Our son Levi had just turned one, and we were in David’s village in rural China celebrating Chinese New Year. One is an age where they love sitting in the dirt, touching everything, and putting everything in their mouth! Rural China is a place that Westerners often don’t go because of the hygiene standards, and other things… but it was where my husband was from, where his family lived, and I had come to love it. However, it wasn’t always an easy place to take our young kids!
The day after Levi’s first birthday, he started vomiting and having diarrhea and a high fever. He continued like this for another day or two before we decided we had better take him to the local hospital in the town nearby. Being a westerner, I was nervous about taking him, since I was used to a different level of hygiene and medical care, especially when it came to my young children. However, he was admitted to the hospital after they diagnosed him with Rotavirus, and we were told he would need to stay there several days at least, until they could rehydrate him and his vomitting and diarrhea stopped.
The room in the children’s ward was a small room with three hospital beds. At the back there was a window with a washing line, and a bathroom the size of a small closet. It was a squat toilet with no sink, but just a hose coming out of the wall for washing. There was no drinking water, toilet paper, or food provided, you had to provide your own or have family and friends bring it in. It was the middle of winter and there was no heating in the rooms, so we and our children had to stay rugged up in our winter jackets and thermals. The room was mopped once a day, and that was it: no wiping, sanitizing, scrubbing. There was no cot for sick babies, instead their mothers had to keep them on the hospital bed all day, especially when they were on a drip. Levi was an active one year old boy! How was I supposed to do that? I was by myself with Levi most of the time, as David had to stay with our two-year-old daughter Anna back in the village, away from the hospital, but they were able to visit once a day to bring food and supplies. His brothers and sisters occasionally came to visit too and brought homemade meals. At night there was little sleep… the light was almost always on, and the other people in the room would bathe their feverish kids at 3am, or talk loudly, or wake their kids to feed them, or have relatives coming in and out. Most days I would carry Levi through the ward for something to do and a change of scenery, and we would wave and smile at the other kids and their families. But after days of trying to keep this sick boy still and warm and fed and clean with little sleep, I was so tired, stressed, frustrated… so wrapped up in my own discomfort and “suffering”. I would pray most days “God, please just help Levi to get better so we can get out of here!” On the fourth (or fifth?) day, when we found out we still had to stay one more night, I was almost beside myself.
As I was sitting there in all my self pity, thinking about another day of taking all my baby wipes and wiping down our bed and wiping all the things Levi would be touching, the Holy Spirit started prompting me… “Go and wipe down all the surfaces in the room. Everyone’s bed, everyone’s side table and chairs, everything.” Hmph. Oh, alright… by that time the family in the middle bed had gone, and it was just a young woman and her young child on the other bed. I’d had several conversations with the other people in the room when I could, but mostly they were busy with their children and talking amongst themselves in the local dialect, or watching the TV. But that morning, it was quiet, and just this woman and her baby were there. I felt a new surge of strength and resolve to be obedient and to serve instead of wallowing in my self-pity, and so I picked up the wipes and went over to her bed and asked if I could wipe down the headboard and railings for her. She nodded, and as I cleaned, tears rolled down her cheeks. We started chatting and she told me how her mother-in-law had scolded her and blamed her for their child’s sickness. She’d been told all the things she did wrong, and that she wasn’t a good mother. We chatted and I talked about how normal it is for kids to get sick! I told her that I thought she was a wonderful mother, just the mother that child needed, and it wasn’t her fault he was sick. More tears rolled down her cheek…
