paradox

If there’s one thing sure in an uncertain life, it’s that it will move on. James passed away yesterday morning, and the same afternoon a little almost-two-year-old with the same name was admitted to B Ward. Sporting curly hair and a miniature pair of sunglasses, he spent the evening laughing, stomping around the room and snuggling with me. (You can probably guess which was my favourite of his activities.) James had cataract surgery a while ago, and was back to have the sutures taken out of his eyes. It was clear from the way he grinned up at me that he could see perfectly, but he flat-out refused to let anyone touch those glasses, which earned him the nickname Baby Ray Charles. His mama approved.

By the time I came in this afternoon, Baby Ray had been to the OR to have the sutures taken out of his eyes and had already been sent home, so I had no one to play with. The shift turned out to be busier than I anticipated, though, so I didn’t have much time to miss him.

It was one of those shifts so full of both good and bad, one of the ones that has you reeling from the near-whiplash of emotions. For some patients, it was good news. Surgeries to be performed, stubborn wounds healing. For others, it meant heartbreak. We turned one guy away because of a tooth abscess that would make anesthesia too risky, told another that he’s HIV positive and watched his world crumble around him. It’s almost impossible to go from that to a particularly funny ward round where the surgeon tried his hardest to talk like a Sierra Leonean, and I was told in no uncertain terms that I speak Krio like a Liberian.

But that’s the way it is here. Life ebbs and flows and sometimes the only way to survive is to just let it wash over you, arms open wide to receive the joy along with the pain. The sweet and salty mix and it’s a drink that doesn’t always go down easily.

Kisses from freshly-repaired cleft lips help; I got a few of those today, along with a little three-year-old dance party in the now-empty ICU. I printed out the discharge papers for the boy with HIV, and as I headed home down the hall after handover, one of the day volunteers called out after me. Goodnight Liberian woman!

And so it goes on.

It's just a few minutes before midnight, and I'm sitting on my bed, willing the clock to stop, to speed up, to do anything but march on in its slow, inexorable rhythm. In six minutes it will be tomorrow, and tomorrow is when I go back to my heart's home.

And for the first time, I don't know how I'll do it.

Earlier tonight I sat around the table in our dining room, all the leaves in, stretched to its longest length to accomodate the wealth of family around it. Turned to a friend beside me and confessed. It's never been like this. I don't know what to do.

It's always been one way or another. Sometimes I'm bursting at the seams, so ready to get on a plane that I can hardly spare a thought for those I'm saying goodbye to. And the rest of the times that I've travelled, whether from here going there or from there coming here, I've done so with a heart torn to pieces for the place I'm leaving behind.

This time I'm cut clean in two, and it doesn't seem possible that I'll be able to get on that plane tomorrow and it doesn't seem possible that I'm still sitting here, late at night, alone on my bed.

This has been the most beautiful summer of my life, and I say that with all the pain and uncertainty included. The list of things I no longer take for granted has expanded far past family and friends and a roof over my head, and I am so grateful for the chance I've been given to live my life like this. I'm still in awe every time I pick up a jug of milk, every time I sit down on the floor to play with my nephew, every time I get back up without pain. When he reaches out his hand to lead me off for our next adventure, I can give him mine without wondering whether he'll hurt me. I can finally say that I'm ready to go back to work and not secretly question whether I'll make it through a shift.

I'm ready to go back, but I can't see how I can leave. This all feels so melodramatic, but anyone who's spent time on the ship can relate to the abrupt shift I'm about to undergo. I'm going to trade in the stability and predictability of life in my hometown for a world where friends come and go with every departing flight, where one day is almost never like the next, and where not even the floor is steady beneath my feet. Yet again, I've bought a one-way ticket to Africa, signed up for two more years of this constant whirlwind.

I'd have to be crazy to want this.

I'd have to be crazy not to.

I wasn't sure whether I should write about this now or after the fact, but I find myself with a quiet moment, the rest of the girls heading back to the house where they're staying, escorted by the boys. And so I suppose now is as good a time as any.

We're going home.

It's all gotten to be too much. The seventeen-hour bus rides and changes in climate and nights of no sleep and days filled with ministry and pain. I'm not getting any better, and it's to the point where I'm risking doing permanent damage to myself if I push on for the next five weeks.

