"Miado go" - we shall meet again (I hope)

It’s my last shift. There are only ten patients left and most of them are here only because their homes are too far away for them to be able to come back, day after day, for dressing changes. My co-worker and I are taking turns watching them sleep. We are all layered under blankets in the cool of our air-conditioned boat, these Africans and I. Most of them are eager to go home. Especially Josie (photo above) who has been here long enough to learn to do her own sterile dressing changes and to take vital signs on herself and her neighbors… the many neighbors she has seen come and go. I’ve watched a lot of people come and go myself. And now I am the one going. I can’t say I’m ready, but it’s a good time. The hospital is half torn down and packed up already. I will only miss out on the bleaching, the boxing and bagging, the floor waxing, a few dressing changes.

So tonight I am doing my laundry and making a last minute check-list of things to do: I must change my extra West Africa CFA back to U.S. dollars. From blue, purple, green and red back into dull green dollars. I need to pack up a box or two to leave behind and pray over, that it will not have turned to moldy remnants by time I return in six months. I need to say goodbye to lots of good, beautiful people. I will get to say hello again to many of them in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone or heaven, I suppose. I need to charge my ipod for the journey, get a few photos from friends.

And I could use one more zimmy-john (motorbike) taxi ride in the evening -at the time of day when stifling heat fades to comforting warmth and the breeze feels soft on your skin, the time when the falling sun makes the red sand glow. Or I'd like to meet just one more child on a street corner who will run up to me and grin with thier flashing white teeth and thier wide eyes and make me think, one last time, that I have just seen the most adorable child on earth. Maybe one last meal of fufu, eaten with my fingers, dripping with red, spicy sauce. I don't know if I have time for all that, but here is one last blog entry sent from the Africa Mercy, Lome, Togo. I remember googling "Lome" not so many months ago. Didn't I just arrive here? In a sense, yes, but long enough ago that it aches to leave.

In the morning I'll have Josie take my blood pressure one last time. She won't know what the numbers mean, but it will be good for my heart. Last night our translator, Yaovi, was singing, "you give me fever, fever when you kiss me, fever all through the night." I told him I was gonna kiss him, but I didn't want to give him a fever. He pointed at the tub of tylenol and told me a little fever would be ok, it can be fixed. Better to have a fever than to miss out on kisses. And it is better to come and go and feel your heart ache when you go, than to not have come at all.

Oh, it must be the crazy hour of the night, the still-dark of morning, that makes me want to cry.

The Goings-On down on Deck Three

I can make it to work in just under seven seconds: from room 4212 on deck 4 to the wards just down the stairs. "Down into the dungeon," so I say, particularly on those days when this boat I live and work on feels like a big metal cage. The halls are long and empty down here, there are no windows, and sometimes the ceiling leaks. I don't know where the leaking comes from, but I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with the rain that may or may not be falling 5 decks above.

It's suprising our patients don't all go batty being trapped down here. We let them out onto the deck once a day -but they can only go if they can walk up stairs, or if the elevator is working, or if they don't have an infection. And they are all crammed into these wards where the beds are only 2-4 feet apart, and many of the beds are double decker, with a caregiver sleeping underneath. Even at night it is never quiet for more than 20 minutes at a time: someone is getting up to pee, the nurses are opening cuboards or dropping things, the vital signs machines are beeping, someone's baby is crying, the patient from bed 2 is translating for bed 14 by yelling across the room...

Yet, it seems there are mostly smiles and laughter here. Our dungeon is full of happy noises, full of new friendships, singing and dancing, children playing, ladies chatting, male translators watching world cup soccer and squeeling like girls when they should be mopping the floor. Yesterday morning at 4 am an old lady fell out of her bed -a loud "smack," as her skinny bones hit the hard floor. I came running at the noise and found her squirming about with giggles, grinning in the dark so all I could see was sparkling eyes and her two partial rows of teeth. Later, when I was telling others the story and laughing at her she grinned and laughed too -then gave me a good smack on the head.

