ali's african adventures

Something happened this morning that I'm not going to ask you to understand, or necessarily even believe. But I need to share it, especially since I know so many of you have been praying for me since you heard I was stricken with the dengue.

This morning, I woke up to the familiar pain that's been my constant companion since the start of this sickness. I could feel each bone in my spine, and it felt like my back was one big bruise. My hands hurt, like usual, when I picked up a pen to write in my journal, and my feet and ankles screamed when I walked downstairs for class. I expected nothing less, since by all accounts it takes a long time to fully recover from this virus.

After our first class, we have a time of prayer, and on Mondays we pray for each other. Naturally, I asked the other two in my group to pray for my pain, believing in theory that God could heal me if He wanted to. After all, I've heard hundreds of stories of healing, been at the bedsides of children who have received miracles; I know it's real. I just didn't know whether it would be for me. I was resigned to a long illness, knowing that God was going to bring me out the other side eventually.

I was sitting and leaning forward while Shennier, a guy in our DTS from Columbia, started to pray for me. (I couldn't sit up straight because of the pain in my back.) He didn't say anything spectacular, no special formula. He just called on the name of Jesus, and I felt something like a little rush of adrenaline along my spine. You know how it feels in your chest when you trip and nearly fall? Like that, only on my back. I sat there for a few more minutes, praying with all my heart that it was was I thought it might be, trying to work up the courage to sit up.

When I did, it didn't hurt.

I ran my fingers along my spine, and where it had felt bruised and sore before, I felt nothing. I moved from side to side, and nothing hurt. I felt normal again. When I stood up to share with the rest of the class, I felt a tingling in my hands, and when I grabbed the microphone, it didn't hurt either.

People, I am not even kidding here; I've been miraculously healed, and I don't know what to do about it. My first response was just to start crying, because it's pretty much the most overwhelming feeling in the world to know that God just reached into time and space on my behalf. And once I finished with that, I wanted to scream, to run into the middle of the street and stop every single mototaxi puttering past, to shake their drivers and tell them about what God just did.

But I'm not sure this healing extends to miraculous protection from rogue motorcycles, so instead I'm blogging. I'm putting these words out into the internet as a song of praise, as a shout of victory, and as an awed whisper in the presence of Power.

I received healing this morning, and I want to tell everyone.

Generally when there’s a long silence on the blog, it’s because I’m off having some grand adventure, which I then come back and share with you, complete with lots of pretty pictures.

This is not one of those times.

This time, I’ve been silent because I’ve been struggling with a nasty little case of Dengue Fever.

All together now: Denguewhatonearth?

Unfortunately, I can now tell you all about this particular tropical disease, but I’ll spare you the pictures; the rest of the internet has more than enough if you must.

Dengue has the distinction among tropical diseases of being the one you don’t want to get. This, I am now fairly sure, is because of its well-deserved nickname: Breakbone Fever. You don’t just earn a moniker like that without some sort of truth, and the truth is every bit as awful. It started more than a week ago with a strange feeling in one of my hands in the evening. I thought nothing of it and went to bed, only to wake up in the morning with all of my extremities feeling like they’d been put through a meat grinder. It rapidly progressed to fevers peaking around 40 degrees.(For those of you working in Fahrenheit, that’s 104, also known as This sort of thing should never happen in the Amazon jungle.)

I might have suffered in silence for longer than I should have, if it weren’t for the cat. No, I’m not delirious. The directors of the base, whose front door is right outside our hallway window, have a cat that slinks around the base and scares away the mice. The night I started to get really sick, I was stumbling back into my room when the cat decided she wanted to be in there too, darting in and making a beeline for the dark corner under our bed.

I’m not ashamed to say that it was a cat that broke me. After everything else in the Amazon Jungle, it was a little cat that finally brought me to my knees. (Figuratively speaking, of course; my knees at this point hurt enough that the thought of getting on them was unbearable.) It wasn’t my proudest moment, the one where I stood outside the directors’ door crying, shaking with fever, unable to knock loud enough for someone to hear me because my hand hurt too much to make a fist.

Eventually someone heard me and came to get the cat out and I was hustled back into bed with a thermometer, a bottle of water and the promise of a trip to the hospital the next afternoon to figure out what was going on.

There are a few options as far as healthcare goes here in Iquitos. Beth, one of the directors, gave us two. There was the Seventh Day Adventist hospital, clean and fancy with top-class service, where you had to pay 60 soles for a consult. In the grand scheme of things, that works out to around twenty dollars, surely not too much to pay for the privilege of knowing what on earth was trying to kill me. But we’ve been on the mission field a little too long, so we chose the local hospital. The dear, local hospital, with it’s inevitable wooden benches and open courtyard and puddles of vomit on the floors.

