Spared for the good news

I sat on the metal bench in the wide, open air waiting room and prayed. I didn’t know how far into surgery they were, or how long I would be sitting there. There was no one else around except the occasional uniformed nurse passing by, her heels clicking on the tile floor. The only information I had received was a curt text message saying “dia sudah masuk ruang operasi”. She has gone into the operating room. I had jumped on my motorbike and zipped to the other end of town and now here I was, sitting in the waiting area of the operating room. 

​I didn’t know what I was supposed to do here exactly. The medical world in Indonesia is a confusing and sometimes infuriating place.  Just the process of getting her in and scheduled for surgery had taken three days since she had given birth. The fact that Tarisi was still alive was a miracle in itself. I remembered back to just two days prior as she drifted in and out of consciousness in the “emergency room” while the attendants slowly typed up her paperwork and asked what seemed like a million questions. Can’t they see she is dying here?! What is the hold up? The careful dance of being respectful but also persistent so that your patient doesn’t slip to the background in the chaos of the hospital. Be too demanding or pushy and you could end up stonewalling progress. Shaming someone (intentionally or not) who isn’t doing their job fast enough will get you avoidance and no eye contact. 


The operating doors suddenly swung open and Tarisi’s bed was wheeled out by a nurse who nodded at me and unhooked a heavy looking black plastic bag off a rung of the bed and handed it to me. Then off we went down the hall, turning down open air tile walkways, passing heaps of garbage where cats rummaged until we reached the recovery room. 


​Tarisi was still unconscious, hooked up to an IV and a bag of blood. I knew exactly whose blood it was too. In Indonesia there are generally no blood banks stocked for emergencies. When you need blood, it is your responsibility to rally your troops to come and donate blood on the spot. Tarisi had lost so much blood after her delivery that she needed at least three bags of blood donated. Amazingly we had three fellow missionaries in town who had her same blood type and were able to come and donate right away. That in itself is miraculous considering out of the five adult missionaries in our town at the time, three of them had her blood type!

The recovery room was a cement walled room with 8 beds, about 4 of them occupied by other recovering patients. A plastic fan bolted to the wall buzzed tiredly back and forth. The others in the room looked like they had been there at least a little while since they had their “tikar” or plastic mats unrolled on the floor around their loved one’s bed and seemed to be quite settled. I was thankful for an empty bed next to Tarisi and sat down. I set the plastic bag on the ground under the edge of her bed. I didn’t have to open it. I already knew what was inside. I thought back to a story I had heard from an Indonesian friend a year or so earlier. Her husband had been in a horrible accident and was in the operating room while his wife waited and prayed for good news. At last the nurse came out and handed the wife a black plastic bag. She opened the bag to see her husband’s foot. It had been amputated and this was the way she found out. 

I knew that inside Tarisi’s bag was her retained placenta. The very reason she had been flown out to our small town to get medical treatment. She had given birth to twins and retained the placenta. Now the bag was mine, to do with as I pleased. No professional disposal service here! Most would probably bury it, or throw it into the river.

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I sat there for a few hours, wondering where Aulina was. Aulina had come out of the village to accompany Tarisi and be her translator since she only spoke her Dem tribal language. Aulina was a Moni tradeswoman who knew both Indonesian and Dem. Tarisi moaned and rolled to her side. There was dried blood on her vinyl mattress. A kind man also waiting in the room with us told me to call the nurse to change her IV bag - it was almost empty. I thanked him and went to get a nurse. After making sure Tarisi wouldn’t be moved in the near future I ventured across the hospital to the NICU to check on the babies. 

​Little plastic incubators lined the NICU, most holding alarmingly small bundles, wrapped tight in swaddling cloths. Their round little faces poked out the top, fluffy jet black hair crowning their sweet little heads. Five pounds is a good sized Indonesian baby, and many are born smaller than that. To an American they seem even smaller. 

A nurse who looked about 15 brought the twins out to me. They were wrapped like little burritos, snug side by side in their little nest. They looked so different from each other, two boys. One small and one larger. One with tiny features and one with a large nose. They were doing well, although the nurse told me that the one had been started on antibiotics. Why? I asked. “Darahnya jelek” - his blood was ugly. I tried to clarify what exactly they had seen in his blood work but they just said it was some kind of infection. They were being fed with formula for now, but my goal was to bring a pump and teach Tarisi how to pump her own milk as soon as possible. Those babies needed every drop! 

The nurse handed me a plastic bag, this time it was full of laundry… and used diapers. I needed to wash the laundry and replenish the stack of baby clothes and diapers for the twins. I had already gone shopping for some of those things, but the clothes were running low since they normally bathe the babies twice a day. At least I had a washing machine at home to do most of the work for me. Many of the residents at the hospital were washing their clothes in buckets and hanging them on the railings along the walkways to dry in the sun. 

When I went home that night I had several bags in tow. The black plastic bag with “you know what” inside, the babies' laundry and diapers to sort through, and Tarisi’s bag of laundry. Aulina had eventually shown up and handed off the blankets and clothing that Tarisi had been sent out in. They were encrusted in damp blood and smelled of the same. Later as I dumped them into a large tub of water and watched it turn red as I plunged them up and down, I was amazed again at the amount of blood she had lost. Praise God she was still alive! Praise God her babies were alive!

The next week I went back and forth to the hospital each day, bringing clean laundry, food, diapers, checking on the babies and sitting with Aulina and Tarisi. She was now in a larger recovery room with better air flow. She wasn’t allowed to see the babies yet, so I would show her pictures of them on my phone and she would coo and murmer proudly in her own language. I had hung onto my old hand milk pump thinking “someday I’m sure I will need this” and sure enough it came in handy! I was concerned that the NICU staff would not allow me to bring Tarisi’s milk to the babies. Sometimes doing things “out of the box” is just not accepted here. Indonesians love baby formula, and sadly do not always have a good understanding of the value of breast milk. I prayed that they would understand and allow me to try it. I was so pleased when the nurses agreed with me that the babies would do much better on their mother’s milk! Thank you Lord!

Through sign language, explaining in Indonesian and with Aulina’s help translating Tarisi understood that her babies needed her milk to grow strong and caught on quickly to using the pump several times a day, filling bottle after bottle with precious golden milk. The nurses were so pleased to accept the milk and encouraged her to keep pumping! 

As she regained strength, eventually the babies were able to be brought to her one by one for nursing, and praise the Lord they both took to it like champs. Once Tarisi was released from the hospital there were still several months of providing care for Aulina, Tarisi and the babies since their airstrip back to the village was closed due to covid. 

When I think about this story I am reminded of God’s help and direction in all the details. It felt overwhelming and stressful, but He answered my prayers (and many other’s) and spared her life. Tarisi is from the Dem tribe, which at the time was only months away from hearing the gospel presented by our coworkers in her own heart language. Because of God sparing her life, she got to be there when the message of the gospel was shared! She is in God’s family now. Her babies (she has several more too!) get to grow up with access to the good news. 

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