It's getting hard to know what to write, because it's been so long since I have.

The travels have taken on a less frenetic pace and we're holed up in Capetown, making the best of some very rainy weather and looking forward to India in less than a week.

When we arrived to Capetown on Wednesday (I think it was Wednesday; just a few weeks into this adventure and I've absolutely lost all sense of time), we were met by Murray's mum, proudly holding a Mercy Ships flag. We drove through the dark to his house and spent a night feeling like family with the family of one of our long-time Mercy Ships friends. I'm coming to realize more and more just what an incredible network we're building living on the ship, so much so that I can just walk into a strange house in Cape Town and feel perfectly comfortable poking through cupboards to find myself some tea, just because the house belongs to the parents of a ship friend.

Early the next morning Murray's dad led us to the highway and we headed up towards George on the Garden Route, an absolutely beautiful stretch of road here on the cape of South Africa.

We wound through mountain passes and past patchwork fields, the crops undulating like waves in the wind and sun. My eyes drank in the colours in long, greedy gulps; greens in every shade interlaced with grey and blue mountains and the flourescent yellow and deep purple of flowers growing in fields and along the roadside. This, I kept thinking, is why the South Africans on the ship differentiate between South Africa and the rest of the continent. It's like nothing I've ever experienced in West Africa, all the lush scenery and pastoral little villages that wouldn't have looked out of place in the German Alps. (We thought we might have taken a wrong turn somewhere when we came across signs for Heidelberg!)

Our destination was George, a little town nestled in the mountains of the Western Cape that's home to another ship friend. Lourens. We met up with him and he took us to a little guest house, run by a friend from his small group, where we'd be staying. Binks, the owner, made us feel right at home in the little cottage, and if you're ever in George, I can definitely recommend a place to stay!

There were two big things we wanted to do in George; caving and ostrich riding. Both had me slightly nervous, but for very different reasons. Thankfully, we started off with a beginner's introduction, a standard tour in the Cango Caves that was full of vast, open chambers and no hint of claustrophobia.

Honestly, if it wasn't for the whole irrational fear of enclosed spaces that seems to plague me, I think I might want to live in a cave. It was one of the most incredible things I've ever seen. It was full of soaring stalagmites and perilously-hanging stalagtites. In the second chamber, when the lights were turned on, I had to blink away tears to see it all clearly. It's incredible to think that there are probably hundreds and thousands of places like that around the world that no one has ever seen, incredible pockets of beauty that exist in the secret places, just to glorify God.

That day, we were too late to do something called the Adventure Tour, for which I was openly grateful. I needed a little time to get used to the idea that I was going to be crawling through places named The Devil's Chimney and The Letterbox. The next day, with the HoJ, Lourens and Jelliot (Julle and Elliot just takes too long to type) there to bolster my courage, we headed back into the dark for some adventures.

I surprised myself, honestly. Most of the places we were crawling through had an end in sight, and so I was able to hang onto that and not get too scared. The first smallish place we squeezed through had me feeling shaky and near tears by the end, but I'm far too stubborn to give in that easily. (Plus, I knew I had to crawl back through there on the way out, and having a breakdown on the first go-round wasn't going to help anything!) I'm glad I did it, if only to prove myself that I'm stronger than I thought, but I was much more excited for the next item on the agenda: ostrich riding at Cango Ostrich Farm.

One of our goals on this trip is to ride as many animals in as many countries as possible. We ticked elephants off our list in Zimbabwe, and I even pretended to ride a lion there, but ostriches was one I hadn't even considered until Lourens told us about it.

The HoJ and I were taken on a tour around the farm by Shane, a guide who seemed bent on pushing the limits of my gullibility as far as possible. To his delight, that was pretty far, and he had me convinced of several absolutely ridiculous ostrich facts before relenting and owning up to his jokes.

It was good enough getting to pet Dusty, a dwarf ostrich, and feed Betsey, her neck all wrapped around us, but the real fun came when we were shown to the corral. Phil graciously let me go first, probably more to see whether I'd meet a swift and inglorious end, but I was more than happy to get on that bird.

Riding an ostrich, it turns out, is like nothing else in the world. You're sitting on this massive bird, feet clenched around its chest, hanging onto the wings for dear life while they push it out of the stall and take the hood off its head. (While the hood's on, they're completely docile, stupid enough to believe that if they can't see you, you're not on their back, getting ready to take them for a ride.) And then, all of a sudden, you are absolutely flying around the paddock (and no, I don't fail to see the irony in that choice of term), the ostrich seemingly trying to get you off its back by dint of the sheer speed it's running at. I think the look on HoJ's face in the second photo kind of sums up the entire experience.

I think the whole thing lasted about twenty seconds, but I couldn't stop laughing for a least twenty minutes afterwards. If you ever get the chance, go ride an ostrich.

When it came time to leave George, we took our time getting home, stopping off at the southernmost tip of Africa, Cape Agulhas, probably the furthest south I'll be in my life, since Antarctica doesn't hold much pull for me.

There is still much to tell about what we've been up to in Cape Town, but we're heading out to go find something fun to do inside in the rain, so that'll have to wait for another day.

(Pioneer Lodge, outside Lusaka, Zambia)

I haven't written much about life over the last few days because I've been far too busy living it, the breaking bones and sucking out the marrow kind of living.

Causemore told us that you haven't experienced Africa until you've canoed the Zambezi. I think he might be right.

Day One:

We dropped in around 10:30, moving slowly away from the lodge where we'd stayed the night before. The sky was, typically, a cloudless blue and the current carried us along. We took most of the day just to get accustomed to paddling and steering, learning how to avoid tree stu8mps and swirling eddies in the water. This is not as easy as it sounds, especially when neither one in your canoe has any experience. (I am not counting the three days I spent on the Delaware when I was fourteen. There in no comparison even remotely possible.)

When it was time for lunch, we pulled our canoes up a sandy beach and Causemore directed us through the untying of tarpaulins and collecting of water and chopping of vegetables since our canoes turned out to be carrying crates filled with utensils and food and folding stools and even a small metal table. In what would become a routine over the next days, we all busied ourselves at whatever tasks Causemore alloted to us. I think that was the best sandwich I've ever eaten, sitting in the bright sunshine on the bank of the Zambezi River.

After lunch, we pushed off again and it wasn't long before we began to encounter wildlife of the larger variety, birds having already been our constant companions. The most memorable of these encounters (at least for this first day; things got better later on) was when we came upon a herd of about tn or so bull elephants. I would have been content watching them munch on the tall grass from the far side of the river, but Causmore directed us into the shore, not thirty feet from where they were. We could hear them chewing, the water splashing and the grass being ripped out by their agile trunks.

We watched them for a while, feeling incredibly small next to their massive bulk and then Causemore direted us to paddle up a small channel, putting us face to face with a young bull about twenty feet away. He looked up from his meal, flapping his ears in warning and then started to charge, water spraying everywhere as Causemore relaxed in his canoe and I seriously considered jumping ship and swimming away through croc-infected waters.

Causemore, it turned out, had the right reaction. A young bull isn't tough enough to charge for real and, in true form, the one stampeding towards us pulled up short after a few steps and shook his trunk once more before turning and ambling off.

That experience set the tone for the rest of the trip.

That night, we camped on a tiny island in the middle of the river, all sand and reeds and hippos surrounding us in the water. We made a fire and Causemore cooked us some dinner and we relaxed while the moon rose, throwing our shadows across the sand.

It was a good day.

