hunting for mercies . . .

In the last 24 hours as we attempted to leave Uganda, we had a
punctured tire on a fully loaded truck that forced us to drive the
dangerous road to Entebbe in the dark, spent a long time looking for a
place to eat that never materialized, found ourselves unprepared for
the cost of the guest house where we stopped off for six hours, woke
at 2:45 am for our 5 am Kenya airways flight to Nairobi . . only to
be kept mysteriously waiting to the side for about an hour at the
check-in desk until they finally told us our flight to Zanzibar had
been cancelled. Why did we try to go on sabbatical? Weren't we tired
enough already? I have to admit our general response to these
setbacks has been to complain and feel abandoned. Kenya Airways did
send us on to Nairobi at 5 am when they determined they could add us
onto a late evening flight to Zanzibar. We were not relishing 13
hours in the Nairobi airport: think stuffy, airless, broken linoleum
corridors, scant fixed hard plastic chairs along the walls, crowds of
shifty businessmen and confused grandmothers, surly staff. The new
schedule puts us into Zanzibar about 9pm, meaning closed grocery
stores and a long drive in the dark to our rental home.

So when we went to the transfer desk for our new boarding passes, it
was with only the tiniest kernel of faith that we asked if we could
get a day room. What looked like a bleakly hellish day has turned
into an extravagantly undeserved taste of mercy. OK we did have to
fill out six copies of about three different forms with every possible
number, date, and signature, but eventually we ended up with free
transit visas, free day rooms, and free lunch, at a luxurious hotel.
This is not the kind of place missionaries stay. Hot showers, fluffy
beds for napping, football on TV, air-conditioning, fresh flowers in
the tasteful lobby. We were plucked out of tedious discomfort and
dropped into a pocket of peace. A good sign for the three weeks
ahead? After a nap and a delicious lunch, we have hope.

En Route

Stage One of the journey: getting out of Bundibugyo, into the Kampala
decompression chamber, the almost-but-not-quite on leave experience.
Luke personally arranged for a hike over the mountains, inviting a
young German staying in Bundibugyo named Hendrick (the only other
foreigner in our neck of the woods, he's bonded with our team a bit!),
Ashley, Sarah, Caleb, and Scott to join him in the footpath that leads
from Bundibugyo Town to Bukuuku on the Fort Portal side. It is almost
20 km, straight up and straight down, the Bakonjo are not big
believers in the switch-back concept. Before we could leave we had
been called in the middle of the night and early morning to see our
ailing neighbor, so in spite of the efforts to bring closure and tie
up loose ends we left with uncertain and heavy hearts. I drove with
Heidi, Jack and Julia, covering about three times the distance in the
winding ascent over the mountain range's northern spur, and along the
steep winding valley on the eastern side. We took our time since we
knew we'd have to wait for the hikers, and were delighted by a
crashing troop of black and white colobus monkeys jumping over the
truck through the tree tops, and a flock of hornbills rising as we
did. Meanwhile the hiking group set a near-record time of 5 hours
(what happens when you combine teenagers with cross-country
runners . . .).

Over the weekend we took care of some pre-trip necessities, including
updating Jack and Julia's yellow fever vaccines (every 10 years, but a
decade has flown by!) and visiting immigration as part of the process
of updating our work permits (every three years), replaced some ever-
puncturing tires, made bank visits. We are usually in Kampala for
only a day or two on a quick turn around, so having almost four days
and NOT heading directly back to Bundi is unusual, adding the the
decompression effect. Two highlights of being out of Bundi far
enough to pause and refocus, but not far enough to be on total
vacation: we were able to make visits to Matte in International
Hospital's Hope Ward. He proudly announced that he's up to 24
kilograms, being fed porridge and ensure through a jejunostomy tube,
and evidently absorbing his TB medicines more adequately this way. We
took him some art supplies and a math book, imagining his lonely days
in the cheerfully clean and modern (though to him sparse and sterile)
hospital.

And secondly we were able to take the Jonah family out for a day at
the spectacular pool outside of town where our own mission treated our
team as a Christmas present. Melen and baby Jonah, Masika, Biira,
Magga, Karen, and Sarah. Slowly they began to relax and smile,
splashing in the water, being coaxed into the spacious grass to kick
around a soccer ball, giggling over cards. The younger girls are now
more used to us than the older ones who are in boarding school. Melen
radiates serenity as she oversees her family, she's pretty amazing.
The impact on the older girls though is significant, they are
hesitant, not trusting life in the same way. And they don't want to
talk about Jonah, at least not to me, yet. It at least does our souls
good to extract them for a day from the muddy tumble of inner-city
housing, from the trash-laden noisy streets, and bask in sun and water
and games and togetherness.

