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| Roselyn and Zyrene |
Dear Fellow Workers,
It has been a heartbreaking evening and little Roselyn's mom is dead.
We received an urgent request to come and help Roselyn's mother who was feeling fine Monday, but fell into a coma late state with high fever on Tuesday. We drove over an hour to a remote barangay beyond Pitombayog to come to her aid. When we arrived all the family members were gathered apparently waiting for Felicidad, the mother of our own little Roselyn, to die. Yet no one would take responsibility and do anything.
We asked her family to carry her in a blanket to the van while I said a prayer. Pastor Gene drove brilliantly as we all prayed, but by the time we got to the hospital she had already passed away right there in the van.
Little Roselyn has had a hard life before she got to the Orphans Home. The level of Philippine poverty that her family lives in is incomprehensible to westerners. Even the bamboo shack they live in is not their own. When their food would run out, they often had to go house to house to beg for scraps.
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| Roselyn |
Sadly, last week, Felicidad's family took her to the emergency room, but because they had no money, (they only had P200, about $4) they were turned away.
This dear woman could probably have been saved if there was a way for the desperately poor in the Philippines to get medical help here. Now these incredibly poor people are being asked to pay P17,000 (about $350.) for a memorial service. I was already surprised to receive a bill from the hospital even though she was already dead when we arrived (almost $40). Apparently there is a fee to be pronounced dead.
It just tears me up to see these precious little girls that I have worked to hard to build a home for, heartbroken and in tears. It is a reminder that Philippine poverty, sickness, hard-heartedness and death are still here in the Philippines and serious about destroying what God has given us to protect.
Felicidad is not the first person I have watched dying. May I never lose the ache of it, may I never just accept it, may I never forget the sting and may I never sit quietly when someone needs to hear the Gospel, because the Gospel of Jesus is the only way past that heartbreak of physical death that ends in victory. It is the only thing that can truly break the grip of Philippine poverty and the poverty of our souls.
Love in Jesus,
Craig, Mary-Anne and Patrick
Servants
I am doing an essay on poverty in the world and this is a great story, because it shows everyone how much poverty effects peoples lives. I also think that the government in the Philippines should get the whole communities to work together and help each other since most live in poverty.
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