Daily life

It is the end of week six in Africa, and I have been so excited to share the big events in my life that I realized I have yet to describe what happens each day. Each morning, I wake up around 7:10, dress in my scrubs, and head up to breakfast before it ends at 7:30. Lately, the meal of choice has been oatmeal with cinnamon, brown sugar, and peanut butter, and I look forward to it...mmmm . After breakfast Monday through Thursday, I attend a morning devotional or meeting with groups ranging from everyone aboard the ship to just the people working in the hospital. My favorite devotions are on Wednesdays, when all of the non-doctor/nurse health care staff meets to watch Rob Bell's Nooma series. These videos are incredibly insightful, beautifully made, and always very applicable in my life. A good friend and I have been watching them on our own and keeping each other spiritually healthy and growing as a result. Nooma comes with my highest recommendation for Christians at all stages wanting to learn God and life and how they are complexly intermingled.

After devotions, work begins around 8:15. I head down to deck three, the hospital level, and all the way to the aft of the ship where the cargo hold and Central Supply are located. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we spend the morning filling orders for the OR, Wards, and various outreach teams. I was so lost in the masses of supplies when I first started--imagine seven train car sized shipping containers filled to the roof with all sizes of cardboard boxes and only a small isle in the center to walk, in addition to an entire room of moving shelves in all of which to find one specific type of gauze! Thankfully, there is an organizational system. Supplies are organized by item number which we are able to search via a computer program. Each box has a bar code, and using our scanners, we can record the location of the box on a specific pallet. This information is transmitted from the scanner to the computer program, allowing us to see where each box of each item is located. Using a master list, we look up the location of the pallet then go to the corresponding container or shelf in central supply and search. I am smiling writing this because this system does seem logical, like it would be accurate most of the time, but every hour we don't spend filling orders, we work to make the system better match our actual inventory in both item location and number of boxes. The worst is when our computer says we have an item that the hospital desperately needs and we spend half an hour in the hold searching for it because the system was not correctly updated, only to concede that it isn't actually there. Let me explain that the hold is not a cool place. It is probably at least 85 degrees at all times and hotter when the welders are working--meaning instant scrub-drenching sweat after five minutes of work. In addition, there is a constant battle between available space and the arrival of new boxes. On any ship, you learn to value space as a premium commodity. Here, we receive new containers of supplies every few weeks at a rate that is a bit faster than the hospital uses them, sometimes requiring a good amount of creativity and box-battling in the unloading and placement process.

I finish work every day by five, have dinner and relish in the rest of my free night. Depending on the day, there is aerobics, ultimate Frisbee games, soccer, music, movies, games, meetings, and various bible studies, all of which anyone is welcome to attend. There are nights of conversation, both superficial and deep, and nights I spend on the top deck of the ship just praying and reading my bible. It is true that whatever you feel like doing after dinner, there is usually a place and people eager to join you. I love the nights, and more often then not, I'm counting down the hours of work until they come.

But more than nights, I love the weekends. There are always trips going out--I have been to two beautiful beaches, a pool, a forest, a historic slave trade village, the stilt village of Ganvie, and many times for walks into Cotonou for food, or into the markets, or just to see something new. I always try to save Sundays for rest, sometimes going to a local church in the morning, and other days just staying on the ship to do my laundry, have a nap!, read, email, and relax. Praise God for creating a break in our weeks!

Although sometimes the days and weeks run together, each one is made distinct by my personal interactions and what I'm learning. Our community is one of constant transition, so I am always meeting new people and saying goodbye to others I have grown to know. Having friends from so many backgrounds and different cultures is so interesting. It takes tangible proof to realize just how different various lives and stories can be from your own. I am coming to understand this much more quickly than I would have in the States and am so grateful for it. I have a bit more people time than I am comfortable with, but this is God changing me, teaching me to love in spite of just not feeling like it. At the end of each day, I am exhausted, but in a pleasant way. I am trying desperately to be connected to God more strongly than I have ever been, learning about prayer and how much spiritual conversation and friendship can carry you through a day. I am learning how to be open to loss and gain as it flows into my life. I am leanning that it doesn't take a major event to spark change in your life, but that you are shaped most powerfully by what you do normally, by living each day.

