Hello Everyone,
I want to tell you a short story that may turn into a long story. Around twelve days ago, on Nov. 4, in the countryside near where we live, a baby boy was born to a poor village family. He was delivered safely but the family soon realized that he had a birth defect that is very common to this area: he was born without an anus. Many children particularly in this prefecture of our province suffer from this condition. The baby’s stomach becomes distended and bloated and typically the baby dies within a few days of birth.
The family did what most villagers in our area do with unwanted or deformed babies: they abandoned the boy outside in a desolate area to die of exposure and starvation. It sounds very cruel to us, and certainly it was a very wicked thing to do, but imagine yourself in their situation. I don’t want to justify what they did. I want only to illustrate the injustice in our world that left them with so few options.
My wife and I were talking about what if we were living back in Oklahoma or California and had this baby how different his situation would be. He first of all would have been born in a warm and dry hospital where literally dozens of qualified doctors and nurses could have immediately diagnosed his situation and taken the necessary steps to repair his defect. We would have medical insurance that would cover his expensive bills, and we could probably count on the generous support of our church (whether it be FBC, CRBC, or SFMBC) to visit and encourage us in the hospital, pray for us, cook meals for us, and even help us with any other expenses incurred in the process.
Caleb by contrast was probably born in a freezing cold concrete or dirt floor bedroom with no medically trained personnel of any kind. His parents have no insurance, probably subsist on less than 300 USD a year, live hours away from any hospital (and it’s probably the kind of hospital most of us from the western world wouldn’t even want to think about going into even if we were very ill). The government here only allows them one child which means most crippled or deformed babies are abandoned in the hopes of having a healthy one next time. His parents have no Christian brothers and sisters to speak truth and hope into their lives. In short they were hopeless and desperate people, so they left their son outside to die.
As it sometimes happens in these awful situations, God intervened for Caleb, much in the same he did for the girl child (Israel) of Ezekiel 16. It so happened that an anonymous farmer was ambling by on his way to cut wood or tend livestock when he heard a baby crying. He found Caleb lying on the ground freezing and starving to death and for some reason his heart was moved with pity. So he gathered him up and brought him to our city to the orphanage hoping that at least Caleb could die with a roof over his head. The orphanage here is not a nice, bright, well-funded operation like we’re used to in the U.S. It’s a small grim place where only a few kindly women work. When they took a look at Caleb, they knew in their hearts that his case was hopeless. To feed and nurture him would only make the pain caused by the blockage of his bowels increase. They decided to put him in a small room in the back on a counter away from the other children and wait for him to die in few days.
As near as we can tell that’s the story of how Caleb’s life begun and was supposed to end. We don’t know who his parents are, where they live, or even who the nice farmer was who brought him to the orphanage. Much of what is in this story concerning his parents is guesswork based on the social circumstances and customs of this place. What we do know is that a farmer found this deformed baby abandoned in the field and brought him to the orphanage. The orphanage workers will tell you that most of the children who come to them, come to them via someone like the nice farmer finding them unwanted in the open country. From this point though his story becomes much more clear.
Again left for dead and written off as hopeless by the orphanage workers God rescued Caleb again. There are two European girls here who are also involved in the same kind of work we are but with a different organization. They’re both single in their late twenties, and were crazy enough to follow God to the other side of the world rather than lead a life of comfortable ease like most of their peers at home. Anyways, these girls are in the habit of visiting the orphanage and playing with the children there every Saturday. In fact my wife and I were over at their house this last Friday, the 13th, for dinner and briefly talked with them about their plans to go to the orphan house the next day.
When they got to the orphanage the next day, they were surprised to hear the sounds of a baby crying coming from the back since all the children at this orphanage are big kids, not babies. The ladies tried to keep our friends from finding the starving baby in the back, but they wouldn’t be denied and when they discovered him and began to feel the terrible hopelessness of his situation, they refused to believe it. Their reasoning was if God had sustained this child thus far when he’s been twice cast aside maybe He will work some more miracles for him. After much pleading and haranguing, the girls managed to convince the orphanage to sign the baby over into their foster care.
Once in charge of the babies the girls flew into action. They quickly named they boy Caleb and rushed him to the capital city in our province, bought airline tickets and were hoping to fly the baby to a bigger more modern city where the baby could receive better treatment than is available in our somewhat backwater province. However, as one of the girls was preparing to board the plane with Caleb, airline officials came and notified her that she would not be allowed to take the baby because: 1) they did not want the baby to die on their plane and 2) they were afraid despite the orphanage’s paperwork that perhaps Caleb was being kidnapped. This meant that Caleb would have to take his chances with the local hospital in our capitol city.
Yesterday, Caleb underwent an emergency surgery. The doctors told our exhausted friend, who had stayed up all night with Caleb, that his chances for survival were almost nil. For one thing, the operation is very invasive, and to complicate matters, Caleb’s blood pressure had already dropped dreadfully low. In fact, it was so low that the doctor said he would not even consider the operation if he didn’t know for sure that Caleb would die without it. In our local Sunday morning group we all spent considerable time in prayer, but one of the girls told me that there was not a lot of hope…we should have known better.
Guess what? Today we heard that Caleb had, despite the doctors predictions and our own fears, been brought through by God’s hand again. The doctor successfully created a colostomy for Caleb and another opening for him. He remains in very critical condition, and he certainly isn’t out of the woods yet, but every hour he survives is a victory and he is one step closer to making it.
Is our God amazing? Isn’t He a father to the fatherless? Is He not a God who defies our descriptions and expectations? Can anyone save like Him? Who brings hope to the hopeless if not He? Should God in his providence continue to uphold Caleb don’t you really believe that his life will be one miraculous praise song to God? I want to ask all of you to pray for Caleb right now and every day for the rest of his life. In his short life, he has walked closer to death than most of us ever have, and I am so curious to see what becomes of him. The best case scenario is that he pulls through this and his follow-up surgeries and, in a year or two, someone adopts him, maybe even somebody reading this e-mail.
I also should mention that my two friends who are taking care of him aren’t exactly swimming in cash and have undertaken this attempt to save his life with no idea how they are going to get the money to cover all his medical bills and other expenses. Please no pressure at all, and they would much rather have your prayers than your money, but if anyone does feel the Spirit’s leading to give, you can contact us and I’ll try to find how we can connect some of your generosity to the girls’ needs in looking after Caleb.
For information on how to help, email info@councilroad.org.
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