Anyone Can Do This, Part 1

Building Bridges

Photo by Womanizer Toys on Unsplash

Let me tell you a story. There once was an old woman named Sarah Foster. She loved the Lord and tried to do what he wanted. She attended Church every week. She worked at a job where she tried to reveal God’s glory to others. But mostly she lived an ordinary life.

She and her husband Ben Foster had a house with a big room downstairs. They decided to build a guest bedroom. But when it was finished, one day she looked at that room and said, "I wonder who it's for?" She asked the deacon at church if there was anyone who needed a place to stay. He said not to worry, someone would come.

Within a week or so, she heard from a friend that there was a homeless woman about to give birth who needed a place to stay. She and her husband went to meet her.

Liya was an Ethiopian immigrant, with no family, who had been working in adult home care. One night she was raped. When she got pregnant, abortion was not an option as far as she was concerned, despite the stigma of her single state. This came at some cost to her, even among members of her church. Yet there was no question of her giving up the baby—it was a gift from God, for she had been told she would never be able to have children.

When her pregnancy was far advanced, she could no longer do the work. That left her homeless, living in shelters with the smoke of marijuana everywhere, and worse. She could not bring her soon-to-be newborn into such a place. She cried out to God. And the answer was Sarah and Ben, and their spare bedroom.

They all agreed that she should move in. It was an act of trust for both parties. To share a home is an act of intimacy and of vulnerability. Liya came cautiously, bringing a friend along to evaluate the situation. The friend said, “Only God could do this!” No one in her community could believe that anything like this could happen. White people don’t open their homes to poor black people with no status, they all thought, and perhaps some said.

But move in she did. There was soon a parade of Ethiopian visitors. They would stare as they walked by the Fosters and say, “Only God can do this” in their native language on their way downstairs to the spare bedroom. They did not approach that “strange” white couple, perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of awkwardness. And it was true, only God could do this.

Over time Sarah learned about all the ways of government subsidy--food stamps, WIC, subsidized housing, DSHS, and Medicaid. She was both impressed and horrified by what she saw. On the one hand, the government gave food, medical care, childcare, cash, and even housing to the lucky indigent. But they gave barely enough to live on and reduced the benefits given according to the amount earned. It was an incentive to earn just enough, but not enough to remove you from the welfare roles. And humiliations abounded. Everything needed documented proof, and petitioners were made to paddle the chartless bureaucratic ocean by themselves, drifting from window to window, that is unless they had a good social worker to help them navigate the waters.

As time passed, Sarah and Liya became like mother and daughter. The little baby girl, Kia, became like a granddaughter. They shared faith together, finding commonality in their love for Jesus. They learned from one another-- Liya learned to eat bread and they learned to eat injera, Liya learned about knives and forks, and they about using injera as a delicate means to pick up a morsel of food and eat it.

But it was mostly Sarah learning from her guest: what it was to grow up poor in Ethiopia—indeed, what it was to be poor in a way most Americans have never experienced. Liya told of sleeping four or more to a bed in one small bedroom, cooking over a fire outside, having no indoor plumbing, walking everywhere, and leaving school to care for the family in grade eight when her mother grew sick and died. No bureaucracy, but no safety net either.

Eventually, the social interventionist government persuaded Liya to take a section 8 apartment with her daughter. Perhaps they had as much understanding as the Ethiopians did of the arrangement between the Fosters and Liya. It seemed something that must be disrupted somehow. Perhaps they were afraid the Fosters would grow tired of the experiment and deposit mother and child back on the street. So, the young mother moved out. Still, she would return for holidays and the couple would go to her daughter’s birthday parties.

Then one day Liya became sick. It got worse and worse. She was in and out of the hospital for 7 months—she could not keep down food. The doctors thought it was first one thing, then another. Liya was afraid it might be cancer. She had no one to take care of her, she thought. And in her culture, people with cancer just went back to Ethiopia to die. But when Sarah found out what she was afraid of, she said, “We will take care of you no matter what.”

From that time, Sarah stayed by her side in the hospital. Liya found she was treated better when Sarah was there. The staff, many Ethiopian themselves, would say, "Why is she doing this?" The nurses and doctors would ask, "How are you related?" And Sarah would say, "What, don't we look alike?"

Finally, the doctors determined that Liya did have cancer, stage 4 cancer.  It was spread throughout her body. Sarah said she should move in with them again. Sarah couldn't do otherwise, she couldn’t let her go through this alone.

This time Liya moved in with a four-year-old daughter, full of energy and life. The Fosters, whose children had recently all moved out, were glad to have them. With the support of the local church, they were able to enroll the little one in pre-K. A local oncologist with an excellent reputation agreed to take Liya’s case. And most stores and doctor’s offices took the government food stamps and Medicaid.

There still were barriers, though. People in the mainly white suburban town couldn’t figure out why they were together. So, they sometimes got strange looks. One time at the surgery suite the whole staff came to see the young Ethiopian woman, so sick and yet so beautiful and exotic to them. This kind of treatment was revelatory for Sarah, who was used to being invisible.

As they settled in, this time it was different. There was a sense they really were family, truly committed to one another. Sarah and Liya would talk and talk and talk, and they would pray and read the Bible, exchanging verses. They would sing and laugh. Sarah found a peaceful spirit, one full of trust in God, in Liya. Her whole life Liya had had practice saying, “I am in your hands,” so saying it now wasn’t hard. They recognized a kindred spirit in each other, though their lives had taken different paths. At least Sarah thought so.

It was different with the Ethiopian people who came to visit also. Sarah made a point to sit and talk to these visitors, and pray with them because she considered them her friends too. She wanted to show them they were welcome, and that her intentions were good. And she wanted to show them that she could pray too!

However, many people in Liya’s Ethiopian community tried to discourage Liya from receiving chemotherapy—they said to trust in God for healing and go home (not in front of Sarah though!). Sarah, when she heard this anyway, knowing how very sick Liya was, pushed her to start treatment right away. Deciding to go ahead with treatment was very scary for Liya. Not only did she have these voices discouraging her, but she also had her own fears of the unknown. The thing that helped was the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, young men who went through the furnace and were not burned by it—the Lord was with them in the fire. And so, she said, “I will go through this fire.”

A week before she was to start treatment, they asked for anointing from the parish priest.

They all gathered around her, hands on her shoulders, praying, as the priest anointed her hands and her head, and prayed for her healing. Liya felt a sense of warmth and power as they prayed.

To be continued…