Bridges

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Bridges are precarious for creatures. In the crazy scary true story of “The Ghost and The Darkness”, man-eating lions haunt the colonial workers in British East Africa who were building a railroad bridge through Tsavo, Kenya. Bridge building is dangerous, but the goal is to bring worlds together. 

When we went to Missionary Training International in Colorado both before and after our years in Kenya, they taught us to use the transition bridge as an analogy for the feelings of being settled, unsettling, chaos in the middle, then resettling, and settled again on the other side of the transition.   It gave vocabulary to us and our kids so man-cub could say “I feel like I’m in total chaos!” when in fact our whole family was feeling that way a few weeks ago.  And I could use that time to remind [myself and] him of where our True Peace is: not in a place but in a Person- Jesus Christ.

Flash back to a bridge story from Kenya:

On one of my last excursions in the villages around Tenwek, I was taking about 15 house-helpers out to the home of Pastor Francis who has also been cooking for missionaries for about 30 years.  His friends wanted to honor him by visiting his home and bringing blessings.  In Kenya, people truly believe that “to have a visitor is to have a blessing”.  So we journeyed out about 15 kilometers to his home for a visit with hot chai in tin mugs, fresh mandazi- a local homemade doughnut, speeches honoring the host and hostess, speeches welcoming the visitors, me choking back the “golly this is the last time” tears, and then the gift giving and singing. Singing to the Lord for joy, singing to honor Pastor Francis and his wife.  Singing by the Kipsigis men and women is done in their natural voice- no frills but pure belting it out from their truest voice.  No reserve or self- consciousness, but lots and lots of singing.  It’s not like the Zulu singers of South Africa that you may have heard, but the acapella harmonies will flash you forward still to the gathering of all the saints around the throne of God.  It is a magical experience to be there in a humble home with newspaper walls, dirt floors, a single solar light bulb and the evening closing in outside but the warmth of the room radiating a blessing to the whole community.  And they wanted to give Pastor a new blue suit, shirt, tie, socks, shoes, blanket, and a dress for his wife.  Presentations are always a big deal in Kenya.  Ceremony and honoring and gift giving are really important to people. They wanted to do this before I left and they didn’t have a car to reach that far away village after work where he and his family have lived for generations.

I am so so very blessed to have been there.  I felt so accepted there among my friends, even as the only white person for miles and miles. Even as it got dark on the drive home and I’m not supposed to have been out after dark driving, I felt so full of life and blessed beyond reason.  Then they said it.  “Wait. The bridge is out.”  We were at a hairpin turn on the bottom of a hill where a natural spring runs under the road.  The right hand side of the road had fallen down under the pressure of too many dump trucks that are building further up the road. Okaaaay…So driving off a bridge is a pretty legitimate fear, right?  I decided to do a 37 point turn around and let my friends walk home from there.   Stella road with me the extra distance to keep me company (In Kenya people do not like for you to be alone). They all texted me to make sure that I arrived home safely.   The songs were still ringing in my ears. Oh, how I love and miss those times and those people.

Only a few days after that, Daktari, the Wife, Man-Cub, and Little Miss are all on a big red bus riding around London.  We drive over the famous Tower Bridge, and London Bridge (which is not falling down), and zoom back to Heathrow to fly all the way across the Atlantic.  Effie told me that the airplanes are too fast for the heart to catch up and we find ourselves in the West with bits of Africa still all over us.

We are now living in Chattanooga- a Cherokee word meaning “rock coming to a point- what we call now "Lookout Mountain".  We have a lot of bridges here in the “Scenic City/ Gig City/ River City”.  One of the bridges is actually part of the historic Trail of Tears where Chief John Ross and the Cherokee Indians were forced out of Tennessee to Oklahoma by the president on the US 20 Dollar bill- another Tennessean.  So many bridges and transitions in my life, but nothing like the Cherokee went through here.  Little Miss calls out at all the bridges “Look!  Are we in London!?”

Yes, darlin, I too am disoriented with my body on one continent and my heart divided between two.  Two years ago 5-year old Man-cub explained to his sister “We don’t have a home now, we just live free in the wild”.  And again it feels like we are in the wilderness walking by faith one day at a time.  In being cross-cultural workers, we have chosen to take this shaky, chaotic, risky life of un and re-settling.  But we get to bring worlds together.

And there are not many people on earth that might be more blessed or more thankful than we are.

What is it?

