kids should not have worms in their head.

this seems like a simple fact of life, right? any child in the states that even came close to an issue such as this would be given immediate top notch medical attention and should there be a bite or cut or something that would warrant a worm or parasite concern, it would be taken care of.

but we are not in the states. and kids here have parasites and worms. and kids here don't get immediate medical care. the simple fact of life here is not that they shouldn't have worms and parasites, but that they do and they live with it. and just the other week we met a little girl in this very situation.

we were up at the clinic in las pitas having a normal day seeing patients. i noticed a litte girl sitting outside with her brother and went to say hello. immediately i noticed that there was somthing very abnormal about her. she had a huge bump on the top of her head. it was hard to see what it was because she was very dirty and her hair was matted with nits of lice and scabs from where she had scratched her head till it bled. she was three years old and badly malnourished. i asked her brother if she was waiting to be seen and he said no, that his father was on the list to be seen and they were simply waiting for him. i ran and told the doctor that there was one more patient he needed to look at when he was done with the appointed list. at the end of the day we brought her in and had a look.

the doctor was apalled. the poor little girl did in fact have a worm in her head, living in the space between her skin and her skull. the father of the girl was in his late sixties and the doctor explained that this might be part of the reason she was so poorly taken care of. the worm in actually due to a bite from a fly. the fly lands and lays larvae in the skin and then when the larvae hatches it is a worm. eventually the worm crawls out of the skin, but it is a very painful process and the incubation period while the worm is growing stretches out the skin in places that don't need to be stretched...such as the head! the poor little girl was so dirty that the doctor didn't want to cut the worm out that day because the incison would become easily infected. so he washed her off and cleaned the area best he could and made two small holes with a syringe in hopes that it was encourage the worm to crawl out on its own. he told the father to bring her back wednesday to the clinic.

that day while we drove down the mountain back to the offices i got really upset. tristan, another intern that was there with us kept asking me if i was alright. clearly i wasn't but i didnt want to talk about it. how do you make sense of that? kids shouldnt have worms in their head. it wasn't just this one little girl that bothered me. in fact, if it was just her, i would have been alright. we were going to help her and the doctor was going to make sure she was alright. it wasn't the one we saw, but the other kids suffering from the same thing that we didn't see, that we won't see, that will live, even just two or three weeks with something so disgusting in my mind. i just couldnt reconcile that.

finally on the way home, tristan cornered me and made me talk about how i was feeling. at the end of our discussion and a few tears later neither one of us really had an answer. why do some kids live lives with parasites and worms and hunger and others with video games and happy meals? we couldn't seem to come up with a reason that those lives coexist with the good and gracious God we serve. But one thing we did walk away with was more motivation and inspiration to heal those in pain around us. Especially little girls like this one. Days at the clinic are not always full of "clinical experience" to write on medical application and "observation hours" to note on transcripts. Days like these are ones that can not be accounted for in simple terms.

- rebekah