So tomorrow will be our last day of ministry, a day filled with kids' programs. We've been living above a preschool this week, and one of the things that helped us make the decision to go home was the fact that I haven't been able to actually play with the kids. I can't sit on the ground or crouch down to talk to them at their level. I can't pick them up or push them on the swings, and so I know that something is terribly wrong. We'll finish out the day, go out for dinner with the team, and early Monday morning we'll start the process of heading back up to Iquitos to pick up the rest of our things and then on to New Jersey where I'll see some doctors and hopefully get some answers.

It's hard to know what to say right now. It feels like failing, even though I know that we're making the wise choice. But everything in me wants to push forward, to go on with the team to Bolivia and back to Peru and finish what we started back at the end of February, back when I really had no idea what dengue was.

And yet. (There's always an and yet, isn't there?)

I spoke at a youth service we did this evening in a tiny church up in the mountains. Or rather, I should say, God spoke. Purpose, passion and peace. Draw close to Him, walk in step with Him and He will give you all these. I have always understood the purpose and the passion; it's what gives me such joy working in Africa and traveling around the world and doing crazy dances in the dirt streets of Peru. But it wasn't until I started talking to them about peace that I realized that I've learned about that, too, here.

I've learned what it means to be at peace even when I don't understand, to trust when everything in me is crying out for answers. It's a strange paradox, this. Being filled with questions and yet knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that everything is okay, that I'm safe under the shelter of His wings and protected in the confines of His hands.

There's room here for my seeking, because I'm surrounded by this peace and I know that nothing can touch me here.

And so that's that. We'll be home Wednesday morning, after which you can expect to see lots and lots of photos, once I'm back on an internet connection that allows for that sort of thing.

Thank you so much for all your love and prayers and encouragement during this time here in Peru. We are still planning to head back to the ship and Sierra Leone in the fall, a big part of the reasoning behind going home and getting things sorted out sooner rather than later. So, although posting is most likely going to drop off for a while here, don't go anywhere, because soon enough I'll be back to my floating home with lots more to share.

I'm finding it strangely hard to blog from the first world. We've been in Australia for a week now, and I've been avoiding this corner of the internet, totally unsure of what to write.

I want to say what a great time we're having. How we've been welcomed so warmly by friends from the ship, shown everything from Sydney Harbour in a raging thunderstorm to the Australian Outback Spectacular in Brisbane to the top of a mountian in Port Macquarie. How we've slipped so easily back into these old relationships, born of a common love for Africa and a big white ship.

But when I sit down at the keyboard, my fingers are slow to type these words, pushing as they must through an unexpected and overwhelming feeling of guilt.

I expected to feel the not-belonging, coming here. I prepared myself for the shock of first world prices, a place where a bottle of water costs three dollars instead of three cents and actually comes in a bottle instead of a plastic bag. I schooled myself to be ready for the orderly streets, the fenced-in lawns and the stop lights where everyone, inexplicably, stops when they turn red. All this I was ready for.

It was the guilt that blindsided me.

All around me is the shiny, new first world but all through my heart is the third, and it's my heart that's telling me that there is something so wrong about all this. I'm here having the time of my life and I can't stop feeling like I shouldn't be.

At the risk of sounding presumptuous, I think I know too much now. I think I've seen and lived among, in my admittedly limited experience, far too much of the opposite side of the coin to be able to bask in the shine on this one without consequence. I run my fingers over dresses made from rich cloth in air-conditioned stores, and I find myself wanting to buy things even as I cringe from the thought of spending so much money and through it all is this voice screaming in my head. You are greedy again. You are enjoying yourself, eating ice cream and going to the zoo and spending long days pleasing only yourself. You want this world and everything it has to offer. You are greedy again.

I'm telling myself it's not true, that I would give anything to be back on the dirt roads and in the bamboo shacks of Asia and Africa, but then I catch the scent of my freshly-washed hair and realize that I'm loving the feeling of being clean and safe in a quiet home where all I can hear is the crickets in the fields outside.

I don't know which way is up anymore. I don't think it's wrong to enjoy myself in this place, to revel in the feel of clean sand between my toes without worrying whether someone's dropped a dirty needle or used the area for a toilet. I don't think it's a sin to wish I could buy a pretty dress. But I don't know how to think that with the same mind that has seen families living in raggedy shacks no bigger than a chicken coop. I don't know how to type about how I got to feed kangaroos with the same hands that were clutched by beggar children with huge, pleading eyes.

