Free Angel of Mercy by Lurlene McDaniel

outside and took a stroll around the grounds, stopping at the perimeter wall to gaze down at the city below. She remembered Dr. Henry saying that once, Kampala had been pristine and beautiful— “the pearl of Africa.” But after decades of military rule, it looked dingy and ruined. Heather heard a whooshing sound and turned to see two men cutting hedges and grass with long, thick-bladed machetes. Their swinging, singing blades glinted in the sunlight, mowing and pruning as machetes had done since ancient times.
    “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Ian asked, coming up beside her.
    “Yes, it is. And it sure beats being blasted awake on a Saturday morning by a lawn mower.” She closed her eyes and inhaled. The air smelled of freshly mown grass, tinged with lemon and charcoal.
    “You smell lemon grass,” Ian said. “It mingles with the scent of the charcoal cooking fires. It’s a perfume that belongs only to the air of Africa.”
    She saw that his eyes wore a distant, longing look. “Do you like it as much as the smell of Scottish lavender?”
    “A hard question, lass. Both are beautiful. Scotland is my home, but Africa has slipped inside my head and heart, and I have come to love it.”
    And she realized then that despite all that had happened to her in Kenya, she loved Africa too. “I’m glad I came,” she said.
    “Are you all right?”
    Both of them knew what he was asking her about. “I still feel terrible about the baby,” she said. “But I make myself think of something else whenever the bad thoughts come. I think about the look on the children’s faces when I gave them candy after their shots. I think about how their smiles break out. I think about trying to make a difference in their lives.”
    She turned toward Ian. His red hair ruffled in the slight breeze. “On the road from the airport, I saw women walking with huge bundles on their heads,” she said. “Some had babies strapped around their waists and little children following behind them. And I saw the cows walking around with only ropes around their necks to keep them from wandering off. And I wondered why the cows weren’t carrying the bundles instead of the women. Why is that, Ian?”
    A brightly colored bird landed on a tree branch and sent a shrill whistle into the sky.
    “Perhaps you know the answer to that already, lass.”
    She nodded slowly. “It’s because the animals have more value than the women, isn’t it?”
    “Maybe not more. But a different value, surely. Do not judge them for this difference, Heather. The animals are their livelihood, and a family without a cow has no milk to feed its children. Yet they want for their children what every parent wants—an easier life, a gentler way to take a living from the land.”
    Remembering what Patrick had told her on the ship, she said, “I guess a man can get another wife, but another cow . . .” She let the sentence trail off.
    “You can’t measure their world by our standards. These people have lived for centuries with war, famine, pestilence, and death—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Revelation. In our countries, we believe we have conquered them, but we haven’t. It’s just that over here, we see them more clearly, more violently. That’s what frightened you so in Kenya, Heather. You saw the baby in all its beauty. You saw death in all its ugliness. You saw how the two things do not go together, and it broke your heart.”
    She thought again about her parents, about how their medical skills went to fix people’s physical imperfections and make them lovely once more. But people like Ian and Dr. Henry saw beyond the outside of a person. They saw with eyes of compassion to the inside, to the dark places. Places where hate and murder and sickness dwelled. Where the Four Horsemen wielded their swords as deftly as the workmen wielded their machetes on the grass.
    She bit her lower lip. “I thought I could come and work and feel good about it and go back home and put this