Last week I come out of my room a little after 2:00 pm and Doris (the one who helps us around the house) says, "Vincent just got a call that his daughter, Brittany has fallen in the toilet." The first thing I thought when I heard this is exactly the same thing that you just thought. After about 10 seconds though, I realized that a "toilet" in the village is far, far, far away from what you're thinking. I ran to get my car keys and asked Doris to get in the car with me to go and find Vincent who was searching the campus for another worker to take him back to his home so he could bring Brittany back to the ABC clinic.
Doris and I found Vincent and we flew over bumpy, crowded roads of the village down the road until we arrived at Vincent's house - a simple mud and brick home with a sheet metal roof. Well, it was mostly sheet metal since he was about a half dozen sheets shy of being able to finish which meant rectangular holes at various places in his roof. We arrived in the house and found that Brittany had gone off to play with friends. I was so relieved to hear that she was up and about. While we waited for her to arrive I asked Vincent to show me where she fell. We walked out the door and around a corner. The houses are built close together creating narrow passages for people (and tons of kids) to pass through. You can see in this first picture the hole in the distance right in the middle of the pathway. Whoever owned that parcel of land chose to dig his new outhouse right there in the pathway with no regard for the people that needed to walk through there every day.
This picture is the hole. If you click on it you can see it enlarged. I'm not exaggerating when I say that it was at least 12 feet deep by 2 feet wide and maybe 5 feet long. When I stood there above it I could not believe that Brittany was alive - much less gone off with her friends. Vincent brought me back to the house where Brittany had arrived. She looked fine but I wanted to take her to the clinic just in case. We sat her in Beth's car seat and left quickly for the clinic. She had abrasions across her rib cage but the x-ray showed no signs of any broken bones or anything. While she was being examined I drove home and gathered up some of Grace's clothes and toys for Bethany. As I was leaving Grace woke up from her nap so I put her in the car too and had her join me in taking Vincent and Brittany back to their village home.
When we arrived Grace was the center attraction for about 25 neighborhood kids and Vincent had tears in his eyes which, I'm sure were tears of relief. He and I quietly stacked a 3 foot pile of random bricks around the hole while Grace got to know Brittany and her friends. She had never seen a house with no electricity before much less a massive pit that would eventually become a toilet, but she was very polite the whole time.
Here's a shot of Grace standing next to Brittany as we were preparing to leave. I was so grateful to God that Brittany was okay. I was also grateful that Grace got one more experience to add to her ever-widening worldview. She didn't understand why she was such a center of attraction. She couldn't figure out why they didn't have lamps inside their house. She certainly didn't grasp the idea of an outhouse. But she saw and understood the love of Vincent for his little girl and she knew that angels were at work on Brittany's behalf that day.
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