Strong Father, strong daughter*

 

In Kenya, people like to know who you come from as much as where you come from.  To recite one's own family lineage is an important introduction skill. While not all fathers are good and I can surely sober you up pretty quickly with some stories of being a daughter in sub-Saharan Africa, I would like to reflect on my father in this piece as the one who gave me the freedom to be me.

He flew the F-4 Phantom- the strongest fighter jet ever known in the 1960’s on a mission to protect others and to put his life into a cockpit for the United States Air Force and the greatest nation on earth.  He himself never has boasted or told stories about it, just that he learned to shun alcohol and always defend the Red White and Blue from any threats foreign or domestic.  We don’t have to know any details but I learned to put my hand over my heart and stand to honor him and his friends that died in that mission to give our nation security and the freedom to speak our mind about it.

Some years later he would use that same loyalty of character to give security to his wife and daughters by providing for us a place to call home on this earth.

He took me to my first concert when I was 6-  Amy Grant‘s Unguarded tour in 1985.  I fell asleep.  But I know she sang a song called “My Father’s Eyes” and I was proud that my eyes are hazel like his; maybe not the point of the song to anyone else but me.

He carried me a long ways.  When we visited New York City in 1986 I was sick and no doubt whiny, but he carried me all the way up the steps inside Lady Liberty.  Patriotism was instilled: A love for my father’s and forefather’s land and liberties that cannot be taken lightly.

And my dad taught us to love God.

Then he took on a new mission in the early 90’s. 

He took us to AFRICA!

So when people ask how my family dealt with me moving to Kenya, I can say “My dad took me there first.”  I was secure in his blessing.  He taught me to love the whole world too.

Fathers provide security and strength and a picture of how we could know God.  Some dads only leave their sons and daughters with a longing for a better Father-God.  If that is you, my heart longs for you to also know the Father’s great strong love as it truly is.

But my joy is so great today in knowing I will be returning to his house soon. A place where he gives me the joy of inviting people into his home and knowing that everyone who enters will be blessed with a bowl of ice cream. The sign outside the door of my father’s house says in all truth “Shalom Y’all”.

They say a little girl will grow up to marry a man like her daddy.  And I say man! I am blessed beyond all imagination that that has been true in my life.  May it be so for our little girl too.

* borrowed without permission from the title of Meg Meeker's awesome book Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters

Simple Gifts

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The happiest childhood imaginable,

12 hours of sunshine a day with occasional torrents of rain to give rest to the land.

And remind everyone about his or her mom at home waiting.

Free range community

In your face community

Take advantage of you community

Missionaries don’t really get to choose their friends- community.

Homeschooling isn’t that bad.

I was surprised at how much fun it became. 

I released 7 awesome pre-schoolers into the wide world this week.

They will be going to Kindergarten or another country next time.

We used to sing “’Tis a gift to be simple ‘tis a gift to be free,

‘tis a gift to come down where we ought to be” as our closing song every time.

Simple Gifts. Repentance is the theme of that song.

And our 2 classroom rules for the world: Respect and Stay Together!

But now we must part.

Living as minimalists here and they don’t even know what they are missing.

Besides their cousins.

And grandparents.

But today is catching crickets and running free,

Mom can I go to school now? Bounding blue backpack down the hill riding on a little boy with a heart fully alive.  Oh my heart, you are so full of life!

The Glory of God.

15 kids with a half dozen dads playing Ultimate on Sunday afternoon.

2.5 bags of chocolate chips and 2.5 months remaining- we made it!

Waking to a million songbirds in the white foggy dawn on the green hills of Africa.

Make the coffee, read the verses, pray with true gratitude over a bowl of cereal

And for strength to do our work this day.

Give us strength to do this work today.

Homemade pizza every Friday,

Long skirts, t-shirts and ladies with fire wood on their heads- looking like my hair.

Some things I won’t miss.

But then again, the freedom to know that nobody minds if I rock the missionary wardrobe.  Nobody minds, not even me.  Some things I won’t miss, but maybe I will.

How was Africa?

Please don’t ask that.

Africa is a big hot mess and so am I.

More gray and gaunt than I’d care to be, but it is a sign of the times.

I told her we are going soon.

Are you glad?  Yes.

She asked me if I’m ready to go back to the creature comforts.

Well, not really.

It’s not that at all really.

