It has been good to be busy today, although the busyness has been wrapped around tragedy. Our former housekeeper, Thelma Sijula, has developed cancer, and I spent most of the day fetching her from Khayalitsha and taking herr to Tygerberg. She turns out to be very seriously ill, and has been admitted for treatment and tests.
Tygerberrg is the primary hospital for the Cape Flats, and you only get to be treated there if you have already run the gamut of the clinics; medicine for the poor is not for sissies. The hospital itself is functional but ugly - I wlaked through hundreds of metres of corridor, including one long underground stretch with raw cement-brick walls.
A concurrent struggle is that lesley's brother Dan is also fighting serious and aggressive cancer. He is able to afford top-end clinics and private medicine, so we are being exposed to a fault line between the world of the rich and the subducted world of the poor. I am not finding this easy, nor is Lesley. I guess what has been an awful set of experiences has been lightened (fractionally) by realising that our calling to Serving Strangers places us on this margin as on other margins with a sense of Mission.
But I have not enjoyed today.
So although I have had to be in a hospital all day, at least I feel as if I have been fully engaged in our calling to outsiders -
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