Kothara and a litle girl named Kima

Laurel, the other med student here with me in case you don't already know that, wrote a nice post on a God-moment we had last week in clinic. I can't describe it any better than she can so I highly suggest reading about the cool story about a Hindu pundit who recently found Jesus. I might've wrote this already but sharing about Jesus openly is strictly against the law so any evidence of our faith that patients see comes from our "Christ-like actions and attitude" (as the staff frequently pray for) or from tracts that may be lying around. But, God is alive and drawing people to himself all the time, even when we don't realize it.

In the past few weeks, we've heard pieces of different stories about Kothara staff and how they or their families have come to know Christ. The Kothara Leprosy Hospital has been around for over 100 yrs and initially begun as a home for leprosy patients on land given by the government to The Leprosy Mission. Families brought people affected by leprosy and left them because they could no longer care for them or did not want the stigma of leprosy in their families. The patients then provided nursing care for each other since there were few people not affected by leprosy who'd live and serve in such a stigmatized community. Thus a whole community linked by leprosy was birthed, and many in the community came to know Christ because of Christian missionaries who served there. By the time effective treatment for leprosy was found, patients no longer needed to live in Kothara. They were treated, found jobs in the community and had families. Well, many of the staff today are either past patients or are children or grandchildren of past patients. Many patients had life-changing encounters with the living God and their children and grandchildren have also followed in their footsteps. It's marvelous to hear about the legacy of Kothara over the years and how God used a horrible disease to bring about good not only in the patients but also the generations that followed them.

Christians are still very much a minority in this area and the vast majority of the patients we see are Muslim or Hindu. We can usually tell which religion they follow by their clothes, especially the women, since the Muslim women wear the black hijab and the Hindu women wear brightly colored saris. It's interesting to see how the hospital is respected in the community for the medical care it has provided over the years, free of cost to leprosy patients and low cost otherwise.

Just yesterday, a little girl was brought in by her grandmother and uncle with an extruded left eyeball. It was an opaque white globe that was just hanging out of the eye socket (sorry to be so graphic). From what we could understand, her mom had died early on and the father abandoned her several years ago because of the deformity. The maternal grandmother found her not too long ago and decided to bring her to the hospital despite lacking money. Laurel and I had no idea what had caused the deformity or what it was. Dr. Shyam examined the beautiful, frightened little girl (named Kima) and diagnosed it as a staphyloma. We'd never heard of it. In fact, she'd never seen a case in ten years. Just in case it turned out to be a tumor, like retinoblastoma, she decided to surgically remove it since she had no possibility of vision from that eye anyway. Turns out that a staphyloma is just a protrusion of the eye when a malformed eyeball gets too big for the socket, here usually due to vitamin A deficiency...sadly something preventable but thankfully not very common anymore. Her family is from a tribal area and they'd heard of Kothara because of the free medical camps often held in the tribal areas. Dr. Shyam said they'd provide free care for Kima since the family had done a lot just bringing the girl in to the hospital and they might never see the girl or family again if they mentioned anything about money considering their extreme poverty. This afternoon, Laurel and I watched the enucleation (or surgery to take out the eye) and then stayed with her until she woke up. There were no one at her side to watch her! (at Children's Hospital, there would definitely be a nurse with her monitoring her vitals, keeping a close watch on her!) The sedation took a while to wear off and we were worried about her so we tried to wake her up every few minutes...so frequently that the optho tech sitting with other eye patients in the room chuckled at us calling out her name and me adding in various Marathi words I'd picked up. "Soondal Kima! " (Pretty Kima) She is so precious, so in need of love. I wonder if she was teased because of the deformity. I wonder if she was ever held by her mama. Her grandma and uncle must love her since they came all this way to get her treatment. We hope she is taken care of and loved, and shown Christ's love for her.