I don't know how these two halves of me will ever fit together again. to form anything like the whole I'm used to. I'd say I'm not sure I want them to, but I really don't want to live with this guilt because it's strange and awkward and not terribly comfortable.

This is one time I really wish I had all the answers.

Today was a strange day, so full of contrasts. It's that mix of joy and heartbreak that's so common here, the mix that somehow never feels quite right.

There was Maurius, sitting like a king on his bed, propped up in a wash basin, tucked in all around with lappas so he couldn't fall down, reigning over his corner of A Ward with wide eyes and ready smiles. He's drinking all his milk by mouth now, and if he keeps this up he'll be home by the end of the weekend, fat and happy.

But then, of course, there's O'Brien in the corner across from him, struggling so hard to breathe that his tiny heart has started to fail him. And so, under the watchful eye of King Maurius, we bundled O'Brien up and made the walk back down the hall to the ICU yet again, the place where we saw his life miraculously spared just a few weeks ago.

Knowing what happened before, we haven't been hesitant to pray for healing, gathering in little groups all across the hospital to plead God for life, but miracles have been slow to appear today. Instead, we've watched as his body struggled to get enough oxygen. We've tried everything short of a ventilator (something that isn't an option anymore, given everything else going on), and still his body is failing him. We've been MacGuyver and Inspector Gadget and the Professor from Gilligan's Island, rigging up one failed solution after another to help him breathe, but nothing is really working. Right now he's wrapped up in his mama's lappa, a wire hanger twisted around to form a frame for the plastic bag, being filled with pure oxygen, that he's resting inside, and still he struggles.

I don't know what's going to happen with O'Brien. I don't know how many days God wrote into his book before he was born, and my heart trembles to think that we might be nearing the last page.

And down the hall in A Ward, after praying for our little sparrow baby at handover, we all stood in a circle with Aissa in the middle, and we danced the chicken dance. Nurses and translators and a little girl with her head all wrapped in a bandage, dancing the chicken dance right in the face of all this pain.

It's hard to get used to it.

.....

In other news, I wanted to share a photo of Liz, Aissa and I on Togo's independence day, while we had Aissa hard at work churning out those Togolese flags. (Remember; give her a task, and she's set.) It's hard to see behind the flag she's holding up, but you can catch a glimpse of the balloon tower taped to her head. She is one classy kid.

And speaking of classy, there's just one more day to register for the giveaway. Don't miss your chance to win a little piece of Africa! I've been having so much fun hearing from so many of you who don't normally comment. It's amazing to hear about people who've adopted from Africa, people who have a heart for this continent, people who've done hilarious, dangerous things and people who think that jaywalking somehow counts towards living life on the edge. (coughDinacough) I think I'll definitely be doing this again soon.

I haven't got much to say. The past couple of weeks have wrenched my heart out and then replaced it so tenderly back into my chest that I don't know whether it's still beating inside me anymore.

Vincent is still here, and our options for getting him home are quickly running out as he gets weaker every day. We sent another pregnant teenager home to face her family with nothing but an appointment after her first trimester and the prayer that there will be an anesthetist who'll be willing to tackle her case then.

And yet. Michael got his chemo this afternoon, the partnership with the local hospital finally having come together and allowing his mama the chance to finally hope again. There are little kids in casts all over the ward who want nothing more than to colour. All. day. long. (It's true; when asked for examples of methods of pain management during an in-service with an anesthetist this evening, the first thing I thought to blurt out was, Colouring books! They laughed at me, if you can believe it.)

I'm coming to realize all over again that this is the rhythm of things around here. That some days will be so incredibly painful that the last thing I want to do is face another one. And other times my heart will be bursting with love because a fuzzy-headed baby drops his cheek to my shoulder and snuggles in tight, cooing back at me as I sing crazy, made-up songs. And there's no way to tell which kind of day it's going to be, so the only thing to do is get in my scrubs, find a matching headband and go to work.

It might hurt, but it might just be the best thing that's ever happened to me.

The problem with the last few days is that they've been so busy that I haven't written. I've been crawling into bed every night, already dreading the alarm that will wake me in the morning, and there just hasn't been time to stop and write. Which is why it's so unfortunate that so much has happened; I don't know how to share it and make it all make sense without writing forever. I don't know where to start now.

