didn't work that hard today, like dentistry-wise, but it was a big crying day.

r.e.e. was back after having a tooth extracted following a domestic abuse situation. he's in jail now. so the important thing is that she is in a safe place.

the dental team and i tend to talk about random things throughout the day, like, anything and everything. but i guess we should try to have a little more filter, maybe, or just be a little more sensitive to patients' listening ears. so, calvin was talking about how his mom is kinda clumsy and broke her wrist while they were on vacation. the whole family were riding bicycles. mom wanted to take a picture. and instead of stopping to get her camera out of her bag, she kept riding, ran into stacy and then fell down, breaking her wrist as she tried to break her fall.
then i responded with a story of my own mommy, who was daydreaming while backing the car out of the driveway, and ended up killing our tree. silly mommy!

i dunno if R was listening, but she started crying and said that her teeth wasn't her fault, that she was taking care of herself, but it was the man who did the damage. initially when i first met her, she didn't mention him. she talked about how she
very overwhelming. and i lift her up to you, Lord. but, anyway, i was a little discouraged as a new dentist that i took 90 minutes on one patient. i guess we do what we gotta do.

lastly, E came in at the end of the day. just making plain convo and asked if he had a lot of family in philly, since he's guatemalan. he responded with 'dos hijos'. so i followed-up with how old are they? he listed off a 6 year old and a 10-month year old. then mentioned he had one who passed away at 4 months. having all the candidness in the world with my dental mask on, ask, when did this happen? then i gotta take my mask off here. he explained that it happened in 2007. his son all of a sudden started crying. he wouldn't stop, so they took him to the er. they waited forever, and apparently were told they couldn't be seen until he brought a translator with him. finally the baby was admitted when he started convulsing. he ended up on life support for a month before dying. but E thinks that maybe he was already dead on the first day. lots of things were lost in translation. of course, he was devastated. finally he took off the patient sunglasses and we could see that he was crying. my spanish sucks. thankfully monin explained that there is comfort and hope in christ. then we prayed for him. a father never really gets over these things. but we had to listen and care even if it's after 5 p.m.

anyway, my parents friends were kinda saying how it was strange (but maybe they implied unfair) that i had to learn spanish to do my job. whereas everyone came from taiwan and learned english in order to make it in this country. yes, i feel the injustice towards them.
but i also feel the injustice towards an immigrant who has a baby who dies partly due to a language barrier.

a more atrocious injustice that's been on my mind since saturday is the sexual crimes against women going on in congo. so, after the genocide in rwanda a lot of people fled to the congo. subsequently many rebel groups and militias arose. so there's new ethnic tension going on. militias know that in order to destroy a people group, it is effective to destroy the women - since they are the backbone of communities, raising children and working in the fields. anyway, there is a crazy amount of rape and rape+torture. the torture part is when they introduce things like effing KNIVES and BAYONETS and STICKS into a woman's vagina after effing raping them. only God knows WHY. so, my new philly friends melanie and scott lived in the congo for a bit and made a documentary about it: www.womeninwarzones.org
i watched this on saturday at liberti. it was very moving, depressing and angering. yet, presented in a manner to inspire hope for change and hope for hope. sometimes we need hope for hope. it also made me miss french a lot. so, hopefully i can help out in some way, maybe writing some stuff in french or something.

speaking of philly connections, some other communities to pray for are the family of the young american man who was killed in uganda (in july) after terrorist bombings. he happens to be a childhood friend of a new philly friend from church.

also the medical team who was recently killed in afghanistan. one of the members is my coworker's cousin.

as i've moved to a bigger city, the world has become smaller, or more within reach. the only one who can bear this burden is Christ.