We head to Entebbe tonight, our plane to Nairobi then Zanzibar departs
at 5 a.m. Tuesday. Prayers much appreciated once again, for filling
with the presence of God to enable us to love each other, to minister
to each other as we take our rest together.

On Sabbatical

And on the seventh day, even God rested, which was meant to teach us a pattern of rest. May will be the seventh month since the ebola outbreak was announced last November, and with the Uganda year-round school schedule giving our kids a holiday, it seems to be a good time to fulfill the wise mandate from our mission leadership that we also rest. Tomorrow we head out, first to Kampala to work on renewing our work permits (the visas that allow us to stay in Uganda year after year) and then next week to Zanzibar. We were looking for remoteness, quiet, water, privacy, visual peace, renewing beauty, and we think we have found it in a beach-front house on the coast of the Indian Ocean. When we were floundering about what to do and where to go, the owner of this home wrote and offered us a great deal for our three-week stay (it’s rainy season, but what can you do about that if your kids are off school in May) that made it very affordable and was worded in such a way that we sensed God’s hand in the opportunity. So for three weeks we will be on sabbatical, just our family. Thanks to visitors and packages we’ve managed to accumulate 22 brand new unread kid/teen great books, which means our readers can devour one per day in between swims in the ocean. That’s our basic plan: swim, walk, read, talk, process, pray, sleep.

First though, we have to make it out of Bundibugyo, which with just over 12 hours to go still feels intimidating and by no means certain. With a few days in Kampala on either side of the three weeks, not to mention a full day of driving just to get to Kampala each way . . .we will be away from home a month. That means lots of planning ahead for the complex web of relationships, workers, patients, team, friends . . . Even our two cows and our dog. It is not easy to walk away, and though we know we desperately need time to focus on our kids, each other, our own souls before God . . . It is not without considerable guilt that we pull away from the glaring needs here for so long. It steels me to know that Jesus did the same thing, even when the crowds demanded food and leadership, he disappeared into the mountains to pray, and I’m sure some children died while he was up there that He could have saved. We do our best to leave contingency plans and supplies, but eventually we have to just go. It is particularly wrenching to leave our elderly and ill neighbor, and we do so praying that he will hold on until we return.

The place sounds relatively rustic and remote, so I have no idea if we will be fully unplugged . . . If so, then come back in late May to visit this site again. In the meantime pray that we would spend the next three weeks in this way (from Marva Dawn’s Truly the Community)
Central to our theology, then, is giving up our attempts to love . . . The first epistle of John essentially describes how love can be without hypocrisy . . Can we grow in love by trying to love more? No, our attempts to love will only end in more frustration and less love. The solution, John implies, is to know God better. This is so simple that we miss it all the time: our means for becoming more loving is to know God better.

Pray that rest would allow us to soak up God’s presence, and in knowing Him better we would return to our life with love.

April Prayer Letter available

Our latest WHM Prayer Letter has been sent to the printer. For those of you on our mailing list with World Harvest Mission, you'll be receiving your hard copy in the mail with a week or so.

For those of you not on our WHM mailing list, you may download a pdf version (544K) of the letter from the "Downloads (pdf)" link on the right side bar.

The letter includes previously unpublished poetry from Jennifer.

If you enjoy the letter and would like to receive a hard copy in your mailbox, email WHM..

Two Burials and a Wedding

The ratios of weddings to funerals is a bit different here in Bundibugyo than the popular movie title. I would estimate I’ve been to 10 to 20 funerals for every one wedding . . .

Yesterday two of our friends, people who live within a stone’s throw of the mission, buried children. Both had died before receiving medical attention: the first was the boy brought dead to the hospital on Friday. The father of the second called me at 6:30 Saturday morning. His wife had delivered twins at the hospital the day before, and taken them right home. He called to say that one had died during the night and the other did not look well. I was there within fifteen minutes, and had them to the hospital a few minutes later, where my favorite night nurse Agnes was still competently on duty. The grief for one twin had to be put aside to focus on saving the life of the other, so the mother stayed in the hospital with Isingoma while the father prepared for the burial of Nyakato at home.

