Our volunteer doctor in South Sudan, Dr. Rachael Consoli has completed her year of service with CMMB.  We’re honored to share her letter this week:
One year is over. Today was my last day at the Hospital.  I’m so grateful for this amazing experience.  My friend Dr. Daniel Doyle, a cardiologist from Australia,  who also comes to South Sudan to help sent me such an appropriate story today.  It is called the “The mighty life of Oliver Sacks captured by Norman Doidge.”  Appropriate for me today because it is about being grateful for our experiences and our journey. The last part reads:

Perhaps because gratitude does not always go unopposed, Psychoanalysts have often seen gratitude as having an emotional opposite, envy. Sometimes a flash of envy can be a helpful sign, a spur that tells you, “You know, you really want this- try for it.” But very often, the envious person sees something wonderful in the world, and instead of appreciating it, attempts to make the envious feeling go away, by devaluing or denying it’s worth (those grapes were sour, anyway); or he or she may try to spoil or destroy the envied object in reality.

If one does this enough, one ends up feeling starved, because one finds oneself living in an emptied world. The envious have a particularly hard time growing old and dying. They cannot tolerate the fact that the young, and not they, have their lives before them.

They feel pain, and emptiness. We speak of people being consumed with envy- but filled with gratitude. It’s paradoxical that, by acknowledging that there are wonderful things in the world, and that we are incomplete, we can feel filled up- even as we bid the world farewell.

When I think of Oliver’s last days, I think of a biblical sentence that I’ve always found instructive in the twofold art of living and dying. It reads,

“And Abraham died… full of years.”

Not emptied of them; filled by them.

I hope when I die someday, they will say, “And Rachael died…..full of years”.  I feel full of joy, gratitude and full of years. I am so sad to leave these beautiful people and this broken country. As you know I have been all over the world, to every continent except Antarctica and here in Ezo, Western Equatoria, South Sudan I lived really “Golden” months of my entire life.

I am so grateful to God that I was allowed to know this and live this gratefully as I was here, that it was a special time in my life. I treasured every moment and lived every moment to the fullest. Everyone was so wonderful to me.

God the Creator of the Universe, the Almighty one looks at little, insignificant, sinful, selfish me and loves me!!  Who am I to deserve this treatment of favor?

Thank you, South Sudan.

Thank you, people of Ezo, Nzara, Yambio.
Thank you, CMMB.
Thank you, Diocese of Tombura- Yambio.
Thank you, Comboni Missionary Nuns.
Thank you, Staff of Hospital in Ezo and in Nzara.
Thank you to all the patients who entrusted their lives to me. Their health to me.
–    Rachael

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