Ready or not, here comes Jesus

This weekend I travelled north a few hours to Kpalime and hiked up the tallest “mountain” in Togo, topping out at 3,234 feet. Along the hike there are several villages. We stopped at one to rest and could hear Sunday singing close by. Then my friend says, “Oh, here comes Jesus.” And I look, and there he is, on a little cross, coming up the stairs into view. “Oh, you’re not kidding,” I say as we watch a boy and then a whole procession of singing, palm-leaf-waving children come into view.

There is lots of Jesus here. He keeps surprising me at times when I am –like on our hike –just sitting there. On this boat, sometimes I find myself looking around and thinking, “what a strange boat this is; how crazy that all these people come and live on this boat; where did this ridiculous idea come from?” We have a whole village living on a ship. And if you aren't on the hospital deck or out with a field team you might be confused and wonder if maybe this is a long-distance ferry or a low-budget cruise ship stalled at port. But then you will see something, or hear a story that will strike you as if you were just sitting under a tree on a hillside and suddenly Jesus is there walking up the hill towards you.

The people I talk to here say things similar to how I feel: somewhat unsure about this big, strange ship, but certain that God has told them to come here. Yesterday a baby died on the boat. Some of the nurses knew her from Benin. She was tiny then and they were trying to get her feeding better. This year she came again and she was still too tiny and sickly. It is the second baby this mother has lost. She is four months pregnant now. Pray with us that this third baby will be healthy. We come here to heal and we had to watch a baby die. We had to give up and say, "Jesus, come and be a comforter." We have not been able to bring healing, but Jesus would you reveal yourself here, would you visit this mother and weep with her as we do. They are used to children dying here; it's nothing new. I find myself wondering if maybe it is a greater thing for this mother that a whole ship of people from foreign lands would mourn for her loss than it would be if we could have saved her child.

I remember another mother who brought her son. She had taken him to an orphanage because he had a cleft lip and the villagers told her he was cursed, that she shouldn't keep him. But she took him back and brought him here and by the time he was ready to go home she had decided to keep him. I would like to see Jesus here on this ship doing miraculous healings; he could have brought back the heart-beat of the baby that died. But perhaps it is of more lasting significance that a mother who gave up her son has fallen in love with him again, or that a woman who has lost two babies knows that there is a God who loves her and her lost children despite what the world seems to be saying.

So we live on this ship and we go about our work and trust that because God has called us all here that when we least expect, at any moment, we will find that Jesus has walked by and what we do in faith and blindness has been made holy and eternal.

A few things that aren't lost in translation...

On the ward everything we say to our patients, every question we have, must go through a translator. The translators are one of my favorite parts of my job, but the fact that they are there to translate is my least favorite part. I am constantly muttering under my breath: "I wish I could talk with these people." It's my new, useless, little mantra. Yes, I could study my French more, but lots of our patients don't speak French, they speak Ewe, or some other local dialect and their French isn't much better than mine. I went with a translator to speak to one of my patient's parents and after rattling on for awhile the translator said, "he doesn't understand my language." And we asked all our other translators and turns out there was nobody who speaks his language. Luckily, the patient, an eight year old, knew a little French.

We loose a lot of things in translation. For example, the boy I was looking after last night: with the help of one translator I learned that he pooped yesterday. I was suspicious after I felt his bloated belly, so I asked with another translator and found out he hadn't pooped for four days. "Defecate, bowel movement, 'caca' in French"... perhaps that would be a more practical thing for me to say over and over again. Enough poop already, I know, but let me just mention that one translator told me, "to poop" in French is "urine." I don't know much French, but I'm pretty sure that's not right.

But enough telling tales on my translators, I wanted to be saying what a joy they are. And although it's often quite frustrating to be a nurse when it takes a few hours to figure out if someone pooped lately or not, I am certainly not in a position to be criticizing people who have not yet mastered their third language. And they are definitely not getting paid the wages of a linguist. They are hard workers when they need to be, but they are best at smiling and laughing. They carry children to the bathroom; they pray with us; they hold patients hands when I have to poke them with needles; they sing songs to them and tell them not to hit their mothers.