It’s just time.  The season has come.

It’s time to start packing up all our simple gifts of this world into 8 Action Packers.

How can I pack this freedom?

How can I pack this simplicity?

How can I pack community?

Little Miss spent the afternoon making mud balls with her friends.

Mommy, can I take my mud ball with me?

How can I describe to you the feeling of living here and leaving here?

Can your heart stretch to hold this breadth of beauty and plunge to contain this real suffering of humanity?  It’s stretched so thin sometimes I think it might burst.  How can I pack that into a tidy statement

“Oh Africa was nice”?

How can I describe the way people here care for each other,

And respect others,

And speak in such indirect ways so as to not offend anyone,

And they remember people so well here,
And how people can endure.

It’s not tidy but it is simple.

It’s a gift that we have been given.

And we will never be the same for it.

Malaria

This post will blend our two writers, Daktari and his wife.  One is more scientific, the other more theological
 (the lecture and the sermon).

I like to hunt mosquitoes at night around our house.  I think it’s a part of my service as an infectious disease doctor; I call it “vector reduction.”  And it’s something of a sport, and it’s part of living in Africa.  Sometimes we live in a FarSide cartoon where I can imagine that it’s a big  coup de tat for the mosquito if it can get an ID doc to hit himself in the forehead.  Or the wife of the doc to smack him and say “Mosquito!”

That’s the light part.  You can stop here. Or proceed with caution into the harsher realities.

In terms of malaria transmission, we live in a “hypoendemic” area.  That means there is some around, but not a lot.  We historically would have a case come to my attention once every couple of months.  For those of you who might wonder why, it’s a matter of temperature.  Our weather at Tenwek is too cold for the parasite that dwells within the mosquito to go through its lifecycle.  It’s as though there are zillions of mosquitos buzzing around here that just can’t complete sporogenesis which activates the parasite.

Anyhow, then these past few weeks it’s been unseasonably warm and there has been some more standing water around after the rains, and all of the sudden there’s an epidemic of malaria going on around us.  We’ve had an epidemic of epidemics the last few months: cholera and typhoid for the most part.   

And the richest targets in the world for malaria infection are pregnant women and children under 5 years-old.  86% of malaria mortality is in these two groups, and I’ve seen a few bad cases in the past two weeks.  Women with kids that are just a few days old have been coming into our ICU because a mother’s immune system changes late in pregnancy, to protect the baby from TH2 helper cells.  That is, the security guard of the immune system that tells the body what is self and what is other.  This makes the mom’s health vulnerable so that the baby, who is other than self, will be sustained.  And unfortunately, these are the same defenders that are needed to respond to the malaria parasite.  It is an act of perfect coordination with the Fall of Creation.  The serpent still acts to kill steal and destroy the children of Eve. 

We had a lady who was hanging on by a thread last week in the ICU.  7 days post-partum with a bad case of malaria.  So in the middle of the night last week when the pager went off, I went up to the hospital in the dark and ran the code for resuscitation.  Pounding and pounding and pounding 10 rounds of chest compressions on her- more than any regular patient would ever get in a code.  But her baby needed her to live.  We tried.  And we tried.  And I did not want to let go. But she died.  7 days after giving birth.  And the blood of Abel would cry out again from the ground-

But the blood of Christ speaks a better word than the blood of Abel (Hebrews 12:24).  I do believe that the One Child of Eve has already come to crush the head of that serpent and his parasitical sin-death relationship. The One Child of Eve came that we might have Life.  

The child of the woman in the hospital survived.  He faces tremendous odds in life, but he has a heart beating own it’s own in his chest to praise God.

A few days later, a local gardener, who also had a 7 day-old baby and a post-partum wife, came to our door asking for help because his wife was having terrible headaches.  We brought her in for a malaria smear.  She was unwittingly hosting that parasite that would destroy her if given free reign. But thank God, there is a cure! And she will be fine.   

We may not exude a happy happy happy kind of hopefulness in writing the truth about this work running a hospital’s medical ward and ICU in Sub-Saharan Africa where little to no preventative care is routinely given for patients.  The suffering of humanity is intensely heavy and overwhelming numbers of deaths are encountered weekly. Seven patients died in one day last week.  Seven.  Mind numbing.

How can this be remotely connected to hope?

Then today in church I heard the pastor say, “Hope is the great grandchild of suffering.” 