June 24

Karen Blixen once said, “The cure for anything is salt water- sweat, tears, or the sea.”

Daktari agreed with this home remedy at last, so we went for a few days where the salt water of Zanzibar would wash over us enough that we could begin the painful process of physically leaving Kenya.  Some would call it a beach vacation.

I called it our “Last Resort in Africa” time.

June 30

This was the night we flew.

There was a none-too subtle American lady there at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.  I call them the Pushy-Affluent-White-lady types (PAWL).  She didn’t like that our family had 13 pieces of luggage to check in. “Hey! What is it blocking the line? How can I get checked in?” (How can I serve my own needs in the midst of bigger needs?) I smile and apologetically wave to say, “It’s me.  We are moving.  Sorry.” (In Kenya everyone always says sorry to express sympathy with what the other may be feeling at the time)  And the PAWLady bellows across the lines “That’s not my problem”. 

Well, it actually was her problem precisely.  And sadly she was the one losing face in front of every Kenyan there for showing her “temper” in public.

Ah, Americans.  Is that what you’re going to be like?

I began having second thoughts about boarding the plane.

July 12

Silver sprinkles of shad minnow raining upwards from the glossy surface of the Tennessee River,

The whitetail near the road and myself, we shared a secret.

It was about how the beauty stopped me in my tracks,

How it brought a tear to my thankful eye.

How lovely a white and pink tipped puff of ethereal, ephemeral delicacy

Could be growing on the hardiest terrain of steep banked country roads.

A wild mimosa tree, proud as a peacock with the glorious flowers for feathers- but silent too, like the whitetail that went bounding through the woods after it got over my non-sense.

Ah, America.

There is beauty in the rare quiet here.

July 16

It’s so hot you can break a sweat without even working and you can wear shorts to let your legs breathe in the sunshine and freedom of living like a PAWL.  Oh, Lord I am one of them after all, aren’t I?

Jupiter and Venus are still up there in the night sky.  We saw them from Zanzibar too.  It feels like Jupiter and Venus are closer to me than my life in Kenya now.  How can we even be on the same terrestrial ball?

But the round white Queen Anne’s Lace is crusting the fields like manna every morning.

What is it?

It is like daily bread in this wilderness time.

Reminding me: He provided for our ancestors here. 

He will provide for my needs too, one day at a time.

There is beauty in taking life one day at a time.

There is Life in taking beauty one day at a time.

And then Uncle Glenn pulls up in his farm truck.

He’s saying to his sister on the phone

“well, I gotta go down to thu co-awp

and git some fertilahzer, and you never know what might come up then,

so I cain’t say fer sure what time I’ll be there”.

That sounded just like Africa.

It was a beautiful and gloriously grounding moment for me.

Karen Blixen also said “God made the world round so that we’d never be able to see too far down the road”.

August 16

Sunday.  Today we got to join in the Lord’s Supper.

Little round flakes of white that we eat.  Not ephemeral, nor ethereal, but solidly grounding the truth of heaven come down to earth.

What is it?

The Bread that came down from Heaven for the Life of the world.

Every side of this world.

Meeting our needs one day at a time.

like magic-

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As we drove away there at the end, two big crowned cranes were flaunting their feathers and trying to intimidate a goose off of her nest so they could eat the eggs.  We weren’t sure what sort of bird it was at first so- Stop the car! We got out for a closer look.  When the noise of the driving engine is stilled and you hear only the quiet crunch of grass and feel the intense equatorial UV rays all of a sudden, you get out of the car and feel the earth below and the sky above and you feel the freedom of the wild all around.  It's like magic.

Then we saw something else.  The unexpected tall heads pop up out of the trees.  Look!  Another one! Wow, over there! The Maasai Giraffes suddenly grazing on treetops just on the other side of the road.  One, two, three, four, o look at the baby!….Twenty!  With giraffes a big group like this is not called a herd or a pack.  They are called journey.

Man-Cub and I walk towards them.  I know they can kill a lion with a mere flick of the foot, but we don’t stand a chance of getting THAT close to them.  They, from on high sense our presence and turn in unison to look our way.  They are silent and gentle giants and we sense their presence too.  Each one stares at the other in expectation. 

My friend Beth gently helped me to learn about expectations.  My expectations often handicapped my experience of life in community.  When I wanted someone to be like me or think like me, I missed the true beauty of that person and our relationship was hindered.  Once my expectations opened up for people to be free as other and not just what I wanted them to be, then the wonder and the joy of relationship to God’s creation opened up. Beth is good at that.

