctors because of the magnitude of the tragedy.
It is so sad and heartbreaking to see the fields devastated by the drought. Here nothing grows, neither corn, nor soybeans, no cereals, here everything is swept away by gusts of wind in giant clouds of dust that soil and clothes it in coats of gray.
Every morning when I leave the house, before dawn, to celebrate the Holy Eucharist, I see the dead cattle on the roadside… cows, goats, sheep ... The stench is dreadful and the spectacle so terribly sad.
At this time, all that Gode breathes is death and desolation.
For a few months now, we have had a young English doctor working with us. He spends mornings and afternoons at the public hospital. Thanks to him we are receiving firsthand information on the magnitude of the drama that these people are experiencing.
Last Thursday, March 2, he warned us that an unusual number of patients were dying (in fact, the first six of them died in the Gode hospital that afternoon), brought from the Afder area, whose capital is Hargele.
We soon learned that the problem was that, because of the desperation to bring water in trucks to the most remote villages, some NGOs had taken water from a dam near the city of Hargele, which was completely polluted and infected.
That same night I loaded the off-road vehicle of the mission with all the medicines that we had at that moment at our disposal and at 5:00 am last Friday I went to Hargele. It was 230 kilometers of terrible road. Before 10 in the morning, I was already in the hospital of the city. I met the medical director and gave him the medicine. It was very sad to hear this man, Abdisalem Mohamed, to tell the tragedy of all those hundreds of people who came every day infected with terminal typhus.
In these days when the whole Church, as a faithful bride of Jesus Christ, accompanies his way of the cross through the countless painful paths of this world, it is not difficult to recognize the face of the passion of Christ in the small macerated bodies of these children.
By mid-morning, I decided that it was imperative to look for the villages from where the sick people arrived, to really understand the problem. What no one had told me was that there was no real roadway to get to those settlements. So, with the 4x4 ready and gritting our teeth, we went trudged those 40 endless and unforgettable kilometers.
We finally arrived drowned in dust from head to toe and scorched with heat. The people immediately swirled around us to tell us about their tragedy. We went to the polluted well and saw the putrid water, that had caused so much death and desolation.
On the way, we saw many animals that had died of thirst and starvation. People said to us: "Abba (Father), when the camels are dying of thirst is when we do not have much life left."
I asked to visit the sick who were too seriously ill to be taken to Hargele Hospital. They showed me a cabin in which several sick people lay on the ground.
There were two very young boys in a ragged white nurse robes. I asked them about the symptoms. "Do they have a fever?" I asked. One bowed his head in embarrassment and said, "We do not know because we do not have a thermometer."
I gave them the few medicines we still had and some clean water. We had to return to Gode and we had more than five hours of road. You feel so powerless, so disturbed inside when you see these scenes ... You simply ask "Why?"
Some of our Confirmation Collections will match the Money raised at St. Michael Secondary School and be sent over to Fr. Hartly's Mission.
No comments:
Post a Comment