The Hospital.

Directly after wrapping up camp, we visited a local hospital.  I'm searching for a way to tell you about this place, and I still come up short.

This is the place my heart was cut, and I was undone.

This was hell on earth.  Evidence of the thief was everywhere- stealing, killing, and destroying life.

Everything you've read about AIDS, Malaria, and starving people is true.  And it is everywhere here.

Everything in me wanted to run from the building, to run out to the road and weep and wail.  But God gave me the grace to stay, to hold their hands, to photograph them and bring them back to you. 

My camera was a door in Africa.  And in this place, it lit up faces, and gave them a gift.

I told every woman I spoke to that she was beautiful.  I saw men, weak and deteriorating, sit up tall with great dignity for me.  I made mothers proud as they held up their frail children for a photograph.

As I sat this afternoon with this set of photographs, they still make my heart beat quick, and take my breath away.  And they don't begin to do this place justice. 

I still smell the smells, I still feel the small hands in mine, I still hear the moaning woman, I still feel a broken mother's heart for the baby with the rotting flesh.  

We came here on December 31.  And with the end of the year, came the end of my ability to separate facts and statistics about disease and suffering from the raw humanity of it.

Even here in the pit of tragedy, God drew us up to incredible hope. 

This man is living a life of the truest religion I've ever encountered, holding dying people up every day in this place.  Shepherding them home.

I can't wait to tell you about Pastor Eddie- but that is for another day. 

Always, always, always there is bright hope.