Day Two:

Today was a day for hippos. They're Julle's favourite animal, and the one we were guaranteed to see on the river. This stretch is wide enough that you really do have to pick sides; either stick to the Zambian side and canoe past villages or brave the Zimbabwean side, where you'll have to paddle through a place Causemore has named Hippo City. He explained to us later that he doesn't take everyone through Hippo City; if he can't be sure they'll stay safe, he stays on the Zambian side. But we had somehow proved ourselves yesterday (maybe it was staying in the canoes while being charged by an elephant, I'm not sure) and so we steered towards the right bank, heading for Hippo City.

This, I have to admit, was nerve-wracking. It's one thing to steer a canoe when there's no danger. It's quite another to do the same when Causemore's voice takes on a note of real urgency and you know that there are hippos lurking in the water, some that have been described as "naughty" because they like to chase canoes and tip them." Needless to say, I spent much of the day not breathing, since something in my brain told me that holding my breath would protect me. (As a side note, this doesn't work and makes it much harder to paddle fast when told to do so; it's not a technique I recommend.)

Since one day on the river is much like another (breaking camp, paddling, stopping for meals and naps under shady trees, paddling some more and then making camp again and waiting for the moon to rise), there's no point in my explaining those part of each day. I'll skip on to the excitement, which came at lunchtime.

We had pulled out on the side of the river just across from a large male hippo basking in the sun. A little further downstream, on the same side as us, a whole school of them were in various stages of relaxing, half in, half out of the water. We ate our lunch and then I looked over and realized that two of the hippos were fighting. Causemore took this as a challenge, and told us to put on our shoes.

Like I said before, I had no idea what I was getting myself into on this trip.

I found myself creeping across the grass towards these two massive animals, close enough that I could hear their teeth cracking against each other and see the blood inside their mouths. When we were far closer than I thought was safe, Causemore dropped to his hands and knees and we followed suit, crawling through the dry grass until the only thing that separated us from the action was a small channel and a few more feet of grass.

The power of those two animals was incredible. At one point, one of the hippos had been driven into the water while the other was still on land. The one in the water hooked his teeth into the other's and pushed hard, driving up onto the bank, lifting the second hippo up on his back legs. I have no photos of this because I was crawling towards them while it happened, wondering whether or not I'd gone completely crazy and coming to the conclusion that I was probably just having a good time.

Once the fight was over and both hippos had splashed into the water, we stood up and strolled casually away, grinning like idiots since Causemore, a guide who's been on the river for twelve years, had never even seen something like that before. It was par for the course for us, really. Almost every day, someone told us. You don't see that every day!

Day Three:

The last day on the river, we decided to canoe the rest of the 65 kilometres to the pull-out point, something we weren't supposed to do until the following morning, so that we could wake up in time to go on a small walking safari on our final morning. The day was relaxed; after the excitement of the elephants and the hippo fight, just canoing past schools of them wasn't causing us much stress. We went for a wander through the woods a lunch, but didn't see much in the way of wildlife. In a way I'm glad; it leaves something for me to look forward to if I ever get to have an experience like this again!

Day Four:

We were supposed to be canoing today, but since we had pulled out early, we went for a game walk in the morning and saw some baboons and monkeys and impala grazing in the golden light of sunrise. The drive back to where we had left our luggage was long and dusty and had me wishing I was still on the river, paddling through the cool water and stopping for siestas under acacia trees. When we pulled back into the lodge, I felt like an entirely different person than the one that had left just four days before.

It's hard to explain, really, but I felt bigger, somehow. I fee like I've learned more about the world over the past two weeks than I have in the first twenty-seven years of my life, and it's like I've had to expand in some intangible way to hold it all. I never had a place in me for storing the beauty I've been witness to, never needed a compartment for the sound of elephant tusks crashing together as they fight in the water, never worried about whether or not I'd forget the way the Southern Cross looks in the night sky.

But now all this is mine to hold, and hold it I will, with all my tenuous strength. And when I grow old, I pray there's someone there to sit at my feet at hear the stories about how granny crawled through the grass to watch hippos fight, paddled away from charging elephants and sat under the light of a moon so bright she almost couldn't sleep at night.



Up next: South Africa.

We arrived at Victoria Falls Airport yesterday morning and stepped off the plane into perfect weather. I forgot what the air feels like when it's not saturated with exhaust-laden humidity. Our driver was named Lucky, and Julle tried to get into his seat, forgetting, as we all did, that Zimbabwe drives on the left.

My first impression of Lorrie's B&B wasn't a great one. Tucked away from the worn on a secluded back road, it seemed like a rundown, ramshackle mess. The lounge area smelled of smoke and dust and dog, and the paint was peeling off the ceiling above our bed.

The caretaker, George, called us a taxi and we got dropped off in town, making our way down Livingstone Drive towards the falls. Along the road we bought some defunct Zimbabwean currency off a street hawker, something like a hundred billion for two US dollars. A little further along, another seller, probably hoping to sweeten me up for a sale, handed me a ten-million note. It's for free. Really?!

We hesitated for a moment at the entrance to the falls. The admission price was thirty US dollars per person, and, trying to be wise with out money, we questioned whether it was worth such a steep fee.

The first view alone made us turn to each other, laughing at our foolishness.

How can I use words to tell you about Victoria Falls? How can anything I say come close to capturing it?

They are massive, carving a wide swath between Zambia and Zimbabwe. The water thunders and churns in a way I've never seen. Rainbows are everywhere, the children of the cool, ever-present mist and the perfectly blue sky of dry season. Ever corner we turned took our breath away again. More rainbows, more beauty, the most falling over us like rain, drenching us to the ski as we stood, mouths open, marveling.

I'm sitting here, absolutely lost for words as I try to write about this. I get the feeling this will not be the last time this happens over the course of the next four months.

As we walked back towards the entrance, the sun was lower, casting that late-afternoon glow over everything. The spray stood out like gold and the mist floated down between the trees, highlighted in wide bands of light.

We ate dinner at Mama Africa's Eating House in town. Little cast iron pots filled with beef soup, peanut chicken and antelope stew. Rice and sadza, the closest thing to nshima I've eaten since Zambia. Washing my right hand and rolling the sticky maize-meal paste between my fingers before dipping it into the soup felt more right than anything has in a while.

The sun set and we headed back to Lorrie's where I killed a scorpion in the shower and headed to bed under a pile of blankets because it actually gets cold here at night. The silence is deafening without the constant hum of the generators.

---

Today started early. Breakfast, I think, is what started to change my mind about Lorrie's. It honestly felt like we were staying at a friend's house, sitting down in the kitchen for some food.

We were picked up at 7:30 and the adventure began: whitewater rafting on the Zambezi. Simon, our guide, introduced himself and had us sign waiver forms stating that if we died, it wasn't his fault. He explained what we should do when (he did not say if) we flipped the raft, and introduced us to Kosta, our safety kayaker. I have never taken part in an activity that requires a safety kayaker, and began to feel slightly nervous.

The hike down the gorge to the drop-in was breathtaking. We kept catching glimpses of the river through the trees as we scrambled down through the green of the jungle. I had forgotten how fine the river sand is, how it squeaks under your feet as you walk over it.

Our porters inflated the raft while we dipped our feet into the water and after a quick lesson on how to paddle (which included the instructions paddle or die), we were off. Zambia on our left, Zimbabwe to the right.

The river carves through cliffs that stand straight up on either side, a row of trees like sentries along the top. The water was cool and green under another cloudless blue sky, and a crescent moon, barely visible in the sunlight, hung suspended in a break in the rocks.

