Tuesday, May 26, 2009

During the last four months of this year's particularly wet rainy season, people worked tremendously hard to get the foundation in for our Community Treatment Center. Had it been just any old building, or any ordinary project, we might have simply waited for the rains to eventually peter out and stop. The trucks carrying stones and bricks often got stuck in the mud and on many a day could only come within a half kilometer of the building site and had to drop their load, which meant then that our students had to do the incredibly hard work of carrying those stones and bricks the last distance.

But the Community Treatment Center is by no means an ordinary building. The sooner we get it built the sooner hundreds of sick people in these villages will be spared from traveling all the way to Lugoda Hospital to get their medicines. Many people, perhaps even most people, will still have to go all the way to the hospital, especially when they come down with the weird opportunistic infections that plague those with AIDS. But when we have more than 850 people having to travel every month, sometimes twice a month, to get their ARVs, it will certainly be a huge blessing for hundreds of them, once they are in the system and healthy, to be able to get their medicines right here in our village.

The hard and time-consuming work of laying out and then building the stone foundation is finished. The huge task of filling up those foundations with special "landfill" has been completed -- thanks to our students who used the two days that we called off classes and the free reign that we gave them to use our two trucks to literally work from morning to night! And now, with the rains finally over and the sun shining here at Madisi, we are wonderfully able to begin building the walls of the Community Treatment Center. It's a monster of a building, centrally located -- just as our school is -- between the five villages of this area -- so that people throughout the area will be able to walk here to get their medicines.

One of the most wonderful things that our students did was to carefully place all of the bricks in small piles all around the building which means that the builders can build at an incredible speed because the bricks are literally right within their reach. And indeed they are building at an incredible speed as the walls seem to rise before our eyes. Susan and I have taken to walking down there two and three times a day just so we can revel in the progress that has been made.

But there's something else that we revel in each time we go there. It's seeing that among the builders is Mateso, a wonderful man who a year ago when Susan first met him was literally on his deathbed. But he got on that bus, he made it to the hospital, he got the medicines and today his wife is not a widow and his little girl is not an orphan, and he is no longer in bed waiting to die. Instead he walks every morning from his village of Luhunga and is at work bright and early. They don't call it the Lazarus Effect for nothing!

There will be thousands of people who will come from all over the day the building is finished in a grand celebration. I'm looking forward to Mateso's daughter being in that crowd and seeing the building that her father will have worked very hard to help to build. He reads every night to his daughter from a Children's Bible that Susan gave him. He loves her. He wants her to have a future, he wants her to go to school, he wants her to grow up. How wonderful that he might be around to see it all happen.