This Loss

Death is so real when it is this close. On Monday, I saw a baby die.

I was working, and my task was simple. A new supply container had just arrived, and we were unloading it, carrying stacks of boxes up the gangway and in to the hold of the ship. They were latex exam gloves, and we had to move them in first because all the wards had been out for a week. Two minutes before, I walked down to the dock and held my arms out to be loaded for the tenth time. I could have been inside the ship restocking, delivering to the wards these urgently needed gloves, in the bathroom, taking a water break, but I wasn't. It was no accident that from behind my wall of cardboard, I heard a wailing that I can still feel resonating inside of me. A woman, a mother, thrown to the floor was pounding her fists, smudges of wet around her on the green painted floor, and the sound coming from her was deep and gripping. I am told this is the African way to mourn. Her tears were violent, spreading like blood around a murder victim. They were her protest and her pain, and at first, I thought the doctor running in was coming to her. But he didn't. He stopped short and bent over the table, over a bundle of wrapped cloth, over her baby.

I remember what it looked like, and I remember knowing that it was dead before the doctor said anything. Its little body was still and rubber-like beneath the stethoscope. Its face was already dim, and it's closed eyes...I think anyone looking at the baby would know.

I have never experienced death this close. I had no idea how to deal with it. Death had never impacted me before. So I stood there shocked, and the tears started to come. I had to leave work. This woman had come to the ship because her child had a lump developing on its neck, and she was leaving it with this emptiness. Soon I was in my cabin, lying face down in my bed and scream-crying into my pillow. I looked like that mother, and I just kept thinking about what she was feeling, like her life had been ripped away. Later, I wrote in my journal that my soul was sore. I was still thinking about the baby well into the night, and I remember it today. I don't think it is something I will forget.

But this is the amazing part: that through it all, God is good and He is stronger. I was praying Sunday night on the top deck of the ship. It was getting towards the end of my time, when God gave me a verse. This is such a new thing for me. It has only happened once before, but I am learning more about what it means to pray. I saw it in my mind: Matthew 5:4 like the bright lines a flashlight makes once you close your eyes. I don't know the Bible well enough to have a clue what this verse says, and so I turned to it.

Blesses are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Sunday night, I thought about this verse in the context of mourning for the time I have spent away from God. Monday morning, it flew back to me, and I knew that God was with me as I watched that mother. Even more so, He was with her, comforting a mourner.

In my rational mind, I felt completely unprepared, taken utterly by surprise. I thought about how profound and shocking my experience of this death was because it was so unexpected. But in my heart, God had already given me a verse, so that I might be prepared. Doesn't He do this in all of our lives, if only we are aware? And so I know even more truly that right here, in Benin, in this darkness, tonight and always, that He is Lord.

African Church

In fitting with all of Benin I have seen, church today was unlike anything I have ever experienced. The congregation at the Pentecostal church planted by Mercy Ships in their 2001 outreach was small, only about sixty men, women, and children. They sat on rough wooden benches beneath a tin roof supported by tall branches. The sides of the building were palm thatched with a few bright orange silk flowers tucked in and the front was a cinder block wall where Assaga lizards, colored vibrant orange and blue, moved with the music like African children.

I love the way that the African people come to church. They are dressed in their best clothing, families wearing outfits cut from the same bright patterns. It is color, clean and fitted to their bodies, but it is also respect for a mighty god, that his people would worship him looking their best. The women are as loud as the patterns they wear. They dance to the music, singing stronger than microphones, their babies tied to their backs and bouncing as they celebrate the Lord. The men are passionate though less obvious in their praise, but they are singing, closing their eyes, and playing the drums that are the center of the music. The children all sit together, some happily joining in the worship, the older ones supporting the smallest kids still too little to know the words. Some dance up front with the women, smiling as they march in a circle. Others just stare ahead, wondering what this is all about. But I am most impressed by the girls, maybe ten years old, singing to God with their little brothers or sisters slung over their hips. I think they must know a lot about life.