We took the first rapids in good form, paddling hard with my heart in my throat. It wasn't until the next set, called the Three Ugly Sisters, that things got really interesting. Simon promised to take us over the toughest part, a Class IV rapid, warning us that the command to 'get down' would be inevitable.

We hit the white water and the raft rushed up a wave like a wall, then down into the valley while Simon shouted at us to get down. What happened next probably took less than two minutes, although it felt like forever.

As I crouched, hanging onto the rope and my paddle, the raft flipped hard, throwing me out. I clawed at the side but a swirl of water wrenched the line from my fingers and I had no time to breathe before I was spinning through the churning waves, no way of knowing which way to swim to get air.

I barely had enough time to be scared before my lifejacket proved its worth and I popped to the surface where I was promptly buffeted by more waves. The raft was close, so I hung on for dear life as roared through another two rapids.

There was no time to right the raft, so we clambered on top and Simon, a note of urgency in his voice, told us to hold on and balance ourselves. Julle's voice came small above the roar of the water. How, and then we were spinning and whirling and hanging on for dear life.

Folks, I survived a Class V rapid on an overturned raft. Not something I thought I would be doing when I woke up this morning.

Once we'd righted our vessel and gotten repositioned, the newly christened Zambezi Swim Team set off again down river. Twice we jumped out of the raft into the cool, clear water and floated through smaller rapids. It was incredible, all of it.

And now I'm sitting on my porch at Lorrie's, a bottle of the most delicious tap water I've ever tasted on the table next to me. The garden is all tangled branches and green grass and the birds are chirping and a ray of sunshine is slanting through the rustling leaves to illuminate my page as I write.

I kind of love this place.

Chobe National Park, Botswana

I'm sitting on a canvas chair in front of the ashes of last night's fire. Off to the right, not so far from camp, the vultures are circling over a dead giraffe. My hair is still damp from the shower I just took, water trickling from a canvas bag slung up over a tree branch.

You're probably already getting tired of hearing me say this, but I can't believe this is my life.

This part of the trip has been the biggest adventure so far, since I had no idea what to expect. We were originally supposed to be staying at a lodge just outside the park, but they had overbooked, and so our travel agent substituted the trip we're on now. Mark, we owe you one.

It started with a mid-morning cruise on the Chobe River between Botswana and Namibia after which we had lunch at the Safari Lodge, a place far too posh for the four of us. We climbed into an open safari Land Cruiser and headed into the park where we met the other people staying at our campsite and went on a sunset game drive. This morning, we were up with the dawn for another drive, and we're just relaxing now before we head out again.

Those are the facts, the bare bones of what we've done. What we've experienced is so much more.

I watched a herd of bachelor elephants, sixteen of them, cross slowly over the river to the greener grass on the island. The smallest ones used their trunks as snorkels, just their eyes and the tip of their long noses visible above the water. When they stepped out onto the land, their wrinkled skin was two-toned, like they'd been half-dipped in dark paint.

I saw a baby hippo throw his mouth open, showing all his teeth while his mama looked on indulgently.

I saw zebras, far off across a plain and right near my car, shy and frightened, darting away through the bush.

I watched a leopard lie languidly along a tree branch, fur like velvet in the late-afternoon light.

I held my breath as out car was surrounded by elephants, one fierce mama flapping her ears at us as her baby scuttled for cover under her body.

I looked out across a wide open island where elephants, giraffes, zebras, impala, warthogs, baboons and water buffalo all shared space under the light of a setting sun.

I saw two giraffes fight, their movements graceful, almost in slow motion as they intertwined their necks and butted each other with their furry horns.

I laid awake at night, listening to hyenas scream as they fought over the body of the dead giraffe, not a kilometer away from our camp, their laughter maniacal in the darkness. I saw them in the morning, slinking around in the cold grey light, ugly as sin.

I locked eyes with a lioness, no more than ten feet from my car.

I watched a baby baboon, no more than a couple of weeks old, sitting in the shade of his mama's body, sucking his thumb and looking for all the world like a little old man.

I watched the setting sun sink behind the long neck of a giraffe as the rest of the journey bent forward to drink from the river.

I tracked a male lion through the cold morning, holding my breath as he stalked past our car, his mane golden in the sun.

I heard a herd of impala gather and make short barking sounds to warn off a leopard who was slinking through the trees, not daring to come too close in the face of such an overwhelming crowd.

How have I been blessed like this? I'm sitting here in the middle of the bush and all I can hear is birds chirping and the wind rustling in the leaves. This morning as I brushed my teeth, a herd of kudu walked slowly past, and just a few minutes before that I heard the low rumbling of an elephant calling to his friends.

I'm overwhelmed by creation. God, it seems, spared no expense when He created this part of the world. The animals and birds are so incredibly varied and vibrant, the landscape stunning in its beauty.

The thing is, all this would exist whether I was here to see it or not. For as long as I'll be on this earth, and, I should imagine, quite a while after that, the world will be filled with breathtaking beauty.

I plan to bear witness to as much of it as I possibly can.

Chobe Safari Lodge, Botswana

We stay at the Chobe Safari Lodge tonight, probably the starkest contrast to the last two days I could dream up if I tried. I've been sleeping in a canvas tent on the sandy ground, using toilets that are no more than holes in another canvas enclosure. Here, the french doors in my room open out onto a deck with a view of the river, and the bathtub is so deep I could have easily drowned. (I did not let this fact deter me and took the first bath I've had in nearly eight months.)

I feel out of place here, and I think it has more to do with the last two and a half years than the last two and a half days.

I find I've become uncomfortable with luxury. When given the opportunity, like tonight, I will enjoy it; don't get me wrong. It's just that, underneath my joy at being able to have a bath, I've got an undercurrent of hesitation, of awareness. Is it okay that I use this much water when there are so many on this continent who die because they don't have access to it? Is it okay for me to stay at a place where they change the centrepieces on the tables for every meal when I know people who don't know where their next meal is coming from?

It's not the first time I've felt this disconnect, and I pray it won't be the last, but coming out of the bush and into the middle of all this throws the contrast into such sharp relief that if I don't move slowly, I'm afraid I'll cut myself.

But everything is still right in my world. One of the women who works here just passed by with a wide smile. So, she said, you are an African lady now. It took me a heartbeat to realize she was referring to the lappa I have wound around my body, but in that moment my soul agreed, and I remembered where my allegiance lies.

Tomorrow we leave for Zambia, and I will finally be back in the first African country I saw, the one that changed everything for me.

Just a quick note to let you know that I'm alive and well, just been out of contact with civilization for a while. There's loads of stories to be shared and photos too, if I can ever convince another internet cafe to let me plug in my camera. It seems that so far only Zimbabwe was a fan of that.

Short version? We spent four days canoeing down the Zambezi River, flew to Cape Town where we spent a night with our friend Muray's parents and are now up the coast in George hanging out with another old Mercy Ships friend. We're about to go on some sort of cave adventure in Cango Caves. I don't know if this is really a good idea, because did you know I'm absolutely, terribly claustrophobic?

Yeah. This is probably the first time I've been properly scared on this trip, and I've crawled on hands and knees through the grass to within thirty metres of where two huge hippos were fighting. But that's a story for another day...

Edited to add:

I've gone back to catch up on some stories. They're posted in a bit more of a chronological order, so they're showing up below this one. I'm not sure what will be happening for those of you who have me in a reader, since I'm all over the place. It might be worth just clicking through to make sure you're not missing anything. I'm also going to be going back through old entires over the next few days and posting photos, since the place we're staying right now has free internet. Stay tuned!

(Chiawa Communal Camp, Zambia)

We've reached the end of the journey.