Do I start with Vincent, the patient from last year in Benin who we found waiting here at the port gates in Togo? He'd been living on the streets for days, waiting for the ship to come because his trouble was getting worse again. Do I tell you how, once the wards were finally set up, we brought him into one of the empty rooms only to discover that the cancer in his hand had spread up his arm, that his eyes were squeezed tight shut while we prayed for him? Do I try to explain how he, inexplicably, left to go back home with a smile and a wave, claiming that we had done enough for him. Done enough by telling him that we can't help and that, short of a miracle, this will kill him. But, by all means, please come back in a week or two and we'll let you know if we can amputate more of your hand.

Or do I start with the time when five of my best friends and I headed out in the gathering dusk to search for a place that sold cold drinks. How we walked into a concrete-walled room, sat in mismatched chairs and declared that we thought the place was lovely, simply because their menus were laminated and there was a single fan hanging from the ceiling, pushing around the thick air. Will it mean anything to you when I tell you that, all at once, the lights went out and we went on without missing a beat, the near-dark from the windows more than enough light to talk by? That, somewhere, somehow, I've become accustomed to life in the third world and have already started dreading the leaving of it.

Maybe I should start with this morning, when I headed up from the dock to find a little group of mamas and babies huddled in the shade of the gangway. Cleft lips and tumors and little bowed legs waiting for everything to change. I could tell you how I saw them take their hope in their hands and climb the stairs, heading for the hospital where x-rays and CT scans would determine their futures. But if I started there I'd also have to tell you about little Felix and his brother Pascal, the two cutest boys I've seen in a long while (HoJ excluded, of course). I'd have to tell you how Pascal screamed, burrowing into my arms when his mama left him to take Felix into the x-ray room. How Felix's screams echoed his brother's through the door, and how the light fell from that mama's eyes when I told her that Felix wasn't going to be scheduled for surgery. His trouble wasn't bad enough; we'll probably see worse, so we have to keep the books open for them. How Felix put up his arms for me to carry him back down the gangway, back into the hot sun to begin the long walk home on his little crooked legs.

I could start with the French. With the way I've been called upon to translate by so many people who don't know I really don't know French. And how, despite that, I've been able to speak the words I'm called on to speak. How I've gone back into my Bible, poring over the passages about the gift of tongues and trying to figure out if this isn't actually what they meant, this speaking out in language I don't know. I could tell you how a surgeon called to me in the hallway outside the x-ray room and asked me to tell his patient about his findings, how I started to say I couldn't and ended up explaining it all to the patient, who nodded gravely and told me she understood, repeating it all back to me with much better grammar.

But none of those stories is the right place to start. None of them fit together, make any sense next to each other. I can't weave this narrative in the way I'm used to doing; I feel disjointed. But I think that's what my life is right now. Just a bunch of stories. Still frames and memories, collected up and stored away like precious keepsakes. These are the stories I'll tell in years to come when I'm living somewhere far from here, somewhere with reliable electricity and hospitals.

And by then it won't matter where I start, because the beginning can be anywhere when the story has already been told.

Today was strange. I know I've been here for a while, and maybe I should be used to it by now, but I still struggle with the vast disparity of emotions this place brings with it. It's so hard to find my footing when I'm swinging between two extremes, hope and despair in beds on opposite sides of the wall.

Ismatou is twenty six years old, her neck swollen by a huge goiter. She came to us earlier this year, but was too sick for surgery. Sent home on medication and told to come back in a few months, she showed up at the ship yesterday full of hope. During routine pre-operative screening, we discovered that she was pregnant, which she staunchly denied, pointing to her one-year old little girl as proof. The evening staff gave her a bed for the night, and it fell to me to sort it all out this morning.

It's simple, really. Based on her last screenings and the information she could give us, her pregnancy was early in the first trimester. There was no way we would risk her baby's life to perform the surgery, and with the outreach drawing to a close, there's no time to reschedule her. I got to tell her.

She cried and she begged, falling to her knees next to her bed and holding her hands out to me, pleading for me to do something. To find a way for her to have the surgery. Her eyes were haunted and her fingernails dug deep grooves in her skin as she clawed at her neck, trying to tear out the curse she's living under. Tante Alice, she told me through a translator, you don't understand. I am ashamed. How can I continue?