Honestly, it wasn’t a bad choice. When we arrived we were pointed to a tent set up on one side of the courtyard where a huge ledger was half-filled with the names of other poor Dengue sufferers. We’re still technically in an outbreak of the virus here, so there are signs up all over the city warning people to sleep under mosquito nets, and the hospitals have been filled with patients; the result is that they know exactly what to do when you come in looking like I did. Thankfully the outbreak seems to be dying down, so we didn’t have to wait for the taciturn nurse to take my blood pressure and then start something that Wikipedia refers to so benignly as the tourniquet test. It’s a simple test for Dengue that you can do without fancy lab equipment, and should probably be outlawed under the heading of Cruel and Unusual. Basically, it consists of placing a blood pressure cuff over the crook of the arm, inflating it to a level that wouldn’t hurt a normal person and leaving it in place for five everlasting minutes, after which the number of burst blood vessels are counted up. The more little purple spots you have, the more sure they are you’ve got Dengue.

After I made it through that test (coming fairly close to passing out because of the pain), my arm looked like a needle-footed centipede had been dancing a jig, and the nurse didn’t have a hard job to declare my fate. Positive. I was sent off to see the doctor, a gentle man who spent more time with me than any doctor in the States ever has, and who prescribed a list of lab work that I needed drawn. From there it was off to the cashier to fork over the only cash I would ever need to pay for the entirety of my care: 15 soles for a CBC with differential. (In case you’re not keeping up with the exchange rate, that’s right around $5.55.)

The next days are a blur. The HoJ and I went back to the hospital each afternoon for another blood draw and medical consult (all free, since I wasn’t getting any ‘fancy’ tests; Dengue’s not really a fancy disease) and I spent the rest of the time lying under the fan, wishing my mattress was thicker and choking down my daily requirement of oral rehydration salts.

And so here I am. I’ve gone through all the stages of Dengue except for the hemorrhagic part (thank the Lord for His mercy, since the idea of bleeding out of my nose and mouth and needing massive blood transfusions wasn’t terribly appealing). I’ve even had the rash, a whole-body thing that has left me itchy enough that I’m seriously considering tearing off all my skin and starting over. At this point, I’m just exhausted and sore, like I’ve run seven consecutive marathons rather than spent seven days flat on my back in bed. Sitting up in class for more than an hour is an exercise in endurance, where all I want to do is get back to the thin little mattress that I was mentally cursing just an hour before.

So, what’s the take-home lesson from all this?

If you’re going to the Amazon, just remember: Dengue’s the one you don’t want to get.


(Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to bed.)

This past weekend, we took part in the first of two mini-outreaches that we’ll go on before our big ten-week extravaganza. We are all very aware that the first ten days of that ten-week outreach are going to be spent in the jungle in river villages, so we were pretty excited to spend a weekend in that environment to see what it’ll be like. Unlike survival camp, we were allowed to pack more than a tiny plastic bag full of things, and so we all gathered our tents and hammocks and a change or two of clothes and headed out.



The adventure started immediately upon arrival to the port, when we realized that we’d be wading through the flooded river on rickety boards with all our things in order to get to our little thatch-roofed boat.





No one fell in, and we managed to pack all of our things along the centre of the boat, along with our bodies and a few other passengers, without capsizing. Low in the water, we set off out of the port and along the Amazon River, heading for the Rio Momon, a much smaller tributary where the village of Hen-Hen is tucked away in the jungle.





I have no idea how our captain knew where he was going, turning and twisting through places that were little more than streams, branches scraping our backs, barely enough room for peke-pekes (canoes so named because of the noise of the little outboard motors attached to them) filled with curious families to squeeze past us.



When we arrived, around two hours later, we again managed to disembark without tipping the boat. (We’re good like that.) We gathered up our things and headed off into the jungle, greeted soon thereafter by some beautiful kids sitting on the side of the path.





After a short break to play with a little boy’s pet toucan, we pressed on, crossing a little covered bridge and arriving at a clearing ringed with huts and buildings, all centered around the ubiquitous Peruvian football field. We set up tents and strung hammocks from any available crossbeam, breaking off to play with the kids that were starting to swarm like moths to a light. (We’ll talk more about moths and lights later; I have stories for you.)









My big responsibility for the weekend was the keeper of the first aid kit. Not terribly surprising, given my nursing license, and I expected to do a little bandaging of scrapes and bug bites here and there. But the jungle never disappoints, does it? Close to sunset, one of the leaders came to my tent, urgency in her voice, and asked me to run across to the little infirmary with my supplies. When I arrived, I found another of the leaders, hand on the table, a deep gash at the base of his thumb, the work of a rather fierce pet monkey (thankfully one that had been vaccinated, so I wasn’t worried about rabies). I donned a headlamp and set about cleaning and bandaging, trying to figure out a way to make tape stick on a sweaty hand. I’ve now been a first responder to an iguana bite and a monkey bite; what will the jungle throw at me next?