I don't want to leave this river.

(second night on the Zambezi River)

I'm writing thisby the light of the moon, somewhere on the middle of the Zambezi, on a little sandy island surrounded by hippos calling to each other in the night. From across the water, a hyena is screaming and Jupiter is rising over our tents while Mars sets over the river.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I signed up for all this. I certainly didn't expect to be camping on a tiny island along with a school of hippos who splash into the water unexpectedly about a hundred yards from where I sit at the fire.

I just don't know how to describe all this. We went from seeing animals from far away while we sat in a motorboat to tracking them through a park in an open safari car. And now we're sitting at water level, paddling up to them (and, more often than not, away from them), with nothing to protect us but our guide, Causemore.

---

Favourite Parts of Today

Elliot: sneaking up to hippos having a fight
Phil: using an elephant print for a toilet; saved digging a hole!
Julle: seeing a baby hippo that was only three weeks old
Ali: seeing colours by moonlight - even red!

Least Favourite Parts of Today

Ali: burning the backs of my hands
Julle: arguing about where to go while creeping around an island to avoid hippos
Phil: being confused about instructions while paddling through Hippo City
Elliot: the fact that today has to end

(A small island on the Zambezi River, Zambia

Just a note: the next few entries will be jumbled and not necessarily on chronological order. I wrote all higgelty-piggelty in fits and starts during this part of the adventure, and I'm just going to copy and date things as they appear in my journal. Good luck sorting it all out.)

Yesterday we crossed over from Botswana to Zambia in a small speednoat. Yet another first. Our driver gave me his hand and I stepped onto land. Welcome to Zambia.

We flew from Livingstone to Lusaka on a tiny place. Julle, somehow, wasn't 'in the system' (TIA!) so she and Elliot took the next flight. It was so strange, in the middle of this whole adventure, to be back on familiar ground. Granted, it was just he airpoer, but in a funny way it felt like coming home.

All our other lodges have been less than twenty minutes' drive, so we were more than a little surprised when our driver thistime told us to settle in for a three hour journey.

---

Pause: list animals (a list that I added to as the canoe trip went on, but which I'll type in its entirety now)

- elephant
- hippo
- crocodile
- water buck
- side-striped jackal
- cane rat
- eland
- bush buck
- impala
- samango monkeys
- water buffalo
- baboon
- warthog

Birds we saw (a list kept with my old roommate, Amber, in mind, since she's the one who taught me to love birds)

- white-fronted bee eater
- saddle-billed stork
- butler eagle (short tailed)
- maribou stork
- grey heron
- great white heron
- white egret
- kingfisher
- african jacana
- pied kingfisher
- malachite kingfisher
- osprey
- sacred ibis
- african skimmer
- marshal eagle
- camine bee eater
- white crowned plover
- african spoonbill
- hammer kopp (endangered bird)
- round hornbill
- black-winged stilt

Heard but not seen:

- lions
- hyenas
- black creek (a bird)

My own life astonishes me these days. We arrived in Zimbabwe on Saturday at 11. It's Monday at mearly 9PM and in that span of time I have had so many experiences I never dreamed I'd really get to have.

Today, I walked with lions and rode an elephant.

That is a sentence the likes of which I will not often get to write.

It was cold enough that I could see my breath this morning as we huddled together and signed our waivers. (Everything I do these days seems to carry the risk of death or dismemberment. I'm not complaining.) The sun was still low, the sky starting to turn blue after the pastel rainbow sunrise had spent itself in a blaze of orange and gold. Sticks in hand, out weapons against the king of the jungle, we walked quietly through the bush, dry grass rustling under our feet as we circimnavigated big piles of elephant poo.

We came upon them suddenly. Mbote and Monday are brother and sister, only nine months old but big enough to set my heart skipping. Walking alongside them, my hand on Monday's back, was like a dream. Nine months old, and her musles rippled under her coarse fur. Her eyes were golden, her paws still too big for her body. Mbote stalked ahead. We didn't pet hium because, according to our guide, he doesn't know how to play. If you stand near him he will turn around and bite your leg. No need for that.

After some time we left them and went off to find the others, two males both eighteen months old, their manes just starting to grow in tufts around their heads. They were perched on an outcropping of rock, and Phil and I sat down to have our photo taken.

The lion in front of us was quiet, almost bored, but as we sat there I felt a rumbling growl from behind me. I froze as Julle, from a little ways away, let me know that the lion behind me was turning his head and moving towards my back as he growled.

It turns out that my natural response to intense dear is to freeze solid with a look of terror on my face. I sat there, hoping Phil would have time to get away while I was being chewed and wishing one of the guides would give me some kind of instructions.

A few taps with a stick later and it was safe for me to get up and get away, which I did willingly. That was enough of an encounter for me! After we'd finished with the lions and enjoyed a picnic-style English breakfast, it was back down the road to meet the elephants.


Our guide, Wellington, helped us onto Lundi's back; she's too picky to use the platform provided, so she knelt down in the dirt and we clambered aboard. Gracefully, of course.

Sitting there on her back, wandering through the bush at a leisurely pace while Wellington pushed back thorn trees and pointed out impala and warthogs among the trees was surreal. I leaned forward and pressed my palm to Lundi's shoulder, feeling the massive, solid bulk of her under my hand. As she walked, her trunk curled around branches, tearing them off and chomping them up for a snack. Every so often she's pull her trunk up over her head, the tip of it moving like lips, waiting for the treats Wellington let Phil and I pour into her nostrils so she could shoot them into her mouth.

I find myself in awe of God's creation, surrounded as I have been by parts of it so new to me. I marvel at the creativity that gave us lions and elephants, dry bush and thundering falls, rushing rivers and a million stars overhead. What must He be like to have spoken all this? How can I understand His glory if I'm floored by a fallen creation?

Tomorrow we drive to Botswana to camp out under a sky full of stars, somewhere in the bush.

I think what I'll do as we go along in the travels is journal on paper and then blog by the day I wrote whenever we hit up an internet cafe. So expect a few entries at a time once a week or so. This set comes quickly on the heels of us leaving the ship, because we've managed to pack more living into the last four days than I thought was even possible. This first bit is from the day we left and headed for Ghana.

---

And so it begins.

The trip started in true African fashion. These are the things I don't want to forget when we've left this continent. Border crossings manned by a surly official at a wooden table, stamping passports mechanically in the cool breeze. Dust on my feet as we walk to the taxi station, a motley assortment of vans. We sat in one for an hour and a half, waiting for the requisite twenty passengers to join to we could go. They never came. We took a private car instead while the man with our money disappeared mysteriously into the crowd.

This is Africa. I'm going to miss it.

Somehow safaris and South Africa don't feel like Africa to me. I need roadside markets, little kids shoving socks and sodas and snails into my window when I stop at a police checkpoint.

I don't even really realize yet that we've left the ship.

I seem to have missed a day somewhere in all this travel. I don't want to fall behind in writing, because there is so much that will pass me by. Already we are on an adventure. Already I feel so removed from what I've come to know as Africa.

We left Accra at night after sitting in a press of people for more than an hour, straining to hear garbled announcements over a shoddy PA system. We took off, the lights of the city spread out below us, raindrops stretching to thin threads on the windows and then we were through the clouds and heading south in a black sky. Dozing off and waking to Phil nudging me and pointing out the window to a million stars that I don't get to see on my side of the Equator.

Sitting here in the Johannesburg airport waiting for our flight to Zimbabwe, it's finally starting to feel like we've left home. Our bags came off the carousel and I was shocked at how small mine looked. All my life distilled into this one pack. Everything we've left on the ship I could walk away from without looking back,.