It is a little sad to be in Africa but on a ship that feels like Europe. It makes me so happy to go down to the hospital and be surrounded by Africans. They are all so friendly; they will stand and shake your hand and smile and laugh with you, and they will talk with you whether or not any words are understood between you. We have translators and parents and patients all jammed into a few rooms -there are patients on beds and parents under beds and translators wherever they can fit between the nurses. And then sometimes the translators will find drums and the parents will pop out from under the beds and we will have a little dance party. By dance I mean the Africans will do finely controlled graceful things with their bodies while the Yovo's (white people) will flail about and inspire hysterical laughter. But laughter is like medicine -I actually learned that in nursing school- and the Africans take very well to laughter.

Here, words travel slowly and uncertainly between us, but a lot is said without them. I will ask my patient's parents: "any questions?" And surely, on this strange boat they have so many questions, but usually the response I get is, "I want to say thank you to you and to God." And it is good to hear, but I don't need a translator to understand that message -it is something I can see and feel, over and over, every time I go to work.

When it seems storms are in short supply

I read Zephaniah 3: 17 this morning: "The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing." And I remember how several times in the Bible God tells us that he wants us to live lives of love, not of sacrifice: "for I desire mercy, and not sacrifice."

Here in Africa there are moments when I when I find myself living so richly and comfortably, and it makes me frustrated. I want to be doing something perilous and adventurous; I want to be living sacrificially. Isn't serving God in Africa supposed to be more like daring to walk a tretcherous ridgeline, or stepping out of a strorm-tossed boat and believing you can walk on water? Instead I feel like I am standing barefoot in soft, green grass.

But living for God is the same thing when it is stormy and perilous as it is when you are standing quietly in the green grass. He just wants us to be looking up to him. He is always longing to "quiet us with his love," to see our gaze lifted to him and to "rejoice over us with singing." He can do most of the saving without our help. He wants us to live lives of love and mercy regardless of whether it feels like a sacrifice or not.

This morning I went to church on the ship's hospital ward. There was drumming and dancing and rejoicing. And soon, after I write a few emails, I might go sit out on the top deck in the ocean breeze and watch the waves. And then I will have an afternoon coffee, and a delicious dinner, and a walk on the dock in the (relatively speaking) cool of evening. And tommorrow I will go to work to look after children with straightened legs, or full upper lips for the first time in thier lives, and mothers who pat my cheek and say thank you in some other language. And I will go on loving these people who are so very easy to love, and I will try to be ok with the fact that I'm not feeling too sacrificial. I'm sure my time will come.

This is Raoul. You can't tell from the photo, but he showed up with a crooked foot. I looked after him yesterday in the ward, and today I watched him go home on his crutches, all wide-eyed and grinning. This morning I looked after three patients and they all came back to me from the operating room with casts on both thier legs. The three year old squealed and moaned and cried whenever I came near. Mako, the 8 year old girl, came back silent with red, teary eyes. And Koffi, the two year old, came back with a tootsie roll half eaten in his fingers and cried only when I wouldn't let him get out of bed and play with the toy truck. These children are delightfully different.

The crew of the Africa Mercy is also full of variety. A few of my favorites are the four security guards who are all Nepalise Gurkas. They made dinner for a few of us one night: tasty lentils and fish that they insisted we eat a painfully excessive amount of. I went for a run one morning -my first run in Africa- with one of them and when I told him that if we went any farther he'd have to carry me back to the boat he said, "Ok," and on we went, a bit farther.

There are lots more things to say... but it's dinner time! We eat on schedule here and it is too tasty to miss. Mangos for breakfast. Crispy lettuce for lunch and dinner -from I have no idea where. Starbucks coffee on tap. Ice cream every Thursday after community meeting... good thing I have Gurkas to make sure I run far enough :)