Then it was on to the wedding: once again the paradoxes so poignantly juxtaposed. And what a day it was. Scott will have to post pictures because the verbal description of the day will not do it justice. We picked up Lynn Leary and her pastor Mike at the airstrip with Pat, back home to quickly change into wedding clothes and decorate the truck with balloons, then on to Ndyezika’s house at exactly 10 (he was very concerned to be punctual) where everyone who could manage piled onto our vehicle. I think Scott counted 20, singing our way slowly to Bundibugyo town, bearing the groom. Meanwhile Massos had taken the girls up to Juliet’s uncle’s home where they bride’s party assembled. Naomi and Liana were flower girls, and Julia and Acacia something like junior bridesmaids. We waited at the church in Bundibugyo town, a crumbly mud-brick but large building that left one questioning whether it was never quite finished or suffered irreparable war damage. The drab church did not matter when the energetic gospel choirs began singing, swaying, clapping. After an hour or more the bride finally arrived, resplendent in white and veil, with her entourage of attendants. Juliet looked stunningly beautiful and happy, and though Ndyezika tried his best to remain appropriately solemn he also broke into the occasional grin. The vows, rings, prayers were pretty much a straight translation from a traditional Anglican service, with the added African element of the attentive best man and matron of honor (our neighbor and friend Buligi and his wife Asita) compulstively dabbing the sweat from the bride’s and groom’s brows, arranging the veil, smoothing imaginary wrinkles or brushing off flecks of dust. Though the service began at a good pace, there were at least three pastors involved in different capacities, a very long but good sermon from Genesis 2 with an emphasis that the phrase “it is not good for a man to be alone” should not be used to justify taking two wives, and an admonition that the families of these two could no longer call them away from each other or interfere in their marriage. There were more songs, offerings, and a very specific and formal process of signing the marriage certificate. Our girls sat patiently up front through it all, smiling graciously again on the way out. Then it was once again chaotic, push and shove, staring onlookers, swarms of kids, trying to prioritize the people into the available vehicles.

By the time we got back to the Community Center for the reception it must have been between 2 and 3 pm . . . There was a diversion to the Masso’s yard for photo ops, the obligatory groupings. Then the reception took another 4 hours or so . . . And as Luke says, was run just like any and every public event that ever occurs here. Major invited guests up on stage in cushioned chairs. Next tier in some decent chairs facing each other across the front . . Then the masses on benches. Everyone sitting still forever, the prayers, the welcome from the LC1, the songs by choirs. The cake was presented and cut and they each fed each other a piece amidst much laughter, then it was basically crumbled into bite-size pieces to make it stretch for the several hundred onlookers, Julia and other bridesmaids serving. Scott was the “Guest of Honor” and in that capacity gave a speech honoring the families and the bride and groom, and pointing to Rev 21 and 22, the hope and beauty that is represented in a wedding being a picture of the “all things new” that God is doing in this world. He did a great job. There was another long interlude while Juliet changed into a beautiful gold gown and then had to ceremonially “search” for Ndyezika who was hidden in the crowd. Later they stood up front, something like a cross between a reception line and the offering at church, people came forward with gifts or money which they dropped into a basin as they shook hands. I’ve never seen so many gifts here, all wrapped in shiny crinkly paper, about half of them from the bride’s family. A CSB student and a CSB teacher each “mimed” (we would call it lip synched) songs played by the DJ in honor of Juliet, and Julia, Liana, and Miss Sarah actually sang “Father we Adore you” with a microphone in front of the whole crowd. By the time the “lunch” was served it was about 7 pm!!!

As soon as people ate the party began to dissipate. At that point we’d been on the go for over 12 hours, kids from the street were beginning to dart in and out hoping for leftover food, and Ndyezika’s friends (including me!) were worrying that the mountain of gifts would be stolen in the gathering darkness, so it was time to get them out. We loaded the entire back of the truck with the loot and the bride and groom and best man and matron into the car, and drove off to their new home. When we arrived some family were waiting, there was a lantern burning in the sitting room of the brand new little cement house that we helped Ndyezika build. Scott demonstrated how to carry the bride over the threshold by lifting me up to everyone’s entertainment, and they entered. We left them there with another gathering crowd, evidently ready to dance through the night out in the grassy yard.

All in all it was a successful day: a beautiful bride well honored, a happy groom whose patience at last paid off, families finally at peace over the arrangement, hard-working friends who spent hours hauling chairs and blowing up balloons and cutting flowers and cooking food. It was a testimony to marriage, to making a commitment BEFORE living together for years and having children, but AFTER finishing school (they were the same ages, 24 and 26, as Scott and I when we got married . . . ). It was an opportunity for our missionary girls to feel included and lovely themselves, to be part of the honored group, to participate. I am haunted by some lingering sadness that the western images of a wedding have so pervaded the African expectation, that the formality inherited over years of colonialism dampened the natural joy of the event. We are praying that the many younger people who witnessed this marriage will aspire to a similar path. And praying for Ndyezika and Juliet. This day was a culmination of many hopes and plans, but also only a beginning. A marriage that has boldly broken old patterns and declared itself before the world and the Lord will definitely come under attack, and they will have a long road ahead. But for today we are all resting in the joy.

