I was afraid. Would we need to touch him? Was he decomposing already? Would I need to check his pulse?
“Cliff, there’s a naked man lying by the side of the road. Did you see that?”
“Really? You sure it’s not road-kill?”
I wish it was, for dead goats, dogs and other ferrets are common sights along the dirt roads of Africa.
“Are you sure you saw what you saw?” he asked again.
“Yes,” I said, wishing I had indeed seen a dead goat instead. But I was certain. An African curly-haired man was lying face-down, next to a pile of trash, with his buttocks exposed in the hot sun.
“What do we do?” Cliff asked aloud, echoing my uncertainties.
I hate to confess, that the answer seemed clearer back home. Back home in Singapore or Canada, we would have pulled over immediately, got out, and called the police immediately. Triple 9 or 911 was not a hard number to call.
Here, a thousand thoughts raced through each of our minds, filling the car with resounding, deafening silence between us. Why did a change in place or location matter? Why did that affect how readily we reacted?
“ I don’t know,” I confessed, “What if he’s dead? What do we do? Who do we call? I don’t even know the police number here. How come no one else stopped for him? If we spoke to him and he was alive, would he even understand English?”
I was getting worried. As the old, rickety car rumbled on ahead, I wished I hadn’t seen what I saw. We were already late. I was supposed to be preaching in the morning at the village church, and before that, we had to adjourn through a catacomb of dirt roads to look for a village house to pick up a Ugandan family to church with us.
Half a kilometer of silence lay between us, and the man we passed. Finally, Cliff said aloud, “If he’s dead, and we send him to the police, do you think they’d think we killed him?”
“Oh, I don’t know!” By this time, I was anxious. Back home, everything, including helping somebody seemed comparatively so straightforward. Over here in a foreign land, experience had taught us that situations which we presumed to be straightforward often turned out to be complicated, convoluted and messy. It was easier simply not to be implicated.
If they thought we killed him, what would happen to us? Would our visas be retracted? Would we get involved in a lawsuit? We had heard tragic, twisted stories from missionary friends who had been falsely accused before in various unexpected situations in other parts of the world, and I was afraid. Our thoughts spiralled out of control, in separate directions from one another.
The silence continued. Just a month ago, when we were at another village church, Cliff had preached, with great vigor, on the Parable of the Good Samaritan. The crowd was enraptured by his vivid storytelling, about a man who had been beaten by a mob, and while a priest and religious person had passed him by nonchalantly, it was a man of Samaritan origin (a despised race at the time) who stopped to care for him and put him up at an Inn, demonstrating true love for his neighbour.
I remember telling Cliff at the end of his sermon, that it was one of the best he had ever preached.
Now, faced with reality of uncanny likeness, we were stunned by our own selves.
“Oh, we’re hypocrites,” I burst out, alluding to the religious person in the bible story, who prided himself in his religious upbringing, but had failed to put his faith into action through love or compassion. “What if everyone ignored that dying man on a Sunday morning because they were all rushing to church like us. We’re not stopping because we’re afraid of being… implicated.”
Our hearts were in knots. Faced between a painfully pricked conscience, and an irrational defense of needing to fulfill our timely responsibilities that morning, my mind tried to go numb.
“We’re turning back,” said Cliff.
At once, I was relieved and afraid. Would I need to check his pulse? Was he decomposing already? The sight of the naked man’s exposed buttocks in the hot sun stuck in my mind.
“If he’s dead, we call the police right?” I asked.
It was a silly question.
As soon as we drove back to the spot, we both fixed our eyes on the man, lying face down on the ground filled with trash and empty bottles. Glued to our seats, we were stunned for a moment, not knowing what to do, as we watched the flies swarm over the corpse.
Suddenly, the corpse moved! I screamed. With a big, languid stretch exposing his testicles, a long, lazy yawn and an unglamorous scratch, the corpse came to life and heaved to one side, before falling back into his peaceful stupor.
My medical mind scanned his movement: no broken bones, no immobile joints, no broken wounds or spilled blood. Bottles of alcohol lay around him. What we had seen, was not a dead man, but a sight of utter intoxication after a Saturday night.
“We can at least give him some water,” Cliff said. And as he got out of the car to leave a bottle of water next to the man, I was filled with an immense sense of gratitude. I was grateful that the man was alive, grateful that we turned back, and grateful for a husband who, even under challenged circumstances, held on to his pillars of moral standing, love and compassion.
That morning, we got lost in the village trying to look for that special family and reached church a little late. But my preaching went on, and we ended on time.
That morning, I learnt how important the decisions that we make in our day-to-day circumstances are, and how frail our moral standards can become in the face of pressure and uncertainty.
Had we ignored the man, could we live up to what we believed in, or even face ourselves, each other and God? I learnt that day, that every decision counts- and it is not our own moral compass that will stand the test of circumstance, but a daily, consecrated walk with God, with full revelation of His sacrifice and love for us, that will stand the tests of life, including a drunk, naked man fallen by the wayside.
“Jesus told him,
‘Go and do likewise.'”