One night on my very first trip to Swaziland, several years before I even became a doctor, I had a dream.
I was walking along a red, dusty road and there was a man sitting on the corner.
Naked and shivering in the cold, his ribs pushed through his skin almost wanting to escape his starved, broken body.
I knew that he had untreated AIDS, like so many countless men, women and children I have known since.
He looked at me with hazy brown eyes and reached a tired, dirty hand towards me.
In my dream, I took off my shirt and wrapped him in it. I gave him the water that was in my hand and tried to comfort him.
As i began to leave.... He stood up and embraced me.
It was an embrace unlike any I have known. It wrapped around me and filled my heart to overflowing. My soul, the interiority of my being suddenly became permeable to him.
When he let go, I had the strangest feeling, that his disease was now in me.
I have thought of that dream many times over the years that followed. We all know that HIV is NEVER passed on by a simple embrace, or close proximity with another. And yet the feeling in that dream that I too, carried his disease, was unmistakeable.
Last year I went out into one of the loneliest communities in rural Swaziland and met a young man who was 29. My age. He was lying on a mat outside his hut.
His head was covered in profuse fungal infection, his skin in scabies. He had tuberculosis and Kaposi Sarcoma all over his body (skin cancers associated with HIV). All of this because his immune system had essentially shut down secondary to the HIV virus.
I remember carefully peeling him an orange and praying with his family as their son lay dying.
And I began to remember the feeling I had in that dream.
In an instant his disease, his pain, his woundedness was mine.
We were one.
To truly allow the immediacy of human need to enter the bounds of your awareness can be a frightening thing.
It is much easier to live a bordered life. To keep the distinctions clear between those who 'help', and those who are 'helped'.
This is what allows us to give, and then forget...... Because 'their' problem, remains theirs....Their possession, their own.
Yet if we can dare to blur the boundaries between people. To allow the hurting and the discarded to pitch their tent in the private places of our hearts. Then suddenly it becomes increasingly and painfully difficult to turn our backs. To walk away.
We are embraced by the woundedness of our world. And its echo runs deep into the soft places of our own wounds.
It lights a fire within us that kindles our days and ignites our minds into torches of compassion which say always "How can I help?" "What more can I give?"
We are one.
And when we allow the veracity and urgency of this realisation to dwell within us,
Nothing can ever be the same.
Love the world into change,
Maithri
www.possibledreamsinternational.org
When Dreams Come True
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