On the first night, we held our first-ever presentation, complete with dramas and worship, in an open-air community room on one side of the football field. We had strung electric lights, powered by a generator that we had lugged up the path, and it wasn’t long after darkness fell that we realized how much months really do love lights. They swirled around each bulb in a frenzy, an enormous cloud of them, impossible to walk through without getting bugs in your eyes, ears, nose and mouth. The kids thought this was just about as fun as jumping through a sprinkler, leaping through the clouds and coming out on the other side eager to see how many moths they had caught. It’s a whole different reality in the jungle.



We were tired by the end of the day, exhausted by so many new experiences, and it was with a collective groan that we heard that we were going to be waking up at 4:45 the next morning. We dragged ourselves out of our tents long before sunrise, divided into three groups for our morning’s work; bread-making, toilet-building, and grass-cutting. I was on the latter team, and ended up spending most of the morning collecting garbage while my teammates cut the grass with their machetes. Afterwards, we all swept up with brooms cut straight from the jungle behind the school where we were working. Phil, meanwhile, worked with another team to build a toilet house for the pastor of the village.











We spent the rest of the day (admittedly a much longer one than I usually experience) in various activities around the community. We visited the home of the vicious monkey, a medicinal plant garden. As an aiside, I am now a true jungle nurse, having had the chance on the following day to use the sap from the Sangre de Grado tree to whip up some antibiotic cream (my forearm was the ever-so-sterile field) to go on the monkey bite.





We had the chance to bathe in the river, more of a muddy hole where we were staying than a lovely, clean, rushing river. I did it anyway, and loved every minute of it. Here’s Amber washing her hair while a little girl from the village washes her clothes.



We got the chance to visit the village of an indigenous tribe that the community is sponsoring and to bring them some gifts of clothing.





One of my favourite parts of the day was when we divided into teams and went out into the surrounding areas to visit with families, pray with them, and invite them to the evening’s planned festivities. We prayed with Roger, a father of four who has been a Christian for eight months and desperately wants to see a church built in his village and with Genesis, a beautiful, toothless woman who’s seven months pregnant with her second child. She’s hoping for a girl.





But my all-time favourite part of this mini-outreach was Saturday afternoon, when we held a program for the kids in the community. I had the ultimate privilege of being one of the ones to lead the kids in dancing Para Los Niños, a dance I’ve long since perfected in the sand of Camp in Ecuador. It turns out the jungle is hotter than the Ecuadorian beach, and I thought I might die by the end of it all, but I loved it. We played games with the kids out in the field and performed dramas and sang songs, and they absolutely loved it, parents sitting around the edges of the action, looking on with smiles.



(Phil took this photo; I’m in that crowd somewhere, loving life.)

After the kids’ program and after dinner, Phil donned makeup and a black t-shirt to play the devil in the longest drama that we perform, El Campeon, and he did his job admirably under the swirl of a million moths. (The announcing angel, the part I play, had at least four of them stuck to her makeup, poor thing. I, for one, was happy to be at the back with the kids, making sure they didn't get scared of the devil.)



Sunday morning dawned rainy and cool and we packed up and headed back to Iquitos, tired and covered in the bites of many unidentifiable insects.

It was only two days, but we jumped in with both feet. As a team, we're looking forward to the time when we get to spend ten days out there. In my case, though, I'll admit that it’s with more than a little hesitation, since the jungle isn’t the easiest place to be.

But there was a little message scrawled on one of the posts of the community room where we held our meetings:



And that’s why we’ll go back, why we’ll go all over the world if He calls us. Because He loved us first, and He sent us out into the jungle this weekend to show that love. Unsurprisingly, we received as much love as we gave, in little hands slipped through ours, arms wound tight around our necks, and crazy, sweaty dance parties to worship shouted over crackling microphones.

I think I’m ready to go back for more.


(Sorry this was so long; You won’t get to hear about the ten-day river outreach in this kind of detail, since there will just be way too much to share, so I figured I’d give you a good taste of what our days are likely to be like.)

When I open up my blog admin site and find more than just a comment from my mother, I'm usually fairly sure that Tim Challies has linked to me in one of his A La Carte entries. This time was no exception, but what was different this time is the depth of the comments and e-mails that I've received.

I can't tell you all how blessed I have been my your words of encouragement, by your own vulnerability, by your hearts laid bare to this stranger sitting in an internet cafe somewhere in the jungle in Peru. After I posted that entry, I rode back to the base fighting tears in the back of my mototaxi. I couldn't figure out whether I should have done it, whether or not people were going to look down on me for my dirty little secret.

Instead I find that God is using me. It's just a few minutes after He set me back on my feet and He's got me dancing already. I love that about Him.

