Words and Pictures: 2 weeks in review

Two weeks.  Two sons arrive, and leave.  Two trips, each two nights, one to West Virginia at the beginning to my roots, one south at the end to look at 4 colleges.  Two holidays, Easter and my mom's 77th birthday.  Too many decisions, because every hour between all that was spent sorting through boxes of every letter ever received, text books, trophies, clothes, scrapbooks.  Making decisions about furniture and mirrors and dishes and towels and tupperware.  Too much to describe, so here are a few words and phone-photos to illustrate.

COLD

EXPLORE

JUNK

HOLY

PURGE

COLLEGES

FAMILY

RECONNECTING

GOODBYES

'

April Madness: CSB to Regional Football (soccer) Tournament!

This is from our acting Team Leader in Bundibugyo.  Please consider helping.  This was a huge part of our life, and our kids'.  Go CSB!!

Dear Friends of CSB,

We are now one month away from wrapping up our first term of the 2013 school year at Christ School Bundibugyo.  The students have picked up where they left off from last year's studies and been hard at work both in the classroom and on the soccer field.  Since soccer is a first term sport, much anticipation has been building for our boys and girls soccer teams to see if they can improve on last year's performances.  

In 2012, our boys team won the district and qualified at regionals for the national tournament.  At the national tournament they finished the best out of their region!  It was a wonderful way to end their season.  

The road to nationals was a bit different for our girls last year.  All girls teams in Uganda were invited to come to nationals.  While they didn't have the excitement of a district nor regional tournament, they had a great experience of competing at the national level and came away with one win!  This year, the girls are required to follow the same course as the boys by first qualifying at the district and regional levels in order to play at nationals.

I'm proud to say that BOTH of our teams finished top in the district this season!  I can't say that the season didn't have it's fair share of "bumps along the road," but I can say that CSB was resilient and ran two very honorable programs.  

Funding the regional and national tournaments are a challenge for us since we are never guaranteed a spot for competing at these levels, which makes them difficult to plan for.  The regional tournaments for both teams will be held in Fort Portal from April 11-13.  We believe that these tournaments are a great opportunity for our students to represent Christ to the rest of the country and expose them to places and experiences outside of their daily routines.  This is truly an exciting opportunity for each of our players.

Would you help send our teams to the regional tournaments this year?  If so, please make a donation here:  http://www.whm.org/project/details?ID=11024

If you would like to, you can mention "Soccer Tournaments" in the comments section.  

God bless you all for your generous hearts towards the people of Bundibugyo.

Michael

Obscurity, inefficiency, and space for hope

All week I've been thinking about the Good Friday sermon from our main sending church, Grace OPC.  We are very blessed to have this congregation partnering with us, more than partnering, making the last two decades possible.  But that's another story.  Seven years ago we were called home early from this service to say goodbye to my Dad, who had whispered "go home" and slipped out of consciousness shortly after, until he finally died in a thunderstorm at midnight Easter night.  This is the first time we've been back for Easter, appropriate timing for my mom's last hurrah at her home.  Luke was able to skip class on Thursday and take an overnight train to DC where we picked him up at dawn, so miraculously we were all together for a sweetly meaningful passover meal.  Then my sister and family drove up from NC so by Friday we were 13 in the house, and off to church together Friday night.

Pastor Clifford preached on the Road to Emmaus, the two men who were anxiously discussing the political events of the weekend as they walked.  He reminded us that Jesus came in obscurity, veiled, slowly and patiently engaging these two minor disciples.  He did not make his presence clear.  He did not take the most efficient route to recognition.  He asked questions and brought them incrementally to understanding.  He had to peel away their hopes for a quick victory to open them up to a bigger vision, a bigger hope.  