So here I am, going back to the Africa I knew first, before the West took hold of me. I'm getting out of the dust and fumes and trash of the cities, exchanging all that for open plains and red dirt roads.

We were talking to a man while we waited to go through security and mentioned how long we'd be traveling. Where are you going, he asked, and I answered, glib. Around the world. I think that may have been the first time it's really hit me, what we're at the start of.

My life is in a bag on my back and I am going around the world. From my seat, dazed after a night spent on a plane and in an airport, it seems crazy to think that this life is mine.

Just five days ago, I put out a call, wondering if there was anyone out there who could feel connected enough with strangers a world away to want to pray for someone they would never meet.

Five days. 580 names.

And the thing is, at this point, I'm not even doubting whether or not I'll get twenty more e-mails. I've been sitting here, witness to an absolute outpouring of faith from around the world, and I don't see any reason it'll stop before every single pink sheet has a little black dot in the corner. My faith has been strengthened because I have been on the receiving end of yours. What a sweet way to end this outreach.

We leave for Ghana on Thursday and from there on to the rest of the world. By the time we land back at home, a couple of weeks before Christmas, we'll have traveled almost one and a half times the circumference of the Earth.

I'll be blogging when I can, but I'm not sure how regularly that will be, because I'm taking the four months as something of a fast from the noise and media that usually surround my life. I won't be bringing a computer or an iPod. No books or magazines. Just my Bible, my journal, and my camera.

Before I go, I will have sent out those last twenty names, and when I write the last e-mail I think it'll feel something like closure.

It's hard to think about this season ending, honestly. I know we're planning to come back, but we're holding those plans loosely. I have no idea what this next year is going to hold or where I'll be at the end of it. I know I'm going to see so much, but something in me already misses the place I haven't left yet.

I think this leaving will be hard. Not knowing when I'll be back under the West African sky feels like losing a piece of myself, a piece I've come to hold so dearly over the last two and a half years.

I hope it doesn't slip away when I'm far from here.

474.

I'm leaving that on its own line because I keep looking at that number, and I can't believe it's true. The pile of unmarked pink sheets is so small now that it actually seems possible that we can do this, that every one of these people will have someone praying for them from a world away.

They're almost all I think about these days. The last nine patients were discharged this morning while I sat at my computer, writing e-mails to all of you about the ones who never made it onto the wards. I stopped by A Ward before they left, and Josee shrieked my name, hugging me as we pretended to cry about our parting. I didn't actually cry until I left the ward and was back in my room, staring at the pile of pink sheets again.

We reshaped Josee's foot. We fixed Maurius' lip and Aissa's cheek. We built Tani a lip and a nose. We did so much. And there is so much left to do.

Thank you standing in the gap with us. For being the link that's going to hold us to this place long after the ship sails away.

On Thursday, I'm going to head off on an adventure around the world, carrying these names with me. I'm praying I can leave behind all six hundred sheets, each one with a little black dot in the corner.

On Friday evenings, after work and before the sun goes down, we head out to a grassy field near the ship to play Ultimate. It's the perfect end to a week of work, and since the raining season has made temperatures dip to where it doesn't feel like we're stepping into a sauna when we leave the port, it's a sweet deal all around. This week, just like every other, it was made even sweeter by the watchful presence of close to thirty kids in various stages of dress and disrepair.

The rest of the players joke that having me on their team is a gamble, that when the kids crowd the sidelines, I'm a flight risk. Yesterday, their fears were confirmed; it appears that I've gone from a hardcore player to nothing but a big softie.

I made it through about fifteen minutes of the game before the kids started mimicking us, hopping up and down and pretending to throw a disc around. One little guy in particular caught my eye, goofy grin and frantically wiggling eyebrows in an impish face. When I greeted them in Mina and they shrieked with laughter, taking it in turns to see who could come the closest to my outstretched hand without running away in terror, I was sold.

I took a spare disc and a spare player, one of my friends from youth, Alannah, and herded my little friends over to the other side of the field. Conveniently, about half of them were wearing shirts in many shades of red. The rest were clad in every colour of the rainbow, but when we asked them what their team should be named, they agreed on the obvious choice: Noir (Black). One small guy presented a bit of a puzzle, with a shirt that was covered in red flowers on the front but totally black on the back. Since it made the numbers even, he ended up on team Rouge (Red). His allegiance was confused throughout the entire game.

The guy with the wiggling eyebrows introduced himself to me as Janneau, and it turned out that he understood my French well enough that he became my translator as I explained the rules of the game. These were met with much nodding of heads and more wiggling of eyebrows, and soon enough we sent Team Rouge over to the other end of the field (they only made it about fifteen feet before they were too excited and turned around) to wait for the throw.

What ensued was nothing short of mayhem. I lost my voice fairly promptly, since all thirty kids either looked to me for guidance or just fought tooth and nail over the disc whenever it hit the ground. And it did hit the ground. A lot. Because they threw it with sheer abandon, no receiver in sight, shrieking with the joy of the game.

We played until it was too dark to see, and then we all said goodbye. Janneau and Emmanuel and Komla walked me to the Land Rover, their little hands in mine all the way across the field.

I don't know if I'll be able to play again before we leave Togo, but if I don't make it back to the field, I'll know that there are a whole bunch of kids who have at least some idea how to play Ultimate. I'd say it's a pretty good legacy.


(Photo taken by PJ Accetturo at our field last year in Benin.)

I think I may have led a few people astray by leading them to believe that we are strictly a volunteer organization. The truth is, everyone who signs on articles on the ship is, in effect, signing a contract that states we will be paid a salary of two dollars. Per year. Payable if and only if you happen to be on board on your birthday and in the form of a gift certificate to the Ship Shop.

Today marked the third year in a row that I've been paid this enormously large salary, and I promptly spent half of my year's earnings on a extra large mug of chai tea.

Wandering onto the ward at seven, I was greeted by a sign on the door and a not-so-hushed chorus of Happy Birthday in seven separate languages. A few minutes later, one of the translators stuck his head around the door, obviously fake panic in his eyes. Afi! We need you! There is an emergency! When I made it into the hall, there was a whole pile of them, laughing at their clever deception while Mark/Eric (he goes by either name, depending on his mood) held up his camera. The emergency is that we need a birthday picture, and so we all piled together to capture the moment.

Being in this community on your birthday is lovely. You spend the day receiving hugs and greetings from all around the world. When you show your face in the dining room, someone rings the big ship's bell and the whole place sings to you. There are cookies outside your door, left for you along with your yearly wages by the Hospitality department. And, in an unspoken tradition, one of your friends has inevitably stayed up until they were sure you were asleep and then decorated the wall outside your cabin so you're greeted by balloons and other pretty things in the morning. (It doesn't matter that you go to sleep knowing full well that this will be the case in the morning; it still makes you feel like a rock star.)

This year in particular, I just feel happy. That may have something to do with the scrub top my friend Jen gave me, the one she loved so much she was planning on taking home, and the one I've secretly been coveting since I first saw her wear it. I probably won't take it off until after she leaves on Saturday, just in case she changes her mind.

But more than anything, I'm just in a good place. I'm twenty-seven, and I couldn't be more content with my life, a life that is, by all accounts, something of a failure. I don't own a car, and I don't even have a license to drive here. I've never rented my own apartment or owned my own home. Everything I own fits into one narrow closet and a couple of drawers underneath my bed. I make two dollars a year.

I am by no measure a wise woman, but I feel like I'm beginning to understand a deeper truth.