So we watch the giraffes from waaaaaay down below and we step towards them in wonder-filled awe.  They stand their ground.  We step again and they turn the other way. We step up our pace to a trot and they begin to amble with two left legs and two right legs.  It looks like magic.  We begin to run and they, like a dream, move in silence and slow motion.  But they gain so much ground with each step that they are gone in no time.

They are a journey.  We too, are moving step by step in the journey.

"Your life is a journey, you must travel with a deep consciousness of God" I Peter 1:17 The Message

Then Again, Do Ask Me

Then again do.

Do ask me how it’s been.

I may give a blank stare and try to gauge your level of interest. But I do long to tell you.  I long for you to know. But these are things I might not tell you in person.

Ask me how was it, and I might say I was so made for this awkward cross-cultural thing.  We are really blessed so much by this experience that we might walk with Jacob’s limp for the rest of our lives.

If you ask are we going back, I will gaze with uncertainty and wish I could answer you in Kiswahili: Mungu atasema. (God will say).  The language and the culture here have a high tolerance for uncertainty. Most North Americans will find that (and me now) highly frustrating.

Ask Man-Cub how it was and he will answer “good”.  That is probably sufficient for most askers.

Yes there are stories of lions, elephants, giraffe chasing, and pure exhilaration.

But if you really want to know, catch me at the right time, send sonar signals telling me you really want to know, and I might tell you something like:  *proceed with caution as you may not want to read aloud the following:

Subsistence farmers with overdrafted bank accounts from buying maize seed that would not grow in a place with no buffers, no insurance for that sort of thing, symbolic mangled up guard rails along the precipice of the highway.

Rheumatic heart disease killing women because they had simple strep throat untreated so many times in life that her own immune system turns on her and infects the heart.  The heart that is to beat twice its normal capacity during pregnancy and just. Cant. Sustain. Anymore. Pressure.

She dies of a broken heart for another baby girl born in Kenya with no mama to love.

A few days ago, my friend Amy rescued 2 newborn baby girls who were victims of attempted infanticide.  One was left to exposure in the rain by the river overnight.  She is malnourished, but found in time to live.  The other. The other girl is probably a month old and has a broken arm.  It broke when she was. When she was thrown into a pit latrine.

Psalm 11

In the Lord I take refuge.        Selah.

How then can you say to me ‘ flee like a bird to your mountain’?  For look, the wicked bend their bows; they shoot from the shadows at the upright in heart.  When the foundations are being destroyed what can the righteous do?

The Lord is in his holy temple. 

The Lord is on his heavenly throne.

(Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple? I Cor 3:16)

God is living in people like Amy.  She rescued these precious daughters of God because Amy is a little piece of the Kingdom of God.  She rescues children and people like me.  She is a friend who will help me in my loneliness; she packs my junk and gives a friendly Kenyan “push” when it’s time to go.  She will continue doing her work because of what God has done in her life.  

Some missionaries will try to tell you “you ought to be doing” (Most religions of the world are based on that idea).  But the Good news tells us “He has done it”.  He has done all the rescuing of all the cosmos and he has encountered all of this suffering in his own heart. 

What he has done is the long list of beautiful tiny bricks being laid in the Kingdom of God.  It may be a Kingdom that looks like mud huts, and milk cows for widows, and school fees for teenage girls.  He has done it.  He has built into his Kingdom medical training for young Kenyan healthcare workers.  He has built into his Kingdom more equipped Sunday School teachers.  He has built into his Kingdom a local translation of the Bible study that gives a storying pattern for the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation seven times over.  He has built into his Kingdom the encouragement of medical staff and treatment of patients with love and respect.  And, He has healed.  His Kingdom does bring healing.  The mortality rates are high, but then again we are all of us, mortal.  But about 80% of the medical patients are discharged in better health.

Though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.  This is my Father’s World.

Sometimes it does feels like the gates of Hell are not far from the front door.  But then again, we know that they will not stand up against us.  The Kingdom is being built here after all.  So we opened the door.  Thank you for supporting us through it all for these past 2 years.  The Kingdom of God is at work in you too.

Tonight we take off to London with the full moon and the stars of the southern hemisphere and fly straight on till morning.  O Lord, Let your Kingdom come on earth as it is in Heaven.

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