Dwi

Dwi was a 4 year old girl who had malaria. When we first met her, she had already been really sick for about 4 days. The family didn’t have any money to take her to hospital, so she had been running a fever for that time with no medicine. She was wrapped up in blankets, just lying still and gazing off into space, not responsive at all. Pretty much the only thing that showed she was still with us was her awful teeth grinding!! I seriously thought she was going to die right in front of us…

We took her to hospital and organised a prayer vigil through that night with the young people from the church. It was a pretty confusing time for all of us on a personal level, wrestling with a God of compassion and mercy with a healing nature yet seeing this sick little girl not getting any better. Once she was in hospital and they diagnosed malaria and put her on meds, and then she did start getting better – but this meant that her mum took her home and interrupted the course of medication, so she quickly went downhill again. We visited her again in hospital and it was harder because we knew that mum had taken her to see a witchdoctor that afternoon. Apparently according to this guy there was a demon on Dwi’s back that had made her worse, so her mum was in a right state by now! It was so frustrating. I can’t really explain it. Jade and I both felt God asking us to stay the night in the hospital, so we set up camp bedside and prayed through the night. It was still pretty confusing, extremely heart wrenching and completely exhausting but God taught us a lot about not having the answers and still believing in his promises.

It wasn’t resolved while we were on Nias. The next morning the mum still wanted to take her home and even though we paid for a few more nights in hospital, it really didn’t look like she was going to get any better, but all we could do in that situation was pray.