Today was Sunday. I was trying to sleep at 10 am after my night shift but I could hear the drumming and singing from the church service on Deck 3, just seven Anna-late-for-work seconds away from my room. I needed to sleep -but I wanted to be down there too. I wanted to watch our translators drumming and dancing till they dripped with sweat, to watch the serious faces of our patients while Clementine tells about Jesus, and to hear little 6 year old Tani yell, "Hallelujah! Amen!" at all sorts of inappropriate times, just because she knows it will make us laugh.

I often feel trapped on this ship. It really is a big metal cage, and it is more cage-like, more dungeony, down on deck 3 where the sun never shines. Yet, on the days I am feeling most trapped the best thing for me is to go down one more flight of stairs, down into the heart of the ship. All our prayers, all our hopes, everything that motivates us is down here. Everything that happens on the ship is us pouring out our lives so that new life can be born down here. We all give our days, our energy, some of us literally give our blood, so that good things can happen here. And they do. The air is sweeter down on deck 3, and it doesn't matter if it's raining 5 decks up, there is always a light down here that is more cheering, better for the soul than sunshine.

"So neither he who plants, nor he who waters is anything, but only God who makes things grow." I Corinthians 3:7

This is Jean Claude, agricultural director of the Bethesda farm. More specifically, this is him delighted that his six-week corn already towers over his outstretched arm. He will be the first to tell you that it is God who made it grow. Jean Claude, formerly from the Congo, is an Africa Mercy crew member but he spends most of his time in Benin working on the Bethesda farm. The farm is a joint project with Mercy Ships and a local NGO. Last year when the ship was in Benin they built a lovely facility on the site and now they offer three month courses to farmers teaching them how to farm with Godly principles. Last week I was able to take a break from nursing and go live on the farm for five days. Jean Claude was the only one there with more than ten words of English, but the twenty agricultural students were delighted to have a visitor. They let me play with their hoes and machetes, and always said, "good job, good job," even when I was doing the sort of job that required them to redo it.

I loved playing in the dirt and learning something about farming, but more than that I loved being in the country. I loved the little red dirt paths I could run down in the morning, and the air, free from fumes and dust. I loved the delicious African food that arrived by motorbike three times a day. I loved sitting on the porch watching the lightening and the rain, and I loved the farmers, all grown men who giggle and joke about like children.

I also loved how Jean Claude and his students would walk by the corn in the morning and all stop, and he would point at the bees, busy pollenating the corn, and he would say, "God is good. Look at the bees. God is so good." It's true, all of creation is busy declaring the glory of the Lord.

At Bethesda they teach "farming God's way." From what I understood it's basically organic farming, only they call it "God's way" instead of presuming to have invented the idea of growing plants without toxic chemicals. Many farmers here burn their fields and then till them up completely, but that wastes precious nutrients in the soil so they must buy expensive fertilizers. At Bethesda they only till seedling-sized holes and they cover the fields with compost materials -"God's blanket," Jean-Claude calls it -which adds nutrients and also prevents weeds from growing. They make insecticide from onions, garlic and chilies -a huge tub of it that is sprayed over the plants. They sprinkle ashes to reduce the acidity of the soil, and they mix in wheelbarrow loads of chicken manure. They shade their nursery beds with palm branches and use coconut fibers to hold in moisture.

They told me, with Jean Claude translating, that when I go home I can teach others everything I've learned. Once they understood that where I come from there truly are no coconuts growing, and no need to shade things from the sun (this took some convincing) their response was one of awe: "Isn't God amazing that he made so many different places." And later, "isn't He amazing," they would say, shaking their heads and grinning at me, "that he sent you all the way here from so far away." "You have taught us so much," one of them said, "that you work so hard and you sit in the dirt with us." I'm not quite sure what was lost in translation there... they think white people don't like dirt? Regardless, these are good things -to work hard and to sit in the dirt, or simply to be together. To be so pleased for the company that you don't care what you're sitting on or in. And perhaps to even forget there was a job to be done.