I told her that she needs to be strong for her children, for the little girl staring at her mama with wide, frightened eyes, and for the baby growing inside her. She asked if she could come back on Monday. I will come back and I will not be pregnant. She doesn't have money for surgery at a local hospital, and so I know that the abortion she was thinking of having would be performed in a back alley somewhere. I told her, no, that she shouldn't come back, that we would not schedule her for surgery, hoping against hope that she would realize that an abortion was pointless. She dropped her eyes from my face and flicked her wrists, palms-up. So then it is decided. I will go home and I will make a poison and I will kill myself.

What can you actually do when faced with despair like that? I have no clue what she suffers, not the faintest idea of what it's like to go through life with a huge tumor on my neck, considered cursed by the people who see me. I had no words of hope to offer her, nothing to say that would give her a reason to live, and yet I was sending her out to face the world again. Alone.

So we prayed and we cried and she asked a few more times. And then she grabbed her child, tied her roughly to her back and was gone.


And then, on the other side of the wall, a shout went up. Nasif is a little seven-year old boy whose jaw had been frozen shut after an infection while he was a baby. He had surgery two days ago to graft some cartilage from his rib into the joints in his mouth, and he was trying out his mouth exercises when he discovered that he could do something he had never done before.

I rounded to corner to see a little imp in a purple, flowered gown, sitting on his bed surrounded by adoring fans. His head was wrapped in clean, white gauze, and everyone was cheering like he'd won a gold medal when he showed them his new-found skill.

Que est-ce que tu peut faire, I asked him, since I had missed the big show. What can you do? And in typical little boy fashion, he smiled and stuck his tongue out at me.

It's the first time in his life that he's ever seen his tongue. He knew he had one, but it was locked away behind teeth that didn't move, and now for the first time, he can open his mouth and smile and put a spoon straight in when he eats. And he can stick out his tongue.

So tell me, if you can, how I'm supposed to feel right now. I saw absolute despair and pure, unadulterated joy one after another today, and I'm just not sure where that leaves me.

Aime went to back to Jesus. In the taxi, on the way back to his house, he slipped away, just like all the other little boys we've cared for. Suey, our palliative care nurse, visited his mama today. I asked Suey how the mama was doing, and she answered by telling me what the mama had said. I feel like my heart has been removed. Which is kind of how it starts to feel when you stand by and watch this sort of thing too often.

But thankfully there was Sunday. Yes, I know today was Thursday; Sunday was the man in bed nine. He's from Nigeria and had surgery to remove a tumor on the side of his face. I had gotten report this morning and was just about to turn on my IPod when I heard the rustle of papers and the clearing of a throat on the other side of the ward. I looked over to where Sunday was perched on the side of his bed, glasses sliding down on his nose, a sheaf of music in front of him. He gathered everyone he could find and led an hour-long hymn sing, right there in D Ward, complete with Scripture recitation in between songs. When I got his discharge order and explained to him that he would be leaving us, he broke into a wide grin. I am leaving. This is true. But the song? The song will go on. You must never stop singing to our God.

But of course, there's really no way I can stop singing. Not when I walk back to the patient waiting area and see a woman in a bright yellow dress, her hair flowing in a sassy weave, an impossibly fat baby guzzling a bottle in her lap. Maomai and Pelagie came back for their last post-op visit the other day. Just as she always does, Pelagie grabbed me in an impossibly tight hug, laughing and telling me thank you, over and over. I took Maomai in my arms, touched her round cheek and sang her name. She looked at me, her brown eyes wide, and her chubby face broke into an enormous smile as she reached up her fat little fingers to touch my own cheek.

And this is why I won't stop singing.

I was in the clinic at the far end of the hospital this morning when I heard the drums begin to call. Voices raised in ululation beckoned me back to my ward, and I followed the sound of the singing.

As I walked the length of the ship, the hall was deserted save for a woman clad in a hospital gown, a faded lappa tied tightly around her waist. She moved slowly away from D Ward, her eyes on the floor, hands clasped tightly behind her back. I passed by, drawn by the tumult spilling from the open door.

Inside, the room was alive with the kind of vibrance I've only ever found here in Africa. Translators and patients clapped and stomped and played any instrument they could get their hands on, from bongos to cowbells to rattles pieced together from bowls and scraps of metal. At the head of the room sat Sietou, resplendent in a bright yellow dress, her headdress piled impossibly high above a beaming face. The swirl of noise and music pulled passersby off their courses while nurses from the operating rooms and the other wards paused in their work to stand at the door. Everyone was gathered to celebrate her, to watch her dance.