(Suffering produces perseverance and perseverance produces character and character- hope. Romans 5:3,4). 

Herein lies the Gospel. It must be that the suffering of Christ will do these things, not me, because if it were up to me, the end result of my suffering would be-hardness- bitterness- despair and we’ve been pretty close to it.   Only when we remember the suffering of our Savior will we persevere, and when we recall His perseverance of three days in Hell that broke the power of death then character is formed, and when we see His character in doing all this for love, then only will true deep hope in our hearts amount to anything.  The Gospel encounters suffering with open arms of love. Hope can only live if it’s connected to the Resurrection.  That hope will not disappoint.

The Lord is close to the broken hearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. Psalm 34:18

Rescued!

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Our friends who are in Bulgaria helped us to see that the kids of missionaries are also missionaries.  We have prayed for our kids to be good missionaries in whatever way they can because the call is for all of us to be caught up in the Story of a God Who Rescues.  Last week I saw part of that answered.

So, Man Cub gets incentives for doing some extra work ($$).  He also gets fined as penalties on work undone.  So one day I looked in his little rock-star wallet to dig out 50 shillings.  And I was surprised to see 2000 shillings (about $20)!  So I asked where it came from and he answered that his little friend, Kip gave it to him.  Well Kip is a local boy and in the local economy 2000 shillings is about 1/3 of his school fees, no laughing matter. So I, together with Kip’s mom and dad, had to investigate as to how that money came around.

“How did you get 2000 shillings?” The dad of Kip interrogated.  He proceeded to explain to us that a stranger had given it to him with the instructions “take this money to your best friend and say let’s go to Nairobi together”.  The stranger was another boy with a man and a car and a woman standing down the road.   

This was attempted kidnapping.

Kip was totally naïve about strangers and he took the money and ran to our house to bring it to his buddy.  Thank God that we were at home and the boys were able to just stay and play here together.  I don’t know what happened to the strangers that day.  I didn’t even know what was happening at that time.  Man Cub certainly didn’t know that he was playing a pivotal role in saving Kip’s life!  We were pretty passive players in the story.  But sometimes, perhaps all times, who a person is and who he has been, is much more important than anything he does. A little micro-story of rescue, inside a bigger Story of the God Who Rescues by sheer relationship to His Son.

Passover

8a.m.Good Friday.

They were out of school because it is Good Friday.  Man-Cub would say “It’s Good Friday because we are outta school”.  So they played to their hearts content in the glorious freedom of MK’s in Africa. 

5p.m.Passover. 

Tonight we got to participate in our first Passover dinner.  The kids watched Prince of Egypt and we are reading in a story bible about the Exodus.  It’s a different emphasis on the meaning of this day, but one I am glad to be connecting in the synapses of their heart and heads.  Freedom.  Deliverance.

7:30p.m.Two little kids falling asleep all over me at the church service tonight.  How am I going to get them home? Daktari was here with us a minute ago, but he was paged up to help a lady with pulmonary embolism who isn’t going to make it through the night.  Now the lights of the meeting room are dimming and the candles being extinguished and it’s raining- the blessed rain that makes such sweet melodies on these tin roofs.  How am I going to get these children home?

“I’m carrying you home baby”, I say as she feels the cold water from the sky hit her sweet little legs.  Two Kenyan defense forces security guards are patrolling the night with great big guns hanging around their necks.  They ask me “habari mtoto?”- How’s the child?  I tell them she’s just sleeping and thank them for their work here.  We appreciate them. 

I think about the Roman soldiers patrolling the night in Jerusalem, Mary and Jesus, the Pieta. We sang O Sacred Head Now Wounded up there in the meeting room on the hill, just inside the staff gate of the hospital. 

I think about Garissa, Kenya.  147 mothers wanting more than anything to carry their sons or daughters home from there. 147 fathers waiting more than watchmen wait for the morning to hear from a son or daughter that they will still be coming home.  These were the valedictorians, the top students in high school.  They have to work so, so hard to get to a university in Kenya.  Their families have worked unbelievably hard at raising funds to get a student through university in Kenya.  Now the families will be carrying them home for burial.

I cannot process this event.  I cannot fathom the shock and grief and outrage.  Writing helps.  But really I can only carry my babies home and be so thankful for their sleepies that keep them needing me.  Their little requests for water at night, for one more story and the contented sigh of well-entered rest inside the mosquito net keep my heart so thankful for them.  They have no idea.