And so it continues, today.  Jesus' presence is rarely clear.  There are many more seasons of a slow slogging walk with ambiguity.  Perhaps because Jesus and Bundibugyo were so tied together for me, the last couple years feel this way.  The kingdom comes inefficiently, led by one who chose to make his first resurrection appearances to a crying woman and two men who missed the whole point and were distant from leadership.  And the clearing away of false hopes can feel painful, as the messianic vision was redefined.  Certainly I have a concrete sense of this over the last two weeks, throwing out and selling, purging to make space for a new sense of home.  I remember a definition (?Flannery O'Connor?) of home:  the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.  We've landed at 118 Lake Drive fleeing war, sick and weary, or just in between worlds, without other options, and we've always found ourselves taken in to warm beds and abundant food and laundry and convenient access to the airport and patient storage of years of accumulated this and that.  Now that is being cleared away, making space, we have to trust, for something better.

The Jesus of Resurrection appears in the shadows of a dying day, on dirt road, on foot, to a small audience.  Pastor Clifford reminded us that the disciples had to learn the connection between failure and redemption.  

Which is uncomfortable, and yet a comfort.  

Closure on a long, good, ride

This evening the four Kenya Myhres will board an airplane for Dulles Airport in Virginia.  We will reach our 20-year-milestone of Africa service this year.  And for all those 20 years, 118 Lake Drive in Sterling has remained our stateside home base.  This was my home through half my childhood, and my mom has lived there for 40 years.  We have fled there with practically nothing (a cardboard box tied with string of the hand-me-downs given after a war drove us out).  We have celebrated births (Julia's) and mourned deaths (my Dad's) within those walls, concocted meals on that screened porch, squeezed cousins and kids into those beds, watched slides, decorated for Christmas, played ping-pong, read and worked on those tables.  It's only a ten minute drive from Dulles, an easy place to access from overseas, and less than half an hour from the church to which we all belong and which remains our stalwart of support.

But this home has become too much for my mom to manage alone, and without us nearby to help her, she has decided to sell and move nearer to my sister in Charlotte.

So this tacking-point of stability is about to be pulled out.  I'm sure we won't even realize how much we counted on 118 Lake Drive as a foundation until it is gone.

As a final moment of grace, God allowed Caleb's Spring break to overlap with my sisters' kids vacation, with Easter weekend, and with my mom's plan to put her house on the market, so we will all converge to reminisce and clean and pack and sort and throw away.  And to celebrate Easter together, a rare event.

We personally have WAY TOO MUCH accumulated detritus of decades, shoes we thought we'd need again, sweaters, photos, the kind of thing that is not practical to pack in a suitcase for Africa but also hard to toss, tucked under beds and in the tops of closets or boxed in the basement.

So pray for wisdom in what to do with things.  Courage to let go.  The right balance of sentiment and practicality.  Sensitivity to each other.  Sheer determination to get it done.  We so rarely help my mom with much of anything we'd like these two weeks to be a blessing to her.

Another step in the journey of being at home all places and no place, of longing for eternity, of finding a balance between modeling the heavenly mansion and yet being willing to let go of any claim to such security on earth.

Globalization . . . can be beautiful

In the last week, as a mom of teens nearing the end of term, I have proofread thousands and thousands of words of research papers on:  AIDS (the reasons for resurgence in Uganda, response); Louisa May Alcott (post-transcendentalist nature); Food Irradiation (safety?); Terrorism (to negotiate or not); and Globalization (is it ruining our world?).

In the spirit of the last one, a tale of the beauty of globalization.

