Hording supplies

One of my most painful memories of those first few days was when I caught myself losing a bit of my humanity. You see, some supplies we had in abundance, some we were short on, and some we just didn't know if we had much of or not.

The doctors were giving out the meds, but I was able to hand out diapers and such directly. My life was a whirlwind of grabbing supplies for each doctor that came in to the pharmacy and mixing the meds that they asked for and also trying to attend to the patients and their needs as well. I was running around in circles. All of a sudden I realized that to the parents who came to me asking for diapers for their babies, I was giving out a single diaper.

How ridiculous was that? I know that babies poop and pee pretty darn regularly and the last thing that their parents needed at that incredibly difficult time in their lives was to have to walk over the the pharmacy every couple of hours to ask the silly American who doesn't speak their language for another diaper. I didn't realize who I was becoming until I turned to one parent who spoke English and said, "but I just gave you a diaper". And he responded, "yes, but the baby pooped again".

Imagine that!

It was at that moment that I took a step back and looked at the person I was already becoming. Stress does crazy things to people. I don't want to believe that I am normally the type of person who could behave so harshly and in a weird sense selfishly to other people especially as I am witnessing so much pain, but in that moment I saw that I was something far less than the person God created me to be. It still brings tears to my eyes to think about what kind of a witness I was in that moment. May God and my brothers and sisters forgive me.