Kaleb

He was born in Goma on 16 March 2004. The town turned dangerous, and a few years ago the family left for Lubumbashi in the south-east, away from the only home they had known. Kaleb’s father was my brother. He died in March last year. Diabetes took him, the slow complications of it, the kind medicine can hold back when there is medicine to be had. There was none he could reach. I could not find the money or get to him in time. My brother died of a thing that did not have to kill him.

Barely a year later, his son fell into the same trap.

Kaleb lives now with his mother and his two brothers. He had finished at the technical school and taken work as a lorry driver, his first proper wage. Then the hernia. The family could not pay for treatment, and my mass stipends, stretched as they are, would not stretch to this. It would not kill him. It did something quieter. It took the work he had trained for, the wage, the use of his own body, until he could barely move for the pain. Look at the photograph. He is young, and he is flat on his back, worn down by a thing that surgery could put right.

His mother, my sister-in-law, had already gone to the White Fathers. They wanted to help and could not. The operation and the aftercare were beyond what they had.

Then your parish sent money.

I will be honest about what came next. When it arrived I froze. Kaleb is my own blood, my brother’s boy, and I did not feel I had the right to turn parish funds towards my own family. It was the White Fathers who steadied me. They had watched my brother die of a treatable thing only the year before. They would not stand and watch it twice over, the father in his grave and the son left idle and broken for the rest of his days. Two lives swallowed by the same poverty. They told me to use the money.

So I sent him to the hospital. The surgery went well. Operation and aftercare together came to £387.23. That is the price it took to give a man his life back. Five days on he walked out of the ward and went home on his own feet.

There was a sting waiting for him. He went back to the haulage company ready to work and found his old place already filled by another driver. He is looking elsewhere now.

The east of Congo is quiet again, and Goma is pulling him home. He wants to drive, or to open a small place to eat, because the man can cook. Two million people live in that city, and they are short of places to eat and places to stay.

Look at him now. On his feet, well again, and ready for the work he trained for. A few months back this was a man who could barely move for the pain.

He has made a promise. To honour his father, and to honour the people of Billingham who reached across the world for someone they will never meet, he wants to pass the same help on. Two children from the primary school, one from the secondary, all from families with almost nothing. He has little of his own to give. Whatever he can find, he means to turn towards lifting their lives. I will write again with word of how he keeps it.

Fr Damien

“who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction.”

2 Corinthians 1:4

Etienne

Etienne is thirty, and he came from Burundi. I first met him on my rounds of the schools as vocation director. A quiet young man, and the cleverest in any room he sat in. The ethnic troubles of that country had marked him out, and his life was in real danger. Both his sisters had already fled across the border. A priest friend of mine got him out and brought him to Goma, where I went to a university lecturer I knew and asked her to find him a place to carry on his studies.

The place was the easy part. Paying for it was not. I knocked on door after door for this boy, and as someone from outside the country he was turned away at every one. Then Billingham. Your parish found what nobody else would, and the studying could begin.

He holds his master’s now, in medical microbiology, taken with distinction at the Institut Supérieur des Techniques Médicales here in Goma. A doctorate comes next, and his record is strong enough that the scholarship for it should fall to him on merit. Thanks be to God for what he has made of himself.

Think for a moment what that degree means in a place like ours. The east of Congo has buried its dead in one outbreak after another. Cholera off the lake. Ebola that reached the edge of Goma itself and put a whole city on watch. The fevers that come and go and take children before anyone has put a name to them. A man trained at that institute to sit at a microscope and name the thing early, before it runs through a town, is worth more here than I can easily set down. That is the work Etienne is fit for now. The lab, the diagnosis, the health of whole communities resting on getting the answer right and getting it fast.

There is the other gift too, the one no certificate records. He knows exactly what it is to be the bright boy with no money and every door closed against him. He was that boy. A man lifted out of that tends to spend the rest of his life reaching back for the next one, and I would not be at all surprised to find Etienne, years from now, knocking on doors for some frightened student the way I once knocked for him.

Look at the photographs. There he stands on his graduation day, the young man on the right, the professor who saw him through it beside him in the robes and a fellow scholar at his shoulder. In the other he sits alone at the table, the papers of all those years in front of him, taking the weight of the moment in. The face of a young life that will go on to help so many.