Scott discharged a patient yesterday.  He was a teenager growing up in Somalia, where the infrastructure of life has been decimated by war.  So he was sent to secondary school in Tanzania, where he became quite ill.  He travled to a hospital in Uganda where he was diagnosed with TB, but after failing to improve on his medicines, he quit taking them, and went to Nairobi where he has cousins.  After a long hospitalization at a private hospital with dwindling health and on the point of death, he came to Kijabe which is well known and trusted in the Somali refugee/exile community.  Scott and others puzzled and probed and spoke often on the phone with his brother in OHIO who had funded twenty thousand dollars worth of care so far for naught.  Meanwhile the best speakers of his native language and patient advocates here are Germans who visited and prayed.  Scott was able to connect with two French doctors working for MSF who have a lab that tests for drug-resistant TB, and made the diagnosis that this teen's problem was indeed very serious, life-threatening TB which was "MDR", multi-drug resistant.  The MSF team of Somali-Kenyans came out to Kijabe with specialized hard-to-access drugs.  A few weeks later this teen was walking, talking, laughing, alive, on his way from skeleton to healthy young man once again.  The brother in Ohio wired the modest hospital fees to Kijabe (compared to the previous outlay) and he was discharged into the care of the Nairobi cousin and the MSF clinic in town as an outpatient.  Everyone is rejoicing.

That's more than a half-dozen countries all coming together to save this kid's life.  And I suspect that this story is not over, more will be written.

Globalization CAN be beautiful.

PS.  Here is the Nursing Director for all of South Sudan visiting Kijabe where she is working with an American anesthesiologist in a Kenyan program to train the new country's first dozen Registered Nurse Anesthetists.  Case in point.

Holding On

Last time we were in the States we had a slide show to the tune of "hold on, to the One who's holding you . . ."  Because holding on seems to be about as much as we can manage, and even that is only possible because we're held.

This has not been an easy term.  Life seems to escalate week by week, and we've found ourselves way too scattered.  This weekend has been a welcome respite of breathing space, and offered some reflection on survival.

So I offer these holding-on points.

First and foremost, transformation from within, which if you read this sign you'll see is the theme for the year for Kijabe hospital.  This was from last week's chapel.  I'm reading, slowly, Practicing the Presence of God, by Brother Lawrence.  I've become harried and distracted and not very nice a lot of the time.  I need a heart that dwells with God to hold on through the days.

Second, thankfulness.  As I rush back and forth from hospital to home  I have been trying this week to call to mind something to be thankful for.  I think I'm like this preterm baby (born in a car, but doing quite well).  I think my little incubator world is all there is, and take for granted that someone will provide all the necessities of life from outside.  But one day this baby will leave his box, and one day we'll see the reality of eternity and how limited our view was in expecting all our needs to be met.  So I'm trying to remember to practice thankfulness.

 Third, sharing the battles.  This is Erika, treasure hunting.  As in cleaning out boxes of disorganized medical supplies to find the treasures therein.  To hold on requires friends, and she has been a great friend these last six months.  Last weekend I was on call and it just felt like everything fell apart.  The monitors were beeping without stop, the nursing staffing was inadequate, the casualty paged the wrong numbers for a code, a crib we sent for repair came back still in dangerous condition, I went to a delivery for a baby with meconium and the proper equipment was missing (the baby was fine), and on and on.  Monday I said to Erika, I can plow through the details of the medical care for these 20 or 30 babies, or I can fight the long-term battles of organization and equipment and nursing and politics.  But I really don't think I can do both.

Her own departure had been successfully delayed by two weeks (YEAHH).  So as I did rounds this week, in she came to plunge into all the other muck.  Lo and behold, she got these guys from biomed to come in and fix the lights on our warmers.  I got the nurses to replace all the monitor probes, and when one baby's jaundice just wouldn't improve we got that light changed too.  We met with the nursing director yet again about staffing.  Erika found TWO of the small missing pieces of suction equipment I needed.  She's made tremendous progress on locating a piece of lab equipement within the realms of possible fund-raising affordability that would greatly improve care.  And on and on.

The point is, the battle is a strenuous and unending one, and we all need champions.  I'm thankful for our tremendous paeds team.

 Fourth, family. Mine are an anchoring reality of love and belonging.  Here is Julia with the girls' varsity soccer team at our house for their end-of-season pizza party.  She was given the "St Peter Award", for being a key ROCK on which the team was built.

