Where does the soul go after death?
Every religion tries to answer this question, but, of course, no one really knows.
But if today, Judah White sits “at the right hand of God,” as his Jewish tradition teaches, surely his soul stopped in Tanzania first.
The reason for the detour?
For the beginning of the story, don’t miss Grateful Traveler: The Blessing, Part One.
There was another young man, younger than Judah, but possessed of the same gift for healing, the same quick mind, and the same desire to help people that had always made Judah stand out.
His name was Ezekiel and he worked in the AIDS clinic Dr. Kimberly Shriner worked out of, close to his Masai village in Tanzania. He had a talent for medicine, but as one of nine children being raised by a single mother, there was no money for medical school. Now Dr. Shriner asked Judah’s mother Martha if she would pay to put Ezekiel through school.
The wife of one doctor, the mother of another, Martha immediately said yes.
And so off Ezekiel went to medical school in the Tanzanian capital of Dar-es-Salaam. Armed with a computer bought for him by Applied Biosystems (one of Dr. Shriner’s volunteers works there), Ezekiel began to send emails to Martha in his halting English. He called her his spiritual mother— which surely she was— for she gave wings to his dreams. But Martha had no plans to visit.
Then one day Martha received a call. Her cousin, who runs an eco-tourism business, was on her way to Arusha (the main jumping off point for safaris in Tanzania). Would Martha, her son Benjamin and daughter Alyssa like to come along?
Since the death of her husband and son, Martha hadn’t felt like going anywhere. But a chance to meet Ezekiel? This could not be passed up.
Martha contacted Ezekiel and asked him if he could meet them in Arusha, which is spitting distance from his mother’s home. “What I hadn’t realized was that, while Arusha was near Ezekiel’s village, his medical school was an 11-hour bus ride away.” But without a word of complaint, Ezekiel came, anxious to introduce Judah’s family to his own.
Before she’d left America, Martha had wrestled with what kind of gift to bring Ezekiel. Dr. Shriner had advised her to keep it simple so she bought Ezekiel a shirt and tie he could wear at medical school. Then, at the last moment, Martha thought about Judah’s habit of taking a picture of each of his patients and attaching it to their chart. “Judah worried about the impersonal nature of hospitals. This way he was able to, literally, put a face on each case.”
At the last moment, Martha ran out and got Ezekiel a camera like Judah’s. “I wanted to share the spirit of my husband and my son—their caring and compassion—with Ezekiel,” says Martha, “to let him know he was walking in their footsteps.”
Ezekiel came to meet Martha and her family at their hotel. “Then he led us through the town, past the Masai marketplace, up a dirt track and across a stream to his home. When I met his mother, I started to get these almost spiritual vibes,” recalls Martha.
One by one, Ezekiel’s family came into the room. They spoke little English, but enough to tell Martha their names. There was a Benjamin, like her middle son. An Ester. Her mother-in-law’s name. A Gideon—Benjamin’s middle name.
And then there was his mother. While Ezekiel’s home was a mud house with only one light bulb and two twig chairs, there was one pride of place. Ezekiel’s mother’s chair. “It was a maple rocker with green fabric cushions. My grandmother had the exact same furniture right down to the doily,” says Martha.
And just like Ezekiel’s mother, she had raised nine children on her own. “When I looked at his mother in that rocker, I felt like I was looking at my own grandmother. Except for the skin color, they looked just alike. The resemblance gave me chills.”
Some, perhaps those who do not believe in Eskimos, might chalk this up to mere coincidence. But not if one is like Martha White, who took heartbreak of almost unimaginable proportion and turned it, and her son’s life, into a never-ending blessing. In two years time, Martha will be returning to Africa—this time for Ezekiel’s medical school graduation.
To find out more about becoming a stem cell donor contact Martha White at CCJSLA@aol.com.
By Jamie Simons for PeterGreenberg.com.
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