Sietou's story is familiar in its heartbreak. Her parents died when she was young. She got pregnant, and the baby died inside her, tearing her apart and condemning her to the life of an outcast. She had another baby, but when she went to his father for money, he turned her away, threatened her with a cutlass, told her he'd cut off her head if she ever came to him again. So she's been alone, and she's been wet. For eleven years she's been living on the fringes of society, leaking urine from a body that betrayed her in her moment of greatest need.

Today, Sietou danced. She laughed and she sang and she hugged and she danced. And her chair, when she left it again and again to take her place in the whirling crowd, was dry.

And out in the hall, the old woman walked slowly back and forth, back and forth, the lappa around her waist slowly growing wet again as she shut her ears to the sound of a celebration she had no part in.

It's been a few days since I've posted, but there is an explanation for my silence, partly because Saturday was the ship-wide blackout where the engines were shut down while the cooling systems were cleaned. I spent most of the day relaxing poolside at a vaguely seventies-era hotel, the Benin-Marina, lounging on a padded chaise and downing fresh crepes with mango ice cream while my poor husband sweated in the engine room back on the ship. At one point, I fell asleep, and when I opened my eyes again, I had no idea where I was. I couldn't reconcile the palm trees and pristine pool with the image of Africa that fills my mind. The rift between rich and poor is so much starker here in Benin.

There are pockets of Cotonou where I can see my much-loved Liberia. In the winding alleyways lined with wooden shacks advertising their wares in chalk scrawlings on slabs of wood out front. In the bare-bottomed babies squatting in the dirt, playing with scraps of rubber and metal while their mamas hawk mangoes by the side of the road. In the sharp, earthy smell of the patients who are admitted from up country, explanations flowing through several translators before they press their thumbs to the pad of ink in lieu of signing their names because they have never held a pen.

But so much of this place is so much more modern than I ever expected. The rich really are wealthy, and the dichotomy robs me of my ease. Standing in the lobby of the Marina on Saturday, I couldn't stop thinking about the Ducor Palace in Liberia. It sits perched on top of the hill, overlooking the city of Monrovia, and it was once a five-star hotel. In fact, back then, all of Liberia could be considered five-star; it was the country against which all the other countries in Africa measured themselves, the so-called Gold Standard. Liberia was peaceful and prosperous, and hotels like the Ducor bore witness to her success in its shining opulence.

And then the war came.

And like everything else in Liberia, the Ducor Palace was soon nothing more than a gutted shell, inhabited by thousands of refugees made homeless by that war. Just before I got to Liberia, the squatters were thrown out and the Ducor was truly abandoned, nothing to show for the years of wealth but the scattered remnants of humanity left behind in the scuffle. Old shoes, some cast-off rags and various epithets scrawled across the bare walls the only echoes of former glory.

I stood in that lobby on Saturday, the marble floor cool under my feet, and I couldn't stop myself from imagining what it would look like without the expensive furnishings, the stained wood paneling, the carefully polished glass. I stared past the luxury, tracing the shape of the room, seeing it lined in nothing but concrete and empty space, grass growing in the cracks in the floor.

It's strange; in Liberia, I wanted nothing more than to rebuild, to gather the shattered pieces of a country and forge something new and beautiful. But here, when I'm faced with something that's actually close to that imaginary end product, I can't accept it. It's too good to be true, somehow. Maybe it's because, here in West Africa, this kind of progress seems just too breakable, too fragile.

If Liberia could fall, so could Benin.

So I don't know where that leaves me. I'm constantly torn, trapped between two worlds, a white girl awash in a sea of brown skin. Unable to enjoy the beauty of where I am because of the squalor I know lurks just around the corner. Yearning for the best but fearing the worst.

I have no answers.

I am torn.

The feeling of being back on this ship is one of the strangest things I've experienced recently. One one hand, like I mentioned already, I feel overwhelmingly that I'm home. I find nothing strange about lining up in the cafeteria to get my meals, seeing container ships outside my window and being hugged enthusiastically by about half of the people I walk past in the halls. Contrary to my own expectations, I have not, in fact, forgotten where things are in this eight-deck floating city. The only thing that throws me for a loop is the fact that the gangway leads down to a dock on the starboard side of the ship, not the port side, which last year was the only thing that helped me remember what the heck starboard and port meant in the first place. (My oft repeated mantra, Port means the side where the port is, doesn't seem to be helping me this time around.) But really, things feel normal. When people welcome me back, all I can think to tell them is that it's good to be home.