My rock is Scott, and I am blessed by all my kids.

(Jack's friends Rich and Ali "helping" him with a homework problem while Acacia looks on)








And speaking of thankfulness AND family, here is Caleb at the Recognition Dinner, the milestone of making it through the 9 months of being a first year cadet and being fully accepted into the USAFA.  We are very very proud of his perseverance through difficulty and of the hard work he's put into school and into his physical therapy for healing his knee.

 Lastly, nature.  There is something about a hike that restores the soul.  Acacia gamely went on a long wander with me this week, climbing the ridge above the school on newly forged paths.  We almost got lost, but we managed to find our way back eventually.  The scramble, the breathlessness (me), the sunshine, the happy dogs, the forest, the Longonot view, the refreshing absence of noise and people and instead the peace of the woods and wind.

So, inner spiritual strength, thankfulness, shared battles, the foundation of family, and hours in nature. Five ways to hold on.

Swallowed, stinging

Then shall be brought to pass the saying "Death is swallowed up in victory."  O Death, where is your sting? (1 Cor 15:54-55)

Our community is feeling the sting, even though we wait for the swallow of victory.

And from a source we don't usually count in our top ten Africa worries. Cancer.

As I write, two women in my age range, both former missionaries here who are wives of former Kijabe doctors, are dying of metastatic breast cancer in the US.  Both are surrounded by friends and family, both have passed beyond the possibility of anything but an 11th hour miracle to delay their final journey.  Both are women of faith who will leave behind teens and older kids who still need them, much as Betty Heron did over 12 years ago.

As I write, I know of a team of 20-30 somethings with the second diagnosis of cancer in two years.  This is a small team.  This is a relatively cancer-free age group.  Both were diagnosed because of persistent symptoms that may or may not have been related directly to the cancer, but led to life-saving investigation.  Both should recover with surgery and medical care, but not before a road already marked by suffering becomes a lot harder.  And not before the people they went to serve miss them, terribly.

As I write, a family from the other major mission hospital in Kenya holds a memorial service for their 13 month old daughter who died from a brain tumor.  She went into cardiac and respiratory arrest Tuesday night, had a CT scan revealing a large aggressive mass, and was brought in critical condition to Kijabe on Wednesday for surgery.  Her family had only arrived in Kenya five weeks earlier, a doctor dad and a mom with 3 boys and this little girl who kept vomiting.  Their eloquent journey of faith is told here:  http://www.aaroninkenya.com/.  In spite of excellent surgical and ICU care, we could not reverse the damage this tumor had already done, and she died yesterday morning.  This dad's blog response is absolutely worth reading.

That's five saints in a week, ages 13 months to 50-something, one dead, two dying, and two figuring out life with surgery and chemo and radiation and delays.

Which just reminds us that this world is a broken place, where innocent people are caught in the crossfire of evil.  But where community and love and prayer and hope bring beauty all the same.

I'm way on the periphery of all these stories, praying for the ladies with breast cancer in my Thursday prayer group, emailing and talking with missionaries on distant teams, and helping coordinate and mobilize the less-then-24-hours of intense effort for the toddler.  When she arrived in a flurry of doctors from her own mission hospital and our normal ICU staff, I could see pretty quickly that extra hands were not needed.  So when the surgeon asked for a donor for O+ blood, I jumped on giving the one thing I could offer.

Which wasn't enough.

But which symbolizes pretty powerfully all we do, be it prayer or diagnosis or surgery or baking or driving or fundraising.  It's our life, our blood, sweat, and tears, pouring out for redemption, an imitation and partnership with Jesus.

Because God didn't rewind the world to erase evil.  And He doesn't stop evil on every front at every moment.  But by the blood and by word (Rev 12:11) we are part of that death-swallowing victory, the one that overcomes evil in the end, that writes a good ending to all these stories that look pretty dismal at the moment, that transforms five cancers into a weight of glory.