Please Don't Forget Me

It was a sweltering spring day on the Nile basin in Northern Uganda in 2002. I was climbing a goat path that was winding toward a small clinic on top of a hill overlooking the Allere Refugee Camp. I was last in line behind my friend Rev. Michael Gantt. I was part of a small medical mission team he had assembled. We were tired. It had been a long trip. A couple of days before we had been forced out of another camp about 300 miles away because of a tribal conflict. We still had seven boxes of medicine left that we hoped to distribute.  The Allere camp served as a sparse refuge for over 90,000 people –mostly women, old men and children, who had fled the genocide just across the river in Sudan. They had nothing.  Most lived under trees or tattered blue U.N. tarps. They had no clean water. They were dependent upon handfuls of grain, occasionally delivered by the World Food Program trucks.  One hundred people were dying each day. The path wound a mile up from the main body of the camp. Lying on both sides were those who were too weak or infirm to continue.  I asked our guide, Michael Longwa, why the clinic was so far away. He said it was because resources were  limited, and it ensured that those who had the best chance of surviving would make it to the clinic. It was…a kind of triage.

The clinic was small. It had 12 beds. The beds were full of children – some of whom were wrapped in gauze. The camp had been raided by the Lord’s Resistance Army a few nights before. They were looking for children to serve as soldiers. These were too little. They had been pushed or thrown into campfires. The Ugandan nurse said that the U.N. doctor had left the day before. He was depressed because he had no medicine.

Children were lying on the wide steps leading up to the clinic. They had been brought there by their mothers or older siblings.  I was stepping over these little ones to bring a box of medicine to the nurse. A boy, 4 or 5 years old, reached up and hooked his fingers in the cuff of my pants. He was weak from malaria, and his eyes were glazed. He was whispering. I asked Michael Longwa what he was saying. He said, “Please sir, when you go back to America, don’ t  forget me.”

 In the hours, days and weeks since that encounter, I found myself desperately determined to do whatever I could to remember him by ensuring that children like him would not go without medicine. I asked God for the strategy, the resources and the people to make it happen. I never figured out the strategy, really. But in the years since, God certainly has provided the resources, the people and the opportunities!

Grace African Medical Missions has partnered with Dr. David Bruenning of the International Children’s Fund to deliver a sea rail container full of 17 million dollars worth of medicine to missions serving children in South Sudan. The International Children's Fund will ship the medicine to Port Mombasa in Kenya. Our job is to make sure the medicine gets to Juba, South Sudan, for distribution – about 1500 miles over land.  The container is ready to ship from the Netherlands. It will take about 42 days to get to Mombasa.

Please, join me in remembering the little boy on the steps of the Allere Clinic by ensuring  that these medicines will reach children in clinics throughout South Sudan. Checks may be made out to Grace African Children’s Fund.

“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try spending a night in a closed room with a mosquito”

-          An African Proverb

In the Grip of His Grace,
Bob Kirkman