On the other hand. (There's always another hand, isn't there?) Remember how I just got married? And remember how, before that, I told you guys I wasn't really going to talk about my husband on this blog of mine? Well, both are true, but the latter isn't really going to be a problem, at least not for the next three weeks. Because after our first three weeks as married people, I actually got to come back to the ship all by myself. The Husband is taking part in a training course in some country that is Not Remotely Benin, and I'm here in a country that is Most Definitely Benin, rattling around our enormous (at least to me) cabin all by my lonesome.

And it's strange. For all the familiar faces and dearly loved friends whom I'm reconnecting with and eating meals with and sharing stories of the past five months with, it feels wrong to be here without him. There were so few days last year that didn't see us hanging out for hours on end, and, truth be told, I'm a little lost without him. I'm not used to not talking to him, but both nights since I've been here, I missed his phone calls because I was upstairs in the cafe, writing him emails that he hasn't read yet because he hasn't found a place to get on the internet. I laid awake in our bed last night, already instinctively leaving half the mattress free, and in the dark, wakeful hours until about three in the morning, I lost track of the number of times I slid my foot over to his side, just to make sure he really wasn't there.

In the grand scheme of things, three weeks isn't a long time. We just got through more than three months on separate continents, and I'm starting work tomorrow, so things promise to be busy. But that doesn't change the fact that I've barricaded myself in my cabin; armed with movies, a tea kettle and a wireless internet connection, I'm not coming out until I get to talk to him on the phone.

Now, who wants to bring me dinner? It's African night, and I have a powerful craving for plantains.

Remember ten years ago, when that song Closing Time came out? If you're close to my age, you probably had it recorded faithfully on at least three different mix tapes. It ran through my head almost constantly today as we power-cleaned the now-empty A Ward.

Closing time, open all the doors and let you out into the world.
Closing time, you don't have to go home but you can't stay here.
Closing time, time for you to go out to the places you will be from.
Closing time, every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

Three weeks from today I will walk down the gangway and into a Mercy Ships car. We'll be in Tenerife by then, so we'll drive on pothole-free roads to the airport where I'll get on a plane and I'll fly home. And just like that, Liberia will be nothing but a memory, forty-five hundred miles away from the family I'll be winging my way towards.

I can't wait to see them. I don't want to leave. Bring on the paradox. (Which, I'm realizing, is exactly what I typed the night before I left home in February. Oh, how my paradigm has shifted.)

I'm probably going to beat this feeling to death over the next few weeks, but this leaving is so bittersweet. I know I'll be coming back for Benin, so when I disembark it'll be with the assurance that it's not forever. But when the ship sails from Liberia, I don't know if I'll ever return, and I don't know how to come to terms with that. I love so much about this country.

I can't stay here. I have to go out from this place and back into the world, and I'm scared.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

There have been a few times this year when I've felt absolutely and utterly far from home. I really didn't think American Thanksgiving was going to be one of them.

We've never been big into American Thanksgiving. It was just the second round of turkey in a three-month extravaganza that marked the end of the year. My siblings and I were born in the States to Canadian parents, so we've all grown up as dual citizens, complete with the resulting double holidays. Canadian Thanksgiving was first, and seemed to mean a lot more, since that's when we actually got to see the cousins. Then came American, which really only felt like a wind-up for the big show in December. That's when we got to pile into the van again and make the eight or nine hour trek back up to granny's where gummy bears after meals and Christmas crackers with silly paper hats awaited.

Last night as I sat on the computer wasting time before talking to a friend, my brother came online. We chatted a bit about Mya and how their first night at home went. My mother signed on. She told me she was up there, cooking a turkey for everyone. That my sister was flying up to join them and my other brother took the day off and was coming for dinner.

They were all together. My whole family, plus the little one I've never met, and it hurt my heart so much not to be with them. It's hard being overseas, eh? my brother asked me. I said yes, but the truth is that I haven't ever given it too much thought. With internet and phone lines at my fingertips, it sometimes feels like I'm just in the next room, not half the world away.

Last night, the reality started to sink in. My family is incredibly close, despite the fact that we've grown up in separate countries. We have something, my cousin often says, that no other family does. It's hard to put a finger on. We don't really have to though; we all know what she's talking about, because we're family. But if this is what I'm being called to, this life and these people and this continent, then Mya's birth isn't the only thing I'm going to miss. It's going to be a lifetime of experiences lived apart from my family. Last night, that thought was so hard to wrap my heart around.