A truth that tells me that life marked by the rhythm of drums and sunsets behind palm trees is a good life. That having is not as important as giving. That beauty is our inheritance, no matter how we look. That if we can learn to love, deeply and without reservation, everything else will fall into place.

This is why I'm so excited to be looking forward to many more birthdays on this ship. Because I am, more than ever, convinced that I love best here.

When there's ABBA blaring from the iPod, beds full of supplies and mattresses stacked up high, it can mean only one thing: the end of the outreach is upon us. This year's tie-down is going to be, in a word, a nightmare. I say that in all seriousness. Since the ship is heading to South Africa for the generators to be replaced, this isn't just the usual business of collecting all the supplies and equipment and making sure they don't move when the ship hits a twenty-five degree roll in the middle of the Atlantic. (Repeat after me: I will not set out to sea in a train ferry.) Once the ship reaches South Africa, we're planning on spending anywhere up to six months in dry dock, and that's where the stress comes in.

For those of you who don't actually live on ship, dry dock is where the ship goes into a shipyard and is lifted completely out of the water for repairs and maintenance. It means limited electricity and no air conditioning. For six months. In one of the hottest and most humid cities in South Africa. Do you see where I'm going with this?

We are a hospital, and as such, we have a lot of very sensitive bits of machinery. Things like anesthesia machines, heart monitors, IV pumps, and the list goes on far longer than I care to think about. Not only that, but a huge amount of our supplies can't really survive in the hot and humid. (Fun fact of the day: sutures are on that list. Not-so-fun fact of the day: the OR has more sutures than you've probably ever cared to think about.) One of the wards is going to have some sort of cooling system in place, so we've got to get everything that might go bad in the heat into that ward. All the machinery, all the linens, all the paperwork, all the everything, practically. Into one ward.

All of this creates a jigsaw puzzle far more complicated than my little brain's power, which means that while the patients are still in their beds in A and B Wards and the ORs are still running, we're starting to think about packing up at the other end of the hospital. This is where my office day got exponentially more fun today. As we wandered through the wards looking at what might need to go in "the cool room" (a name I have only just now come up with and hope to sell the rest of the hospital on tomorrow at our seven AM meeting when we sit down to talk all this over yet again), we realized that there were x-ray viewing boxes on the walls of every ward that were going to be taking up a lot of space.

Thankfully, at this point we also realized that our entire x-ray system is digital, and we really only need to leave one or two of them on board for emergencies; the rest could be taken down and donated to local hospitals. Naturally, just doing that simple job wasn't really an option; we needed to pose with them and take ludicrous photos, too.

Hopefully, after tomorrow, the twelve viewing boxes we managed to collect from all over our hospital will be headed off to hospitals and clinics all over Togo, and the scrubbing and emptying and arranging of the wards will continue without a hitch.

Let's not get our hopes too high, shall we? This is, after all, Africa.

(But I heart Africa, so I think everything's going to be okay.)

Here's a sneak peak at the smallest patient we've treated this outreach.

I'll tell you Baby Kossi's story soon.

I've been blogging for a while now, and I've gotten used to the sound of a keyboard rather than the scratch of pen on paper. It's just as easy for me to upload a photo as it would be to doodle one in a margin (provided the ship's bandwidth is feeling up to the task), and reading entries starting at the bottom of a page and working my way up doesn't seem terribly backwards. I think I like this whole internet thing.

Be that as it may, there's something incredibly satisfying and, well, just plain right about reading the old-fashioned way. The get out a flashlight and burrow under the covers kind of way. No illuminated screen, just real paper in your hands, pages turned instead of loaded.

Yesterday, I got to hold my writing in my hands for the first time, and I'm not going to lie; it felt pretty good. Flipping through the pages of my blog from my first year with Mercy Ships felt really organic, if that makes any sense. I could see so clearly how I moved through that year because I didn't have to stop reading every few minutes to load a new screen on my browser.

And the cool thing about the website I used to make the book is that it serves as an independent bookstore. Which means that you, if you're crazy enough, could go here, preview the book and buy a copy for yourself. (There's a button in the sidebar now that will take you there, too.) Heck, I'm planning on making one for each outreach, so by the time HoJ and I leave the ship for good, you might have enough of these things to fill a whole shelf!

Blurb lets you pick your own price for selling your book, with the understanding that you earn the profits above the manufacturing costs. Which is why, if you're actually considering buying this thing, the price seems high. I was talking with another of the nurses about this today, and she gave me a great idea. One of our Togolese day volunteers, a housekeeper named Amelie, was just diagnosed with leukemia, and we've been taking up a collection to help pay for her treatment, since she's going to be losing her job in a month when we sail away.

Wouldn't it be cool to set aside the money from the book for crew and day volunteers who have needs like Amelie, she asked me, and I knew it was the right thing to do.

My cousin Dave calls it love money, this secret stash of cash that it's always good to have on hand for needs like this. For the patient's caregiver whose roof blows off in a storm. For the mama who suddenly needs to pay for her baby's funeral instead of his formula. For a co-worker who gets sick and lives in a country where money for treatment is so hard to come by.

I'm not saying we're going to solve the world's problems with the couple of dollars this might raise, and I don't want you to feel like I'm guilting you into buying it. Money isn't just hard to come by in Togo; I know that.

Just know that if you want to hold a copy of these wild ramblings in your hands, a few of the dollars you spend will go towards love, half a world away.

I looked at a calendar this morning and absent-mindedly noted that it's the twelfth of July. Huh. Already, I thought to myself, and went back to what I was doing.

About three seconds later, I did a massive double-take.

The twelfth. Which means that in exactly one month, I leave the ship to set off on a crazy four-month adventure around the world with the HoJ by my side. One month. Suddenly everything narrows, and I'm thinking in terms of lasts. One last cleft lip. The last hemimandibulectomy. The last tie-down at the end of an outreach. Even the incredibly mundane. This will be the last bottle of shampoo I'll buy; by the time it runs out, we'll be travelling.

The map above our couch is marked, each magnet holding a slip of paper reminding me what dates we'll be in each country, and I find myself staring at it at odd moments, hardly able to believe that I'm going to do this.

I'm going to see the Taj Mahal at sunrise. I'm going to canoe down the Zambezi River and sleep under the stars on its banks at night. I'm going to dance on the Great Wall at the express request of my sister; if not for her I might just be planning to walk sedately along its length. I'm finally going to visit friends in countries where the water swirls the wrong way around.

I'm going to do all that and a thousand more things, and I cant wait to start.

But starting all that means ending this, and I'm just not ready to do that.

If you look closely at that map, you'll see one magnet without a little piece of paper under it. It's sitting in South America, over the northern part of Peru, and we're not going there on the world tour. And I slipped a little hint into an entry a few days back. (Did you notice? I'm firmly convinced that Togo in raining season has the absolute most perfect weather in all of West Africa, or at least in the four countries I've visited so far. [I'll get back to you in ten years or so once I've been to the rest.])

While I'm well aware that West Africa and Peru clearly have little to do with each other, I'm so excited to finally explain how they're both in our future.

It all started a few months ago when the HoJ and I turned our sights to home, trying to figure out where we'd be heading come August and the end of the outreach. Our options were as wide as Canada, but every time we sat down to seriously discuss just where in the real world we were going to settle down, I would dissolve into tears. I just couldn't picture us in any of the cities we were considering, and that scared me. It also made me cry. A lot.