The message this morning was simple and powerful. Delivered in three languages, I think it means the same thing to all of us. Matthew 26:39-42--Lord, let your will, but not mine, be done. At first, when the pastor announced that God has a plan for prosperity for all of us, I wondered, what is prosperity in Africa? I know what prosperity means in the West: a healthy family, a certain standard of living, material wealth, good friends, a successful career, happiness...but how do these standards compare to African ideas of prosperity? When the pastor asks his people, "Do you know that the glory of God is upon you?," what do the people of Benin envision? And then I realized that at its heart, prosperity is a deeper relationship with God. It comes from following after Him even when we cannot understand why, even in suffering. Maybe that is why I expected Africans to have a different sense of prosperity than me, because I believe that they have suffered so much more than I have. The pastor said to us, "You are crying deep down inside of yourself, but I am telling you that one day this will end." I think this promise is so great, but how much greater must it seem to the people of Benin?

When it came time for the offering, the music started up loud and joyful. The song only had four words: Our God is good. And every single member of the church danced up front and dropped something in the offering box. I am still shocked by the joy in giving. Though these people have so little, they are still happy to give away. I am ashamed of my own reluctance when I see this. I will try hard never to forget the way that African people share.

At the end of the service, the pastor asked our group to speak and pray for the church. The lady who spoke for us was amazing. She had this way of making us all equal, all God's children, all family. I have never felt so welcomed by a congregation as they smiled, amened, and praised God that we could be there with them.

So, there are lessons here, of hospitality, of humility, of generosity. A different culture, the same God. A different life style, but the same gratitude. I am an ocean away from home and I feel like I am seeing God's face from a new angle, in a different light.

The Village of Ganvie

This place is called the Venice of Africa, and our adventure started on a boat. Fifteen of us loaded into a wooden canoe with an outboard motor and started slowly across the broad brackish lake, our guide John explaining the history of his village, Ganvie, in loud broken English. This is a place of fisherman, of daily life on water, of houses built on stilts and children barely eight years old paddling their own long canoes. It is a place where each child learns how to swim before his third birthday, where the market goods float in the bottoms of women's boats, where young men stretch yards of cloth between their arms to catch the wind and lessen the work of paddling.

But at it's heart, Ganvie is a place of refuge. It was built in the years when the slave trade was thriving and animistic voodoo ruled the minds of the kings. The kingdom of Abomey, located on the coast of Benin, had an especially corrupt king known to capture his people and sell them to the slave traders. Some of the people fled to the water, which according to the local religion, could not be crossed, and only here were they safe to live. Today, over five thousand people reside on thin wooden platforms with tin walls and roofs, each propped on spindly sticks that somehow support a life. There is a school, a hotel, a restaurant, two churches, barber shops, a market place, tourist gift shops, all the pieces of a community.

As we floated down the water streets, I wondered what it would be like to grow up in Ganvie. There were little kids everywhere. As soon as they saw our boat, they skillfully maneuvered their canoes loaded with nets and little brothers and sisters to nudge ours, hands outstretched, "Madame, madame!" coming from their mouths. They wanted gifts from us, whatever we had that was edible or Western. We gave them apples and cereal, then they kept asking for Bic and chewing gum, the only English words they knew. It was clear we were not the first rich "Yovos" to come here. I was overwhelmed by their constant requests and I had brought nothing to give but smiles.

It did take away from the experience some, this nagging in me illuminating my fortune. Is it even possible to image what my life seems like to them? I've been thinking, even before I came to Africa, about the reasons God has given me all the gifts of my life, and the best I can do is that He wants me to use them to the fullest for His glory. Funny how the most we can understand of God's plan is this simplicity, that we must run after Him always, and from this will come our lives. Pray for me, that I can continue to follow in His way, and specifically for my time reading the Bible: that I would be disciplined and passionate in it this week. Thank you for reading and supporting me in these first two weeks. Much, much love from Cotonou! Pictures coming soon.