O-bla-dee, O-bla-dah, Life Goes On...

As with most any day here in Swaziland, the skies are blue and the breeze is steady.  I gaze out the doorway of the hut, looking past our sandals to the tall trees at the edge of the yard.  The "Africa Tree" is what everyone calls these tall, skinny trees sticking up out of what looks like the Agave plant.  Goats meander by the door, stopping to look in & sniff, but then chase after each other on their way.  I can hear the kids talking as they walk home from school & the cars going by.  Life goes on in Nsoko. 
Yet as I sit inside this hut on an unfamiliar homestead, life is all but going on.  I am sitting with a young single mother who has hardly any family left, who is HIV+, who has never been to school, who lives in a mud & stick house that she built herself.  She is wearing the outfit she wears most days - a blue t-shirt, black skirt & striped soccer socks.  Yet she has an accessory on today that reminds me that while life goes on outside the hut, today is different.  She is wearing a piece of black fabric around her neck & around her waist because she is in mourning.  Life for her (and for all who know her) is different today because her 10 month old baby has passed away all too soon. 
His short & sweet life brought us together as she almost gave birth in my car last September.  The next week, as I picked her up while she was walking home from the clinic in a lightning storm, she asked me to give her son, Lindane, an English name.  I had just been reading in Genesis 35 about Rachel & Jacob - how she called their son Ben-oni (meaning "son of my sorrow") and he called him Benjamin (meaning "son of my right hand").  I have always loved the name Benjamin, and thought it was fitting that this woman whose life had been full of sorrow so far have a son named as a helper in her life. 
Yet here we are a short 10 months later, and her baby boy is already buried in the ground.  As we sit in the hut, talking, crying, praying, laughing & just sitting, I am frustrated that life went on as normal outside.  That she had been sitting alone in mourning all day until we came to see her.  But I remember that in this culture, death happens more often than new life & birth. And as we talk about what gives us hope in these hard circumstances, I began to remind her of a hymn that we sang as I was growing up.  As soon as I said the first line, my bilingual friend with me smiled & said "we have that song in Siswati too."  So as life for her changed, and as life for Benjamin ended on this earth, we reminded ourselves of the truth that "Because He lives, I can face tomorrow.  Because He lives, all fear is gone.  Because I know He holds the future.  And life is worth the living just because He lives."  And while life goes on...in Swaziland and around the world...my life is forever changed because of the 10 months that I knew Benjamin.