I did do some work, but I certainly didn't feel as though I was working hard. Although it didn't seem that anyone was working too hard, at least not for more than a few minutes at a time. And often it was only two or three people working hard while the rest of us watched. They are great team players, these Africans. Not in the sense of efficiency or productivity, but rather in the sense that they will do everything together. Or a cynic might say they do lots of nothing together. Lots of sitting and joking, being busy telling stories. But here it is hard work to just breath sometimes. I could spend a morning doing nothing but standing and sitting outside and still after lunch I would collapse on my bed and sleep for two hours, waking with the same feeling I have after spending too long in a sauna. If I worked too hard here I would die from heat stroke. I'm usually no good at taking naps, but everyday I could have fallen asleep in the dirt... tilled myself an Anna-sized hole and hoped the insecticide man didn't come by and mistake me for a large bug. As it was I came home smelling so bad my roommates wouldn't allow me to unpack my bag in our cabin; I was sent straight to the laundry room.

So I went to the laundry room to wash away the scent of old onions and garlic, of red sand and brown chicken-manure soil, of rainstorms and five days sweating in the sun, the stains of African food eaten with my fingers and juicy mangoes that dribbled down my arms. Me and my things were pungent with the smells of a small farm in Africa. I hadn't noticed until then. But I was not eager to wash them away. Is it strange that I would be jealous of the men I left behind on the farm? I wanted to be back there in my smelly clothes sitting on the porch in the welcome dark, drinking tea with powdered milk and listening to the chatter of the farmers and of the crickets, and maybe standing and walking out under the stars to where the crickets are louder than the men and there is a slight breeze, and I'd sit there in the dirt, with my head back, looking for the big dipper which, I discovered, hangs upside-down in the sky here.

Apostle Paul tells us that we can plant seeds and we can water them, but only God can make them grow. He wasn't speaking of plants, he was speaking of people. All the same -did you see how high that corn is? Tip your head up to see the top of it and tilt your ear to hear the buzzing of the bees way up there. There are so many things I miss about the farm. Being in Africa and surrounded by Africans for one -in particular an Africa that is green and lush and not a polluted port city. I loved the smell of the breeze that came after a rainstorm, and how it felt to hold a ball of dirt that held a living, breathing plant.

Jean Claude said he will bring me some tomatoes when they are ripe. I can't wait to smell them. I will hold them in my hands like precious pearls and say, "Thank you Jean Claude; isn't God good." And he will say, "Yes, Anna, God is so good."

"There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells." Ps. 46:4

One of our translators said, "I want to teach you a song." And he sang to me: "Joy like a river, joy like a river, joy like a river in my soul. Joy like a river..." I laughed at him and said, "that's not a song, that's just a sentence." But it has been echoing over and over in my head, sounding very much like a song.

The poet Rumi writes,

"Birdsong brings relief to my longing.

I am just as ecstatic as they are

But with nothing to say!"

That little sentence of a song -for me it is as close as I can get to birdsong. Why this joy? I hardly know, I haven't the words, but still I would like to sing. There is "joy in my soul" just as "there is a river whose streams make glad the city of God." The city of God -someday it will be a real place - but for now the Most High dwells inside of us. We are the city, make glad by his presence, made holy because he is willing to flow through us like a river.

Isaiah 55 says:

"As the rain and snow come down from heaven to water the earth and do not return to it without watering the earth to make it bud and flourish so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth. It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it."

This is part of that river of joy. Even when we don't see the budding or flourishing or we can't imagine the miracle of what a seed will become, we can believe in God's promise that his purposes and the things he desires will be accomplished. His promises, his words, are like rain and snow that fall on the land and flow down to the sea, only to be taken up again into the clouds to once again fall like blessings. His promises are good, and they are endless, persistent, like rivers carving out deep canyons, slowly changing landscapes. They are rivers of joy, streams that gladden.

