March 8, 2024

(Hang with me, its going to have a happy ending!)

Her name was Mary, she was a widow, 28 years old, with a baby she could no longer nurse, her breasts had gone dry and obviously she was starving.

This was her home or what was left of it, chunks of the mud caulking had fallen out between the sticks and the dust and wind blew continuously through the house.

She lay on the ground covered by a thin cloth, not wanting to see or be seen by a world too harsh to stay in.

Ester made her look up. Can you see it? It is the face of complete despair, all hope exhausted; youth, dreams, joy, plans, pleasures vanished like the smoke of her cooking fire, now empty ashes.

Too much? Sorry.

It’s not something we want to see or hear, it’s not one of our happy stories. But we hear it quite often now. The men leave the village looking for work in the towns and they never return and the women and children starve.

Ester our “Save The Mothers” director brought me pictures of Mary and asked if we could help.

She had left at 6am with some of our volunteers for a long, dusty trip out to a Maasai Village to check on the Bibis (Grandmothers) from one of our previous Save The Mothers classes.

It’s important to follow up after a few months to check how the Bibis are doing, how many babies has each one delivered, how many moms or babies did they lose, what were their ages and what were the complications, were they able to use the simple skills they had learned in our classes, etc…

And we had sent gifts and supplies to help them in their work. The Bibis were excited, each one wanting to tell their successes and some their losses.

Each month twelve Maasai traditional birthers come to Neema Village in Arusha for Save The Mothers.  It is our attempt to stop the high numbers of moms dying in childbirth and I think it is working. We have now had over 384 women come in for training.

Our first lesson for them is bring the moms in to the hospital! But they want to birth at home, women die in the hospitals, they say.

With little or no medical care during pregnancy, girls as young as 12 marry and get pregnant. They eat grass to make themselves vomit during the last three months so they will have small babies. Maasai women are tall and thin, narrow hipped and they’ve learned big babies kill.

And complicated by the Maasai practice of FGM, female circumcision, the chances of not making it through childbirth are high. Scar tissue does not stretch like normal skin so they rip and tear and bleed to death having a baby.

Too much again? Sorry, someone needs to know, someone needs to care.

And Ester cares, a Maasai herself whose been through all of it, early arranged marriage to an abusive old man, running away, scared, alone, trying to get free. We helped and she made it, now she tries to help her people. She cries as she tries to teach these grandmothers.

But today after this session out in the village they asked Ester to go to a hut with them to see a widow named Mary.

Can we help her, she asked me? How could we not, I asked.

More and more as we live our lives in this beautiful, blighted land of Africa we ask ourselves how did Jesus do this every day, hear these stories, continue to care, not throw up his hands and say it’s just too much?

What would He do? We know. He would help.

So, we sent Ester back out the next day to bring Mary in to Neema. Another long exhausting day for her and Kilele the driver. Later sitting on the couch in the baby home at Neema Village Mary was so weak she couldn’t stand by herself. We took her to the hospital and in a few hours, she had medicine and a drip in her arm.  Thank God, Another life saved.

We had sent Ester back out to pick up one woman but she brought in two. A pregnant woman in the village was so big she could barely walk and, on the way home they dropped her off at Maternity Africa.  But Maternity Africa wanted to trade her for another mom who had delivered twins in their hospital earlier and had no home to return to. So we have a new mom in our MAP program with little twins. I went to visit and mom wanted me to name her babies.

Babies Madeline and Michael Bloom, above, like little buds waiting to open, are named for Madeline Bloom who lost her husband, Michael, last year.

Madeline is on the right with her sister Molly with two Neema babies. The Michael Bloom Foundation in collaboration with “True North” is building a soccer field on Neema property to help young boys and girls and women have a place to play off the streets.

If you’ve been to Neema, the “Furaha Soccer Field” is right below the cow shed. We will paint soccer balls all over that wall. And we will have a women’s team with lots of Neema Nannies to work off their frustrations after a hard day playing with our babies!

It’s not all sad and depressing, our granddaughter, Maria, is Maasai, the last child of an eighth wife who died in childbirth. She is proud of her culture and loves to visit the simple life of her family out in the village. Like Maria and Ester, Maasai are beautiful. God made each culture in His image.

What’s Mary’s future, now that she has one, you ask?

We brought her back to Neema Village after a few days in the hospital to the MAP houses where she is being fed nutritious meals and where she has other women with similar stories to lean on. She is still skinny but she will attend classes where she will learn that God never lost sight of her. His love heals and one day we will set her up in a corn or rice business and she will return to her village. Hope restored.

Why do we do this you ask? Because Jesus would. He loves these beautiful Maasai women more than we do. Did you know that His longest discussion with a single person recorded for us was with a woman?

I wonder if her name was Mary.