Impossible stories
There was this radio program I was listening to recently. They were interviewing some guy who was the executive director of a Christian relief organization who had spent decades in war zones and around poverty and famine and diseases. Some guy who had traveled around the world doing good in the name of God.
I was half paying attention when he told two stories. The first was about driving down the road in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, and seeing a four-year-old boy stagger out of the bush, malnourished, barely alive, having been without water for nearly two days. His parents and other family members had died. There was nobody with him. He was all alone. Four years old.
The second was during the AIDS crisis in Tanzania. He talked about dead bodies “piled like cordwood” beside a tent. They couldn’t be buried because the soil was largely ash. He spoke of one day seeing a woman walk up carrying her dead infant in her arms. He watched as she gently placed her baby on a pile of corpses on the back of a truck and turned and slowly walked away.
