Mother and Child

By Takahashi Masaya

One day a (Vietnamese) mother came to me and said, "Please come help my baby." I went to her house to find a three-month old baby lying very still. I did not know how critical the baby's condition was, but I decided to send the baby immediately to Phnom Penh, the capital. The mother did not speak Cambodian and she had never been to the city, so I needed to accompany them to the hospital.

As soon as we arrived, the doctor started a cardiac massage, but it was too late. The baby had died long before we arrived. The news shocked me. I thought that the baby had been sleeping quietly during our drive, cuddled in its mother's arms.

We decided to leave the baby at the hospital that night and to come back to get the body in the morning. I offered her my office in Phnom Penh for the night but she couldn't sleep at all. It was my first encounter with death and it was so shattering that I couldn't eat or sleep either. We conversed in minimal Cambodian throughout the long night.

Next morning, we collected the baby's body and returned to the water village. When the mother laid the body in the centre of the tiny house where families and neighbours had gathered, everyone started to cry and talk to each other (in Vietnamese). I could only pick up the word Masaya from their conversation and I was sure that everybody was blaming me. "Why didn't he first check the baby's breathing? If he had done that, he could have discovered that the baby was in a very critical condition and rushed to a nearby hospital instead of driving so far." "That man, Masaya, must have been so content with this role of accompanying the sick to the hospital that he did not care about the baby itself." These were the kind of sentiments I imagined in the voices echoing together around me, making me burst into tears.

Noticing this, one of the women said, "Masaya, come and rest at my house." While I ate the food she cooked for me, she explained in Cambodian: "I guess you did not understand our talk. The baby's mother was telling us how grateful she was to you. She said 'Masaya took care of us all the way through without taking any meals or sleep'." Hearing her words I started to cry again.

When the woman came to me for help, she must have been confident that I could help her baby. The result was the total opposite, yet she did not utter even one word of blame, but instead addressed a kind and warm word of thanks to me; I could not even figure out what I was being thanked for. If I were in her situation, going through the hardest experience of my life, I would have made harsh accusations and never dreamt of offering any kind words.

In this 'thank you' of the mother could be felt the Love of God who works among the poor, something far above the reason of humans like myself. It is a Love that can be found only among the weak and the poor. Because of their poverty and ignorance, they feel compassion for the pain, loneliness, frustration and anger of other people, and cannot ignore another's suffering. They go and stay with the people in sorrow, sharing the burden.

I now know that, to understand their kind and warm love, I, on my part, have to devote myself to being with them. I realised that, until after I lost the baby, I had not been with the mother and baby in the true sense. I was fully content with fulfilling my role. The mother and the baby were merely the objects of my good deed. It was only after the shock of losing the baby that I met the mother face to face. It was as much out of my own shattered feeling as out of sympathy that I talked with the mother through the night. But now, for the first time, I could be with her and feel her sadness and frustration as my own.

Without this exchange from heart to heart, the words 'thank you' would probably not have come to her lips… Facing my own limits, I come to realise one thing with tears: God needs me who am hopeless and powerless (2Cor. 12:9).

Takahashi Masaya is a 28-year-old graduate, a Japanese lay missionary in Cambodia. This story is adapted from "Encountering Christ in the Poor", first published in The Japan Mission Journal, Summer 2009 pp.83-87. Reprinted with permission.

[Far East Magazine]