11/24/06

Thoughts \ Developed Thoughts \ Rants \ Raves \ Writing

07/03/2005 23:29 +0200 GMT

Sister C., Part 1.

There is a nun at Our Lady's Hospice in Kalingalinga, Lusaka. She wears the cloth about her, with the catholic scarf surrounding the back of her head, and the simply draped cloak of a nun. Unbeknownst to her, I saw her first in Spar supermarket at the Arcades center in Lusaka. I was waiting as Brad and Stewart gathered their groceries in their first such shopping as residents of my town here in Zambia. Sister C commands attention, but without giving a single order.

Since that first unencounter, she has been the warmest, most hospitable, firm hand-shaking, laissez faire leader I have met here in the new Lusaka, and I admire her from a distance.

Sister C has circular wrinkles about her face, and a tan on that same face that I noticed immediately when I first met her, belying her British background. Knowing the shifts that Catholic disciples must take in their lives, I wondered where else she had been in this world, where she might have been exposed to a lot of sun. She's a bright smile, with clean teeth, bright eyes, but much more to her than that. She's reserved. As I took a break from the charts, and parted the soft white curtains that gird all of the rooms in the extraordinary complex of buildings that make up Our Lady's Hospice, I saw Sister C at the periphery of the grounds.

The OLH grounds are surrounded by a wall-fence, made of cinderblocks, and topped by three or four rows of electric wire, which is more in vogue these days in the new Lusaka, compared to the razor-wire of the bad old days. The hospice, despite conforming to the seeming necessities of physical protection from the world - the cinder block walls, the electric fence, the guards - still feels like a place of peace. The walls are shorter at Our Lady's Hospice. I get the sense that if someone wanted to get over the wall...if a thief were to come in during the night...if Victor Hugo were to write a novel about Jean Valjean, and silver candlesticks were stolen, and the magistrate or Gendarme were to arrest, and the suspect be brought to bear, Sister C would say that the 'sticks were a gift, that this was a house of God, that the suspect should be set free, and that they should go with peace.

I feel a strong need to meet with Sister C, and learn her real name, and learn more about her work here, and her service mission here.

We shared a laugh, in the office of the Zambian director of the place, whose name again escapes me (Do you sense a theme?). The subject of suffering was brought to the fore, and I said to Sister C, while thinking of the central theme of suffering that characterizes so many Zambian lives, "I think you may have come to the right place."

Sister C is an enigma to me, an entity that I don't understand, but that I would like to get to know better.

As I saw her out that window, and as I parted the curtains, she was alone, at the periphery, with the cinder-block wall behind her. The grounds of OLH are immaculately kept, watered and neat. Sister C was stopped at a bush that had some flowers blooming, just about at hand's level when one is standing. She was lifting a bough of the bush - I couldn't tell if a bloom was in hand. But her impression on me was such that I wondered what she was thinking at that time. Was she thinking, I thought, about the wonder of God, and the fact that He would permit flowers to bloom in a place where so much early death occurs? Was she so committed to her faith that she was considering more transcendental things than the life and death struggle one faces in the physical world?

J'espère qu'un épilogue á cette histoire va suivra.