Time went by, and we found ourselves at an impasse until one day the HoJ turned to me in the midst of me tears and said the wisest thing he's ever said. What if we change the question? What if, instead of a city in Canada, we try to decide between staying on the ship, working on land or doing a DTS and then coming back?

It was like flying, like sunrise, the way I felt then. I can't even begin to explain how excited I got every time we discussed the future, no matter which option we were considering. And the more we considered it, the more we realized that this season is not over. That our time with Mercy Ships is going to be much longer than just this next month.

So here, tentatively (as is everything in this crazy world) is the plan.

Once the world tour finishes, we'll have a month or so at home to spend time with family (and hopefully meet some new friends). In February of 2011, we're hoping to head to Peru together for the next six months to do a Discipleship Training School with YWAM. We're going to spend three months in the largest city in the world not accessible by road and three more in the Amazon jungle of Peru and maybe Columbia and Ecuador, too, learning Spanish and getting to know God so much better.

And when all that is over, we're coming home. Home to the ship, to our life here in West Africa. While we couldn't picture life in North America having anything to do with us, life here makes all the sense in any world. It fits us, this place and these people.

This is our real world, and it looks like we're going to live in it for a long, long time.

When I first met Josee, the first thing I noticed were the flip flops sticking out from underneath her bed. She had shoved them as far back as possible, but I could still see them. One was an ordinary, black leather sandal. The other, obviously custom-made, was more than twice the size of the first, fashioned to provide a place for the two massively oversized toes on her right foot that had brought her to us.

She was quiet in the evening before her surgery, more than a month and a half ago, now. We had no idea that day just how long she'd end up staying with us, no idea that the silent little teenager in Bed Eleven would become a fixture on the wards.

Unfortunately, that's just what's happened. Josee had her surgery, and her right foot was reshaped to match the left. Everything looked good at first, and she was discharged home only to be readmitted about a week later, the wound beginning to break open, threatening the entire success of the procedure.

And so Josee has stayed with us, confined to her bed, only allowed outside for a short time every day, and only if she promises to keep her foot up, since any swelling might make us lose the tenuous grasp we've got on her healing.

She's another of the incredibly bright ones; Beth (one of our nurses whose mishaps and adventures this outreach could fill an entire blog post all on their own; suffice it to say that she's the only person I know to burn her leg on a zemidjahn and be hit by a falling coconut all in one week) taught her to do her own wound care, and so twice a day Josee sits in her bed, brow furrowed in concentration as she performs a complicated dressing on her own foot using impeccable sterile technique.

But a dressing, even if it needs to be done twice a day, can only take up so much time. And with the World Cup drawing to a close, there's not much for Josee to do during the rest of the day.

This is where Claire comes in.

Claire is one of my favourite people these days. She's a writer with the Communications department, but she doesn't just write. She hangs out with us, making it a point to spend time with each patient before ever pulling out a pen or asking a personal question. The patients love her, because they can tell she loves them.

The other day, Claire stopped me in the hall and told me about an idea that she had. She wanted to write a story from the patient's perspective, in their own words, and she was wondering if I had any suggestions. It was all I could do to keep from hugging her; here was the solution for Josee. Here was something to keep her occupied during the long hours between dressing changes and football matches.

And so now Josee has a little notebook and a pen and she's writing her own story. Every time she passes me in the hall, on her way outside for some fresh air, she grabs my arm. Alice, I am writing. I am writing.

When she's finished, I'll share it with you. I'll let you know how it feels to be a teenager with a deformed foot, trying to blend in in a cruel world. But this time, I'm not going to use my own words. I'll let Josee tell you herself.

The wards are slowly filling back up, with more and more beds occupied with patients waiting for their turn in the operating rooms. Even so, D Ward is still dark and quiet, a testament to just how slow the last few weeks have been. As a result, we don't need all our charge nurses every morning, and I've drawn the short straw: admin days.

Don't get me wrong; having an office day isn't all bad. I get to sleep in, for one. My alarm doesn't go off at six, and whenever I do end up rolling out of bed I don't have to make my way to the dining room; the dear, dear, HoJ will have brought me breakfast and a glass of orange juice, and they'll be waiting for me on the counter. (Yes, I know I'm lucky. Even luckier is the fact that, not only do I get breakfast delivered, I never, ever have to cook dinner. Who else is ready to sign up for Mercy Ships?!)

However, being in the office means just that: I'm in the office. Sitting at a desk, staring at a computer. All. Day. Long. After a good eight hours spent working on the end of outreach report today, I was feeling more than a little stir crazy and more than a little lazy. So after dinner, I laced up my sneakers and headed outside to exercise.

I'll give you a moment here to get over your shock.

It was a beautiful evening. I'm firmly convinced that Togo in raining season has the absolute most perfect weather in all of West Africa, or at least in the four countries I've visited so far. (I'll get back to you in ten years or so once I've been to the rest.) There was a cool breeze blowing in off the ocean and the sky was awash in pink and orange, the fiery remnant of an early sunset. It was the perfect night for a brisk walk.

I hadn't reckoned with the guard to our gate. He sat on his customary wooden bench next to his little shack, holding onto the rope stretched across the open road. Whenever a car passed, he dropped the rope to let them pass and more of then than not left it on the ground for ten or so minutes afterwards until he remembered to pick it up again.

He thought I was insane.

Every time I passed his way, he was staring at me, wondering why on earth this crazy yovo would be walking back and forth, not carrying anything on her head, clearly getting nowhere.

After about six laps, it seemed that he was catching on and would wave happily as I made my turn. On laps ten through fourteen, he got really excited and clapped, cheering me on. However, somewhere around lap sixteen he had had enough and started frowning at me, his forehead all wrinkled with concern, making the characteristic patting motion with his hands that means stop around here. Through the music in my earphones I could hear him telling me, Doucement! Slow down!

I decided twenty laps was probably all he could take, since his concern for my health (more mental then physical, I assume) was growing rapidly, so as I passed him on the final turn I made sure to let him know that I was finished.

Evo, I told him, finished, and he smiled in relief and made sure of what I'd said, adding the one little sound that turns everything to a question here. Evo a?

Under the pink and orange sky, I headed back to the ship as a rat and three rather large cockroaches ran across my path. Which, even if I hadn't almost given that poor guard a heart attack, might be enough to convince me that this whole exercise notion is a bad one.

And now if you'll excuse me, I've got a World Cup match to watch. I'll let the professionals do the exercise from here on in.

It's a strange time on the wards right now. I suppose it always slows down a bit during the summer, but it seems like it's more than usual this year. The wards are emptying out, the combination of only one type of surgery and women healing without any of the usual major complications making it impossible to keep beds full. Not that I'm complaining; it's incredible to see our ladies dancing so soon after surgery, going home to their new lives in their new dresses with their new hope held firmly in their hearts. It's just that, for me, the charge nurse who doesn't really work with the VVF ladies, things aren't so fun.

We kept it up for a while, with Tani and Gafar and Josee providing enough work that we could keep D Ward open and humming. But Tani left yesterday in the darkness just before dawn. Climbed into a bus with thirty other patients and headed north, back to her village where I don't know what will happen to her. She's spent fifty-six days with us, the recipient of almost exclusive attention and constant repetition of our favorite phrases: I love you! I'm beautiful! But now she's home, in a village full of people who might not see her the same way we do. Who might look at her face and still see the maimed little girl who left, the absence of a right eye, the scars snaking across her skin. They might not see her intelligence, her beautiful smile and the sparkle in her left eye. They might make fun of her, just like they used to.

It's so hard to let them go, sometimes.

