Day of Tears

Today I went with some other ladies from THQ to visit Colonel Mhasvi in hospital. He was still in the Intensive Care Unit, and so we were only allowed to go in one at a time. He didn't look too good. I told him about how beautiful his daughter had looked at the wedding, and he graciously asked how I was doing, and how John was doing, and said that it was more than a pleasure to see me. Like in most important moments, I didn't know what to say, so I just told him that we loved him and would continue to pray for him. And then I left the unit and cried for half an hour. It's hard to see someone you care about suffering. And it's so unfair that there are only two doctors that can do surgery, and neither of them are working right now. We then went to visit a man in another hospital who was in a bus accident two weeks ago, and got crushed in the wreckage for two hours. Now he's paralyzed. And he cried when we prayed for him, and he said "Mwari makanaka" (God is good).

Friday night I attended two screenings of movies at the Zimbabwe International Film Festival. One was out of northern Uganda and called "Lost Children." It told the story of children who had escaped from the Lord's Resistance Army. I was so angered by the stories that the children told of being forced to commit atrocities - like having to kill a mother in front of her children, or having to cut up another child into tiny little pieces, or capturing another child who tried to run away, cutting off her head, and then throwing it up and down, up and down in the air like a ball. It's horrible. Those kinds of things don't leave your mind easily. How can people leave emotional scars like that on children? The other movie was called "Faith's Corner." It was out of South Africa, and told the story of a woman who lived on the streets with her two boys; trying to make a living for them. I cried at the point where she thought she had lost hope.

There's a lot of sadness in the world.

But there is joy, too. Because there is always hope. I believe that with all my heart.
(And I had some good tears of joy today too, because I got to talk to both my parents and both my brothers, and that was nice). Mwari makanaka.