MEET LINDA

From the Thibodaux Daily Comet:

Some mornings, she woke to the rural din of crowing roosters and the happy chatter of playing children. On others, the silence was broken by wailing women accompanying one of the funeral processions that ran through the small village almost daily. And at night, the vast sky was a sea of brilliant stars unmuted by earthbound electric light and dominated by the Southern Cross, a constellation only visible below the equator.

Linda Lahme, 64, has spent the past month lying in a bed at Maison De'Ville, a Houma nursing home.

“They tell me I'm dying of cancer,” she said, “but I don't feel very dead.”

In her heart and her head, she still lives in Luapula Province, Zambia, the poverty- and disease-stricken southern-African nation where she spent the past 10 years working to ensure orphaned children had a chance to go to school and eat three meals a day.

“It is the focal point of my life now,” she said. “It's one of the poorest countries in Africa.”
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Lahme, a retired nurse who spent most of her adult life in Thibodaux, joined the Peace Corps in 2000, three years after her second husband, Winfried Lahme, died of cancer. “I was grieving very much for my husband. It was a very difficult time for me, and I just wanted to get away,” she said. “There was a humanitarian element to that, but my primary purpose was to just reinvent my life somehow.”

She was offered a posting in Zambia working on HIV prevention and education. For two years, her home was a mud hut with a dirt floor and a grass roof that was prone to leaks.

“It was overwhelming,” she said. “I've never been in such a primitive environment in my life.”

Within two years, she had started the Luapula Foundation, which now works to promote sustainable farming, schooling for thousands of orphaned children and educates communities about how HIV spreads and kills.

“It was the need I saw,” she said. “My heart just went out to the children. They would come to me crying and begging not only for food but just for the opportunity to make something of themselves.”

Lahme's latest project is a Christmas fundraiser to buy goats for families in the province, organized through St. John Episcopal Church in Thibodaux. The animals provide milk for direct consumption or making cheese, their waste can be used as fertilizer, and they can survive what can be a harsh climate — hot and dry about half the year and soaking wet during rainy seasons.

“That's my last push before I die from cancer,” she said. “They told me I'm dying. I don't believe them, but that's what they said.”

In church this past Sunday, Linda announced that she will be returning to Zambia next month. Medicaid will no longer pay for her to stay in the nursing home unless she first uses the money she has put aside for her adopted daughter's education to pay the fees at the facility. Linda says, "That is not an option." I asked Linda if she was content to return to Zambia, thinking there might be something we could do to help her stay if she wanted to stay, and she said, "Yes. I want to go." And so she will return to Zambia, where her heart is.

At the same time that I accept that Linda wishes to return to Africa, I am ashamed that our health care system insists that Linda spend her daughter's education funds on her own care before she is able to receive help. Something is very wrong here.

Moses Zulu was working as a environmental-health technician at a rural health center in Luapula when he was introduced to Lahme, who he called “the most compassionate lady in Luapula Province.”

What Moses says is true. And Linda is one of the bravest people I know.

“I still have my round-trip ticket. I did not come here to stay,” she said. “I truly came here believing I would go home. It's expiring in March. We'll see if I'm healed by March. … My doctor tells me I'll be dead by then. Who knows? I sure don't feel like it.”

WANT TO HELP?

To purchase a goat for a Zambian family, send a check for $25, made out to Luapula Foundation to:

Luapula Foundation
c/o St. John's Espiscopal Church
718 Jackson St.
Thibodaux, LA 70301