More paradox on a Friday . . . .

In honor of Birungi Suizen’s discharge home today, a whopping 8.45 kg and one day short of a full two months in the hospital . . . I led the staff Bible study on Rev 21. Behold, I make all things new. Birungi is a first-fruit of the new world where hunger and tears are no more. He has a long way to go of course. Heidi baked muffins and we had a little party on his corner of the ward, with the seven nutrition patients and their moms that were his neighbors. The rest of the ward, however, is not exactly partying. 35 patients this morning, with two more sets of twins admitted before noon. There is still a little floor space but it is diminishing. By the second hour I was holding onto the fact that I know people are praying for Bundibugyo and praying for me, and I know that Jesus will make it all new, in spite of the misery which seemed to wash and swirl around me. Begging a young mother of a child with AIDS to get tested, to not run away from the hospital with her wilty sad little daughter, to have hope. Ludicrously asking a blind mother of malnourished twins to take them to the lab, as their odd orange starvation hair mingled in their push and shove on her lap for her tired breasts. Trying to engage little Robbinah, who seems to slip downward daily, with sickle cell disease and malnutrition and a mother with AIDS, stick-thin arms holding her cup of milk in her dingy dress that has “I love my Mommy” embroidered on the collar, a costume from another world. Pushing my thumb into the spongy edema that makes a malnourished 5 year old girl’s legs look like they could burst. Tracking down the absent lab man and the key so a deathly ill 3 year old just admitted could be tested for malaria. And on and on and on. Just as we came to the end of the long morning of desperation punctuated by the small rejoicing with Birungi . . . There was a commotion. I came to the door of the ward to find a mildly inebriated teenager holding a very pale boy, the young man sweating with the effort of having carried the kid as quickly as possible for help. “He’s dead, doctor” Margaret sighed as I listened to his chest hoping to hear a heart beat. Nothing. The boy was wearing a school uniform, and missing his front teeth, just like any 7 or 8 year old . . . But he was dead, limp, pale. His mother lay screaming and writhing on the floor, and when I looked up I realized that fighting off tears to the side was the same man Scott wrote about a few days ago (ironically in a post entitled "The Poor Never Get Sick"), a neighbor who just inherited the children of his brother who died of alcoholism. . . This was his actual son, his oldest, named Dan after Dan Herron, a kid whom I’ve treated many times, whom we’ve lived near his whole life. Tragically this was the healthiest kid in the family, there are others who have died or who barely manage to make it through another year with sickle cell, but Dan was tested negative. It seems he was taken to the grandmother’s house this week because school was essentially out . . But not until this morning did the parents learn that he’d had a fever for three days. Malaria most likely, we are having a deadly season of it. So this morning we celebrated one child rescued from the Destroyer, and mourned another who had no time to fight back, who was snatched before we could even enter the battle. Living here, I sense the appropriateness of the last words of the Bible: COME, Lord Jesus.

2 years and 10 years, milestones and memories

Today is 2 years since my Dad left this earth for Heaven, and 10 years since my nephew Noah left his mother’s womb for this earth.  Two birthdays, both celebrations if looked at from the right perspective . . . But both involved significant pain in the transition, significant change and the perception of loss, significant tears.  I’m thinking about my Dad a lot.  My neighbor John M is only two years older than my Dad would have been, and his immobility (from a hip fracture), his wasting body (cancer), his resilient spirit as bodily functions become problematic and public, his loyalty to us . . . Even his jaunty English cap . . . Remind me of my Dad.  I don’t know how long he has now, Scott had to put in a permanent catheter in his abdomen to relieve the pain of blocked urination, which was another similarity to my Dad’s last days.  As with my Dad, we are part-family and part-doctors, holding his hand and greeting but also taking his blood pressure and managing his medicines.  It is hard enough to walk this path with family, let alone cross-culturally with neighbors . . . Pray for us to do it well.

