Malawi - Love That Costs A Life

Tam with Hands at Work member, Roy

I had been sitting outside their home, a hut in a rural Malawian community, for a few minutes, distracted by a boy opposite us playing with a toy of his own invention – a block of wood carved into a point at one end and a thin piece of rope tied to a stick, which he used to whip the block of wood and make it spin like a spinning top. That ingenious resourcefulness and creativity instilled in those born into poverty is never more perfectly put to use than by a child designing a toy to pass the hours. The toys these kids make out of milk cartons and maize husks never fail to captivate me.

There were a few of us sitting outside the home, watching the boy play with his spinning block; Hands at Work staff, a couple of international volunteers, some local ladies who care for the orphans and widows in the community, and them. Them: Layla, a 40-something woman sitting on the ground outside her house, and Tam, a silent and unsmiling boy huddled in her lap. Their hut was one amidst a thousand others, each seeming to tell as desperate a story as the next. But their story, and the hope of which it spoke, was not ordinary, and nor were this pair one amidst a thousand. They were extraordinary, uncommon, and precious – as precious as diamonds in the dust. Their story was about to bring me to silence.

I had arrived in Malawi a week before, my first step into the Warm Heart of Africa. It’s a far cry from the Congo, that place I’ve written so much about. There, poverty is born so much of humanity and of human greed. You see it in everything, from the government office to the grocery seller – a culture conceived in violence and corruption, “Africa’s broken heart.” But here, in her Warm Heart, what struck me as soon as I arrived was that the poverty feels of a different kind. A poverty almost born of the earth. The landscape isn’t marked by old and dilapidated buildings, the stripped skeletons of colonialism that overrun Congo’s cities. It is marked by beautiful mountains, by the shimmering great lake that gave Malawi her name, and everywhere by mud huts that seem more to rise out of the dirt than be built on top of it. A warm and a beautiful heart in every way, but so poor. People here have so little. I met children who sleep in the same windowless house as the family’s goats, suffocating in the unvented stench and huddled together by night under a roof with holes. I was brought so many times to silence.

And it was into that silence that Layla spoke her story. Better said – spoke their story, for you could no more tell the story of the boy in her lap without mentioning Layla than you could tell Layla’s without mentioning him. His name was Tam, and he was five years old. He had lost his mother shortly after he was born, and when his father abandoned the family, Tam’s older sisters were taken into the care of their aunt. When Layla met Tam for the first time, he was little more than a baby, stripped of his mother and therefore stripped of his world. Layla was a ‘care worker’ at the time – one of the local people visiting orphans and widows daily in their homes. Care workers are the foundation of all that we do in Hands at Work – serving and supporting them as best we can, creating relationship between them and people all across the world as they live to be mothers and fathers to those who have none, “beautiful feet bringing good news” to the poorest. But to become a mother, to become a father, most especially to children who have lost their own, is not an easy work. And never since being here and having the privilege of walking with such as these have I seen it so purely, so simply and sincerely, as in Layla. When Tam’s mother died and father left, Layla took him in as her own. In an instant, she went back 5, 10, 20 years to the time when she first became a mother. She had to work harder than ever to raise enough money to feed him whilst juggling the weight of caring for her own children, and all the while still continuing to visit other orphans and widows daily in their homes.

It would be so easy to miss the depth of pain and sacrifice it took for Layla to do what she did. Few of us will ever meet with a decision that demands so much of us. Few will ever know what it is to encounter such a crossroad; to see our plans, our aspirations, our dreams leading one way while someone else's desperate call for love lies the other. Layla changed everything in an instant, gave up her entire life, for Tam. I don’t know how that feels, but I imagine it is a crossroad reserved for everyone who truly understands, or is at least willing to discover, the depth of commitment that love demands of you. And that is just what Layla understood, or what she discovered. Call it what you will: the clutch of fate, the hidden hand of Providence, I only know that these things are not an accident. That in one instant the direction of your entire life will change when God invites you to discover the depth of what it truly means to love. As for me, I’m discovering more and more with every person I meet like Layla that love equals commitment, nothing more or less. Love is not charity, or sympathy, it is not pity or well-wishing. It isn’t throwing a coin to the beggar who asks you for one. Love is giving the very last coin you have to live on because you know that it belongs to them just as your entire life belongs to theirs. Love costs your life. Mother Teresa wrote of such a thing when she said “love is proved by deeds, the more they cost us the greater the proof of our love.” At the cost of her own life Layla paid for Tam’s. Her life is not her own. She doesn’t claim it for herself. At some point 5 years ago she gave it up, a gift to the silent and unsmiling boy in her lap who has since become in every way her son, she in every way his mother, the two of them the most extraordinary pair, and theirs a most impossible story of hope amidst a thousand unlike it. A precious and an extraordinary love. I hope I will meet such a crossroads and choose the road less traveled. It costs much, but Layla tells me that you have to walk the way of sacrifice to meet the joy at its end; joy akin to a mother gaining a son, and a son discovering his mother.