I'm starting to work through your comments and e-mails; please know that I will respond to each of them, but I'm part of a group leading an intercession at the base this week, and so my internet time has been mostly taken up with researching the country we'll be praying for. This weekend we're having our very first mini-outreach in the river communities, so please just give me grace if you don't hear back from me soon.

Know that I am treasuring your words, lifting you up in prayer as we fight this battle together.

Sorry for the long silence. I was going to post a fun entry about the trip we took to the zoo last weekend, but for now that'll have to wait.

I’m not really sure how to go about writing all this down, but I need to. My past isn’t something I’ve ever really talked about on this blog, but if I’m going to tell you what happened this week, I think I’m going to have to. I’ve prayed a lot about whether or not to share all this, and I’ve realized that it’s nothing I wouldn’t tell anyone I’d meet face to face.

I was addicted to pornography for over eight years.

I’ll give you a moment to get over your shock, to say to yourself, But isn’t she a girl? Girl’s don’t struggle with that! Trust me; it’s nothing I haven’t heard before, and it’s part of the reason it’s often so hard to tell people. When a man confesses to a struggle with pornography, it’s par for the course and you move on. But women are a whole different story, and I’ve been met with reactions ranging from the incredulous to the downright horrified.

The thing is, satan will take whoever he can get his claws into. He doesn’t care if you’re a man or a woman, a hundred and two or just twelve years old; if he can snare you, he will. I was one of those victims, and until I was nearly twenty one I fed myself on a steady diet of lies.

You are worthless. You are not good enough. No one will ever desire you, but that’s the only way you can ever find fulfillment. You are a worthless piece of trash, and you deserve every last scar that you’re carving into your own soul right now.

I might seem well-adjusted and strong, but the truth has always been in those words for me. During the years when I should have been forming a strong identity, I was systematically tearing myself down, dooming myself to a life of emptiness. It seems like I’m overstating the case, I know. But believe me when I tell you how damaging this particular addiction can be for a woman’s soul.

A couple of months before my twenty-first birthday, God broke the addiction’s hold over me. It’s a long story, and one I’m not going to get into right now, but suffice it to say that from one day to the next I was a new person in that area. The problem was the rest of me. I didn’t feel any desire for pornography anymore, but I still felt worthless, like a piece of trash kicked into the gutter. I knew all the Bible verses about how much God loved me and how he forgave my sin, but I still felt irreparably broken, scarred beyond redemption.

I’ve felt that way for seven years, right up until a few days ago.

And here’s what I want to share with you, the reason for all the back story. During this week, God spoke to me. Now, if you’re anything like me, that last sentence got you all skeptical. Yeah right, you’re thinking. Like God actually just talks to people. I wouldn’t have believed it either. In fact, I spent the last however-many years of my life not believing it, because it just wasn’t happening to me. And I can’t explain what it was like, not really. It’s like what people say about being in love; you can’t describe it, but you know it when it hits you full-force.

I was reading in John chapter eight, where Jesus is talking about slaves and sons, and I was trying so hard to believe it, but all I could see was this picture of a slave, adopted out of the fields, but never quite as good as the rest of the kids. Sure, you can sleep in the house, but we all know where you came from; you can’t hide your scars.

I sat there on my bed, and I honestly felt pretty well resigned to that fact. That yes, I’m healed from my former life, but I bear the permanent marks of it. I spent years with my wrists and ankles shackled in heavy, cutting chains, my back bent under the lash of the whip. I can’t hide my scars, and they have always named me as a former slave.

Which is when God spoke: Look at your wrists.

And so I did.

Look at your ankles.

And I did that, too.

Do you see anything there? Do you see even the faintest mark?

I ran my fingers over the smooth skin, forced to admit that they were perfect, unblemished.

Child, He said to me, there is nothing of the slave left in you. You answer to no master save that of Love. Your place in my house can never be taken from you; no one will put you back in those chains.

You are my daughter. The wounds inflicted by the whip? Your wrists and ankles raw from the chains? They have been healed. Every time you look at your own hands, I want you to remember this. And remember that it’s my wrists that are marked with the twisted flesh, never yours. You are perfect, because I have made you so. You never have to hide again, because you have nothing to hide; you are whole again. You always have been, really, it’s just that you can only now see it.

Do you see it? You are not broken.

And so everything is different now. Everything is new.

I knew I was forgiven, but I thought that forgiveness couldn’t touch my scars. That they were an unfortunate and unavoidable side effect of my former life. Yes, I’m ‘healed,’ but I still have this limp. It’s okay; at least I can walk.

Oh, but He doesn’t want me to walk. He wants me dancing in the streets, running fleet-footed in the paths of His commands. He wants me sprinting down the aisle into His arms, wedding dress and all, totally abandoned to my love for Him.

I have been given wings, and this time I will use them to fly.

Because this changes everything.

Some springy flowers and another sunset are the wallpapers for April.







Enjoy!