Even when what we see doesn't look joyful, we are still called to rejoice. Paul says, "Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: rejoice!" (Philippians 4:4). It is a strange command, and, incidentally, no more eloquent than my one sentence song.

Rejoice! Even when you do not have words, sing this little birdsong with me: "Joy like a river in my soul." It's a river; you don't have to understand where it comes from to let it make you glad. Rejoice! if only because the Most High longs to dwell within you.

"So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal." II Corinthians 4:18

I tried to memorize this passage once:

"Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world -the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does - comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and it's desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever." I John 2:15

And my thoughts at the time were of how easy it is to fall in love with the things of this world. This earth is so full of good and beautiful things, and it is so easy to go about our business doing and seeking and satisfying our endless desires and forgetting that everything is spiritual. Even though it is that part -the spiritual part -of ourselves and this world that will outlast the rest.

I read this passage again recently though, and my thoughts were very different.. more along the lines of, "Thank God that this is not the end, that he has better things planned, that here and now is not all these people have to hope for." I cringe to speak of the poverty and injustice of this place in general terms. We know these things; I would rather point out the good and beautiful. But it seems that maybe now after the thrill of the new and different has faded I can more easily see the ugly things -and it is easy not to love them.

Some examples: There was an election recently, and the family that has been in power for forty years "won" again, thanks to military backing. They say girls can now go to school without having to pay the fees, but when I mentioned it to a local father he said it is what the government tells the Europeans, when the true story is that unless you can pay for a private school your child will be crammed into a classroom of 100 with one teacher who is paid $50, maybe $60 dollars a month... well, hopefully the teacher will be paid. Lately they have been going on strike because they haven't been paid.

It is true that you can live cheaper here - you can buy an arm-load of bananas for $1, and really, it's too hot for clothes (although all the Africans with $2 dollars to their name dress better than me), and you don't need a car because if you're African you can carry 50 pounds on your head (of anything, including chickens -live or dead) and a baby on your back and walk all day through the 98 degree heat.

But it is hard to find any way at all to make money. Our day worker volunteers get $6 a day in "travel expenses," based on our agreement to not officially employ locals. And some work with us because they love what we do, but for most it is also because they can find no other work. Six dollars for travel is a stretch, but gas is expensive and it is not ridiculous to allow that much. The sad part is that it is also not something these people can turn away -and they are the educated English-speaking locals. They tell me $6 a day is not much, but $8 a day, that would be a good job.

I saw a poster recently. It said, "with God all things are possible," and had a picture of a shiny car and a big house. My first thought was, "oh, that's so wrong, so materialistic." But I have always had a house. I thought of one of our workers; he is 31 and has been living with his brother, then his aunt, now his nephew, but his nephew just got married and now he sleeps on the couch 4 feet away from their bedroom. He wants to get married and have children. I saw him rubbing the cheek of a baby and he said, "I wish I could have a baby, but I am getting old and I can't get a wife." Wives only come to those who can afford to at least rent a house. He doesn't want a big house, or a shiny car; his heart's desire is for a small room in the corner of a dusty courtyard to call his own so he can have a wife and a child. I know it doesn't only take money to have a family -but it breaks my heart that America is full of young people who have so much and who are too engrossed in it all to want something as good and simple as a family, while here there are so many young men longing for this good thing -to be a husband and a father, and they are unable because they don't have enough money to rent a room.

Living here beside these people I'm discovering a different meaning when God tells me not to love the things of this world because they are passing away. It is not so much a challenge, but a reason to continue to live in hope, a reason to rejoice despite circumstances. It is true that with God all things are possible... a big house, a shiny car; it's possible. But more miraculously, it is possible to live on little but faith and hope. I am challenged to look again at that awful, materialistic picture and think of how it is an eternal promise of riches and blessing in a realm I have yet to see clearly. May God continue to focus my eyes. And I pray he would pour out his blessings, his eternal blessings of peace, hope, joy and comfort on these people who have so little now.

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.