Oh, child, He says to me through my tears, nowhere did I say this would be easy. But you need to hold them lightly, this family I've given you. You need to be ready to turn your back on them, all of them, even Mya, if this is really what I've called you to. Just realize that what I have in store for you is more than you can imagine even in your wildest dreams. Trust Me.

Can you see why it's hard, though?

This place is such an odd kaleidescope of conflicting emotions. Twist the glass one way and your sides hurt from laughing. Turn to face the light and your heart is shattered. Today was a day of both.

Dawayne is eight. He's in third grade. (Do the math and you'll realize that he's in the right year for his age. It's the first time I've seen it since coming here.) He's a bright kid, and I'm not just talking about the lightness of his skin; he read me the story of Jonah this morning, only stumbling over words like Ninevah and repentance. He's really not too sick; as I was leaving work he was being called to the operating room to have his hernia repaired.

This morning, Dawayne provided me with two of the funnier moments I can remember. I went over to him, needles in hand, and explained to him that I needed to juke him small for an IV. That I would make sure I got it on the first try. And that, if he held still, I would give him not just one, but seven whole stickers. His eyes lit up and he stuck out his hand, brimming with confidence. His bravado failed him, however, as I approached his skin with the needle. His eyes rolled heavenwards in supplication as he screamed out in utter seriousness, JESUS, take me now! I had to stop and compose myself before starting that IV.

A little while later, the mamas in his corner called me over. They prophesied over me that, once I get back to the States, the first thing I will do is born a baby. While my ovaries don't mind the thought of that, I explained that I had to get a husband first. One mama laughingly offered her three-year old son. I told her he was too small and that I needed a big man. At which point little Dawayne rolled over, looked up at me, and with raised eyebrows and a sassy little head tilt delivered a perfect impression of Joey Tribiani. How you doin'? I almost peed myself.

And the kaleidescope shifts and Eddie fills my view and laughter is the last thing on my mind.

Eddie is four months old. From the neck down, he's like any other baby. He's the firstborn in his family, a little porker with chubby thighs and a miniature pot belly. Eddie is cherished. When he was born in the middle of the rainy season, his mama made sure to always cover him with a mosquito net when he slept, to make sure he didn't get malaria. About two months ago, an aunty was doing something by candlelight as the baby slept, secure under his net. She placed the candle on the ground, and in just a few seconds, little Eddie's life went up in flames. The net caught fire around him, and his face and head were horribly burned.

I hold Eddie and rock him and kiss the angry pink skin on his cheeks. I tell him he's beautiful. To anyone other than us, though, he's hideous. He doesn't look like a baby anymore. His eyes can barely open and close. His lips are a static mass of scar tissue. His nose is gone, leaving only two small holes in the centre of his face. The top of his head is an open sore. Everything else about him is the way it should be. His skin is creamy brown, his fingers delicate and perfect. It's just his face, the first thing everyone will see for the rest of his life. It's just his face that's been destroyed.

His mama loves him. She holds him and rocks him and dresses him in little outfits that we've scrounged from the bottom of donation boxes. She can't bear to be there when we change his bandage, so we take him to another room. He wails as we soak the infected sores on his head with vinegar, shaking from side to side, trying to make it stop. And then he quiets, submits, gives up, and that's maybe worse than all his screams.

I'm afraid for little Eddie. I'm afraid of what his life is going to be. He will never know what it means to be normal. He will live forever with people staring at him. People hating him. People ignoring him or making fun of him or calling him ugly. We sit here and we tell him he's beautiful (and he is, really; you just have to ignore the obvious), but he's not going to hear that very often when he leaves here.

Which made it all the more poignant when I heard his mama singing. I looked over to their bed in the corner to see her lying down, Eddie propped up on her stomach. From behind, all I could see was the plumpness of his diapered bottom, encased in a clean, white onesie, and the fresh whiteness of the bandage around his head. She bounced him up and down as she sang quietly.

I am on the Lord's side.
I will never give up.
I am an overcomer,
For the Lord God is on my side.

I pray that Eddie would be an overcomer. That he would somehow have the chance to grow up and go to school to learn to read like Dawayne. That he would be surrounded by people who can see past the scars.

That he would know love.