Buen Samaritano

Whoa! What a night....

Mark and I were innocently walking our 4-block route to church this evening around 6pm when we bumped into a teenage kid sobbing on the sidewalk where we usually walk. He was really crying hard and grabbing onto his leg like something was wrong.

Asking what had happened and if we could do anything, the kid replied that he had been riding his bike and was hit by a public bus in the middle of the street. Taking a closer look, the kid had blood coming out of his ear and his left knee was already very puffy. His cousin seconded what had happened with the "guagua" (bus) and let us know the hurt kid's name was Ariel. It was pretty clear these kids were lower-income and both of them were scared.

Sprinting to the church to try to find help, I kept on asking Mark two things: 1) How could the public bus just drive away after hitting this 14-year-old kid? 2) Why were there about seven people across the street watching us, who had done nothing and were doing nothing?

When we arrived at our church, we immediately ran into our two friends from soccer Charlene and Frank. The four of us hopped into Charlene's car to pick Ariel up and bring him to a free public hospital a few blocks away, and then carried him into the emergency room where there were people dealing with open headwounds and other yucky stuff. It was wild. The room was small, light blue, chaotic and old. I give the doctors and nurses in that public hospital a huge "gracias" for their commitment to serving the poor.

(You may be asking yourself where Ariel's mother was... why was she not informed and there with Ariel in the emergency room? Well, Ariel's family doesn't own a phone and his mother lived an hour away... he was visiting his cousin for the weekend... who also didn't have a phone.)

We quickly found out that all vehicle-related accidents were treated at a different hospital about twenty minutes away, which caused us to then rush to another hospital on the other side of the river. Ariel was still in writhing (sp?) pain and not saying much, but I guess he was okay with the fact he was in the back of a stranger's car, as long as he was getting help.

On the way, Frank kept telling Ariel what a miracle it was that he was not hurt even worse by the bus and how God had provided for him when Mark/I bumped into him. Ariel nodded.

Long story short, Ariel had deep internal bruising and a dislocated knee, and had to have blood ejected to take care of his internal bleeding. There was a metal gate between the patients inside and the family/friends outside, so we heard every scream from Ariel and saw every other emergency situation pull up in front of the metal gate. These were not folks in Honda SUVs... they rolled up three people on the back of a motorbike and in the back of beaten-up public cars. Once again, hats off to doctors and nurses (Jennifer Hay, you better be reading this... :). It was a unique opportunity to pray silently for those who were really hurting.

Three hours later when we dropped Ariel off (cast and all) at his cousin's house, we noticed that a kid from the soccer team was there waiting for him to return. We didn't know, but Ariel lived in a neighborhood with lots of kids from our team... so now he and his cousin were going to be connected to our soccer team and church. His cousin even said he's be at next week's practice. We traded phone numbers with Ariel and his aunt and let him know the church was here to serve them however we could.

Some people would say we were in the "right time at the right place" but the four of us believed it was a diving appointment from God for us to serve this kid! I told Mark on the way home that although we missed church, we were "doing" church together... it was so cool to see God work and use us all in this way.