10a.m.Tomorrow- we will get up and scramble around like crazy candy addicts searching for bright plastic eggs and try to connect it all somehow to Jesus. 

6a.m. Sunday- We will watch the sunrise over a big wooden cross and stand in its shadow to decorate it with flowers.  147 mothers and 147 fathers will stand in the shadow of the cross somewhere all over Kenya with their shock and grief and outrage, and they will be able to look up at the Father who saw His Son die for them.  And He will say “I’m carrying your baby home too”.  Lord, please.  Let them see that you are there.

Seasons

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Cattle being herded through the capital city streets, mountains of mangos for sale on tables piled high with big black avocados. A thin layer of dirt is veiling everything and a sun radiating brilliantly into the pollution of a city bursting at the seams.  Nairobi.  They are zooming past the industrial age and into technology and Chinese investments shaped like enormous concrete monoliths of Babel as they scrape skywards out of poverty. 

We go to the city once in a while to be away from the weight and nearness of tragedy in the hospital.  We go to buy chicken and cheese and coffee (mostly to buy coffee really).  Nairobi is exhausting in a different way so it relocates the normal stress and that is good enough to call it a “break”.  It is a changing place and gives us a change of pace.

Daktari is hard at work this Saturday morning where 50% of his patients live with HIV or die with AIDS, and the other 50% have heartbreaking illnesses too but are just more complicated to understand and impossible to deal with.   Sometimes all a person can do is to be there as the face of Love to the dying.  He doesn’t pretend anymore to be the face of hope.  But the Love of God is constant.

  In the cool dark of this morning, tropical birds call me to rise and get to the day’s work before the day gets to me, and a beautiful African song echoes up the hill from a nearby school.  This may be what it was like for Eve or Lucy or whoever at the dawn of time in Africa. Pure and perfect for a moment.

But today I’d rather listen to Alan Jackson.  He reminds me of where I come from.  Country music is a still life in a swirling world of changes.  It’s good to remember where you come from when you come from somewhere like my home.   The constant of home is in moms and dads and sisters and cousins who love us and in the churches who sent us out with love and generous prayers for our journey.  It is the strength of deep roots allowing us to branch out so far into this unexplainable, unpredictable and ruggedly beautiful place.

The strength of constant love at home is allowing our children to exhilarate in their free-range lifestyle here.  They climb to breathtaking heights in trees.  They soar in the green meadows.  Like Kenya, they too are zooming through developmental years, growing taller and more angular with each new morning.   Their dirty feet signify a good day’s work and the thorns remind them of their vulnerability.  They are learning what it means to be at the mercy of the rains and the Maker of the Rains.  We take them to the river to watch the water levels fall and rise.  And to pray.

Like Kenya and our kids, our seasons are changing.  Rains have come like an Amazing Grace on a tin roof.  We are in the 4^th quarter of our 2 year term. Hope is perched mid-summer on the calendar for that mythical land called home.  But changes come to us all and home will be changed, as we will be changed.  Yet Love remains the constant.  And since it’s Saturday, I’ll just sit still and listen to Alan Jackson for a while.

A Little Journey to Rwanda

 It has been long since we last wrote an update, and I wanted to write a short story to reconnect us.

The first week in February I (Mike) took a trip to Rwanda to visit some Australian friends, the Walkers, who work in an Internal Medicine residency training program, and to teach a few lectures at the University of Rwanda Medical School.

It was a deeply refreshing and stimulating experience, the family hosting me was extraordinarily hospitable and gracious.  The training program is taught at a very high level of medical expertise.  And I didn't have to make any life or death decisions for a whole week.  It was something of a nerd's vacation.

Pictured here are some images from a hiking trip into the surrounding volcanic mountain ranges (no gorillas, we were on the southern end of Rwanda).  And below are some still shots of an immunology drama which I dreamed up to illustrate the cellular immune response to infection.  It's a 4 part drama of cellular warfare, good guys (immune cells) vs. bad guys (bacteria/viruses), with various weaponry (antibiotics).  These residents have knowledge and curiosity at a deep level of medicine.  They challenged my teaching ability and encouraged me deeply that they are the bright hope of medicine in Africa.