On our way home this afternoon, I asked what Ntombi’s name meant because I am intrigued by the meanings of so many words & names here in Swaziland. The answer was “a girl”. A simple name that just means “a girl” but Ntombi was more than a girl to me & she is precious in the eyes of God.
The first time I met Ntombi was two years ago, when I thought she was a young boy. She didn’t have great fine motor skills, she couldn’t talk very well, and she was very dirty. She had come to see a visiting doctor at the carepoint because of a wound on her foot. We invited her to eat with the kids at the carepoint, and she had trouble holding the spoon to eat. We took her home that day (she was ELATED to ride in a car) to see if there were ways we could help further. What we found out was that Ntombi wasn’t a young boy, but rather a 48 year old woman. She was healthy her whole life up until around 1996, when something happened to make her the way she is now (almost like she had a stroke, but it affects both sides of her body). The wound on her foot was from when she accidentally stepped in the fire, around 1996...and it still wasn’t healed in 2009.
For the past two years, God has kept Ntombi (and her hard working father, Joseph, and her two children) on my heart. He has given me dreams about her & revealed specific ways for me to be praying.
Today we had extra time at the carepoint by her house, so I asked if we could stop by to see her. I was preparing myself for anything - her to be in worse shape, her to have passed away, her to be totally healed...but what I hadn’t prepared myself for was that she would be about the same. When we walked up to the homestead, her daughter went inside to get Joseph. I was looking around the homestead when I heard her say “Yebo, sisi”. I hadn’t seen her sitting in the shade of one of the buildings, on a mat, and I hadn’t ever heard her speak so clearly. When I went to shake her hand, she didn’t let go of mine, and when I asked if she remembered me she said that my face was not new to her.
We sat and talked with she & her father for a while, but the thing that kept getting me was her foot. It still hadn’t healed from two years ago. Then it was about the size of a quarter, and fairly superficial, but today there were two wounds, about the size of a tennis ball, indenting so far into her swollen foot that her toes were now deformed. Flies were in and around the wounds and I couldn’t help but wonder how she hadn’t already died from infection.
We offered to bring her down to the clinic & her father said yes, but she needed to change first. She went and changed into one of the nicest dresses I’ve seen in Swaziland (something my mom would have worn for Easter about 1988) and then was ready to go. Her father had built her a crutch out of a branch, but she wouldn’t be able to walk to the car. I drove it up their “driveway” and then Celimphilo carried her to the car.
When we got to the clinic, the nurse was asking about the wound and when I told him it was more than 15 years old, he didn’t question it at all. He was able to clean her foot & bandage it up, as well as give us enough supplies for her to keep cleaning & bandaging it over the next several weeks.
I can’t help but wonder at the rest of the story - how she ended up this way, why she hasn’t been able to keep the wound clean, what she was like before, how this illness has affected her relationships with her children & her father. It’s one of those times when I look forward to heaven, where she and I can sit down over coffee and speak the same language, without mental disability and catch up on all the Lord has done in her life. But for now I will trust that God knows her heart & her every need & has kept her on my heart & in my prayers for a reason.
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