Caring for the Queen

I treated Queen Elizabeth today.  Yes, that was the name of the tiny febrile baby, born in the midst of the hype surrounding CHOGM and the royal visits to Uganda!  Queenie has become a rather popular name around here, and I have a second baby on the ward with just that name (no Elizabeth).  Also saw two babies named after local celebrities today:  Scott, the first baby born on the new maternity ward last July, to an HIV positive mother, his test results still pending but he looks great.  Parenthetically, she received a goat at the goat distribution which she also named Scott.  Scott the goat is providing milk for Scott the baby, who has weaned to try to save him from infection.  Later I dropped in on Baby Jonah, who smiled at me at 5 weeks, which I am sure is a sign of his precocity.  Being named after doctors is much better than one of my other patients, a now-4-year-old former premature baby boy born to an older HIV positive mother.  He was burdened at birth with not only HIV and prematurity, but the name Robert Mugabe.  I was sure his name fit his poor prognosis in life, and had no faith at all that he would make it.  But he’s fine, HIV negative and growing taller, and no one seems to mind that he’s named after an infamous dictator.  Perhaps that is because  names are so unimportant, countless times the parent has a blank stare when asked their child’s name, or their spouse’s name.  One of the services I offer I call “name consolidation”.  Many, many kids have major discrepancies between the names one parent or another or a grandparent use, one name on the immunization record and another name in the chart.  I resolutely insist that the mother choose the two names she wants to stick with and then I cross all the other ones out and rewrite her favorites on all official documents.  Even though no one but me really cares.

The poor never get sick

The angel of Death has racked up a lot of frequent flier miles for visiting Bundibugyo over the years.  

Last week Issac (no real names here), a 38-year old living immediately adjacent to our mission, died of chronic alcoholism.  He led a sad life of scraping by - mostly through stealing stuff from the mission - and squandering what he managed to scrape up.  The saddest part of his tale is what he leaves behind--four healthy kids with no legacy, no nothing.  These kids have been handed over to Charles, his brother, a former house worker to a WHM missionary family who have returned to the USA.  Charles  is unemployed (like 90% of those in Bundibugyo) and scraping by with intermittent manual labor and a subsistence garden.  

Charles showed up at our door on Saturday morning and reported that he now has eighteen mouths to feed two meals a day...and nothing in his pocket with which to buy food in the Saturday market.  I would skeptically brush aside such comments from many, but Charles tends toward the truth in a culture where words are a tool of manipulation and truth is, let us say, not a core value.

Consider for a moment what such a situation must be like. No money in your wallet, no money in the bank, no food in the pantry, no check in the mail, no security whatsoever. And a huge group of people expecting you to provide their next meal.  I'm afraid that the sense of desperation that I would feel in such a situation would reveal a heart of darkness rather than of faith.

So, I asked him to bring a day's worth of elephant grass for our cow and then gave enough cash to buy a day's worth of food for his burgeoning flock...and found him back at my door on Monday morning, hopeful for more work.   Not exactly what I had in mind.   So, after several minutes of agonizing I decided to give him a couple of days more worth of work clearing weeds and brush in our pasture.  Rarely, have I seen more work accomplished per hour.  It looks like he'll finish this job in a couple of days, hoping because of his strenuous efforts that he will have earned the privilege of gaining even more employment in the future.  

While Charles was down in the pasture and I contemplated this situation a week down the road, another former mission house worker, Mark, planted himself on our porch with his tale of woe.  He's not been around he said, because he's not been feeling well.  "So," I said, "you've been in bed at home?"   

"No. Scott, you know we have a proverb in Lubswisi - The poor never get sick."

"I don't think so," I said, "confidently. If anything, the poor are more likely to get sick.  Poor nutrition.  Poor sanitation.  Unclean water.  The poor get sick all the time."

"The proverb means", he said, "that the poor have no time to lay in bed, to recover, to play the role of a sick person.  We must bear our burden of sickness and continue our struggle to feed and clothe and educate our children."

I nodded in agreement.

How long, O, Lord, how long? -Psalm 6:3

Dancing on Monday

Today Birungi Suizen weighed 8.3 kg.  His target for minimum survivable weight for his length was 8kg (though it still leaves him WAY below the minimum size for age).  And he has gone in just a week from standing, to walking, to DANCING.  Yes, dancing.  Pat saw how much he liked listening to our cell phone rings, and managed to find him a gaudy pink plastic toy cell phone that plays obnoxious electronic riffs over and over.  He loved it, held it to his ear smiling and swaying, then stood at the end of the bed holding onto the rail, dancing.  He is the closest thing to the insubstantial nature of prayer taking form.  I’m sure we’ll never know how many people over this world have followed his resurrection journey, how many prayers lay behind those grams accumulating.  He is supposed to stay over target for a week to be ready to go home, something the other little baby boy with TB (Rick Tom, what a great name!) did today, all smiles as we sent him on the way.  My heart still cringes with the possibility that Suizen could fall apart again . . . But for today I rejoice in the dance.