And it's not just Tani. We sent Gafar to the Hospitality Centre yesterday, too. Away from our constant love and craft ideas, he's withdrawn back into his shell in just twenty-four hours. They called me to see him in the outpatient clinic today where he sat, head low, refusing to meet the nurse's eyes. His ear and eye were swollen, the obvious product of a bandage pushed aside, and when he finally looked up at me I could read the guilt in his good eye, mixed in with what could only be sadness. I think he misses us.

It's so hard to know how best to help them, these kids. Do we keep them in the hospital forever? Shelter them and love them and tell them over and over how precious they are? Or do we let them out, send them home and out of our sight and hope for the best. If Gafar is any indication, I probably don't want to know how Tani's doing.

And the thing is, it's not just them. It's so many of the kids we send home. It's Anicette, who left us and starved to death. It's Maomai, whose story I'll probably never fully know, but who also didn't survive living at home despite everything we did. It's Aissa, whose Uncle Jean missed planting season while he was watching over her in the hospital, and so now they have no food. It's probably a hundred more kids whose stories I haven't heard, and there's nothing I can do about it.

I think it's just a part of this life and this work, the not knowing, but it never really gets easier. It's going to be almost be a relief to see the general surgery patients next week, people who come and go in just a few days. Patients whose names I barely have time to learn. Certainly no time to fall in love and get my heart all tangled up in their stories.



(And knowing me, it'll be about three seconds before I'm wishing myself right back in the middle of all that tangling.)

Sorry for the recent silence, but I caught the current cold going around and completely lost my voice. While I wasn't feeling bad enough to call out of work, an inability to call for help, should I have needed it, would have made it hard to manage in an emergency. And since D Ward is chock full of three whole patients, all of them at least three weeks out from surgery, emergencies weren't looking terribly probable.

Thus, I have spent the last couple days in bed. Which is probably a good things, since I'm getting ready to head back up to Kpalime tomorrow with the youth. If prior experience tells me anything, it's going to be a lot of fun and very little sleep.

It's probably good I stocked up.

On closer inspection of the art supplies, it turned out that there were actually two canvasses! And because recent observation of Tani and Gafar has shown an ever-increasing sibling-like rivalry, I figured it wasn't necessarily going to work out for them to work together.

So they each got to work, and the resulting products are wildly different.

Gafar is ten. He had a large tumour removed from the right side of his face. He's been with us for several weeks already while his little body struggles to heal. Up until a few days ago, he was quiet and withdrawn, a bandage covering his right eye and his left eye swollen almost shut. Just recently, he's come out of himself, running around the ward, pestering us to go up to Deck Seven and waiting expectantly for the next craft idea to come out of the charge nurse desk.

Gafar started his painting out very precisely. One by one, he painted the things he knew. A bike, a TV, a car and a boat in every colour. An orange and a soccer ball and a map of Togo, and then he got the idea to start mixing colours. In a few minutes he had painted over all the lovely colours with a dull faintly-purple grey. I think he may have redeemed himself a little by writing the name of each thing very carefully on the back of the canvas in his scraggly little handwriting.

Tani is nine and lives way up in the north of Togo. When she was five, she fell face first into a cooking fire, and lost her right eye and ear. Her face is masked in scars, her nose and top lip burned away and the fingers of her right hand mangled and missing. She's been on the wards for forty-five days now, and we've rebuilt her nose and upper lip. We've taught her to say I love you, and we've taught her to say I'm beautiful! She dances around the ward every day, shrieking about her love and her beauty and it is a deeper truth than any I've known. (Jenn explains it all so much better than I can.)

Tani's painting shows her personality more than anything I can imagine. It's a swirl of colours and shapes, all thrown together with absolute abandon. She attacked the paints like she attacks life; nothing held back, her scarred face pulled into the biggest grin I've ever seen. The result was something like a masterpiece.




I want two of you to have these paintings, painted with love (and, in Gafar's case, a lot of gray) on the Africa Mercy in Togo. Leave me a comment and tell me which one you want. Also, since I absolutely loved hearing about your dangerous streaks last time, I'd love to hear about your creativity this time. Tani's and Gafar's skills are fairly obvious, but what about yours?

I'll go first. I'm a writer. I love to take my experience and somehow distill it enough that it fits into black and white, tiny strokes that contain a life's worth of love. I'm also a photographer. They go together, to me. Capturing moments and setting them down to were I can go back and live them again later. Also, I like Tani's painting best. If I could win, I'd want to win that one.

How about you?

(Comments will be open through the end of the weekend; speak up!)

The random number generator has done it again, and two of you are winners!

Before I plugged in the numbers, I made myself promise that I wouldn't cheat. Because I kind of knew who I wanted to win. (Is that wrong?) Kim wrote to me about a friend who is a burn survivor, one of the world's worst. He's blind now, a fate Tani only narrowly escaped, and he goes to a local burn centre every week to meet with the patients there. Wouldn't it be incredible, I thought to myself, if he could bring along a painting from a survivor an ocean away?

Now he can! It seems that random.org read my thoughts, (please, daddy, no comments on randomness and how it doesn't equal telepathy) because it promptly spit out Kim's number! She's going to be receiving Tani's painting, and I pray that some of her joy and full-on zest for life spill out of it when it's shown to those other patients.

Tara is going to be receiving Gafar's painting. She's a scrapbooker who has recently turned to a life of, well, crime prevention; she's been sewing superhero capes. I'm pretty sure they look better than the version Gafar was sporting the other day; an old raggedy gown tied around his neck as he ran up and down the hall, fist in the air. Until we were told we were being too loud and had better contain all the hilarity. The thing is, it's hard to; I'm so ridiculously excited about how Gafar has changed and grown since he came to us. When he arrived, he was withdrawn, pulled entirely into himself. He hadn't seen out of his right eye in what probably felt like forever, the tumor blocking not only his sight but his spirit, too. Yesterday, for the first time in four years, I held away the swelling above that eye and he pulled back in astonishment as light hit his retina. He looked up at me, shocked, and I gently closed his good eye and held up three fingers.

Trois, he yelled, three! Over and over he identified numbers, and then sat down to colour, grinning to himself and shaking his still-bandaged head in disbelief.

I think his painting speaks just as much of who he is as Tani's. Underneath all that grey, it's bursting with colour. Life and exuberance and joy, just waiting to break through.

So there you have it. Send me your mailing addresses, ladies, and I'll send along your love.

(And don't forget that tomorrow night at eight PM on Discovery Channel Canada is the grand unveiling of Mercy Ships on Mighty Ships! Try saying that ten times fast, and then go watch it! I've used entirely too many exclamation points in this post!)

Here's the thing about Father's Day: it's most likely nothing more than a trumped-up Hallmark holiday, invented so that retailers can make money on cards and tie pins. At least that's what I was brought up believing, along with the truth about the made-up-ness of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. (Small children and grown-up believers in magic, feel free to ignore that last bit. I was only kidding)

We didn't celebrate any of those "fake" holidays. Every Saturday was Mother's Day, when my mum had the four of us trained to fight over who got to bring her breakfast in bed. (She has yet to reveal to me how she managed that.) Valentine's Day was just the holiday a week or so before my brother's Heart Day, the reason all the heart-shaped paraphernalia was so cheap while we celebrated the real February holiday; the anniversary of the day when he had his tiny chest cut open and the hole in his own heart repaired. And no one really talked about Father's Day; we just kind of ignored it, like we did Flag Day and Presidents' Day and Columbus Day. The only reason we even cared about the latter of those is because it conveniently always fell on Canadian Thanksgiving, and the resulting long weekend was time enough that we could head to Toronto to see the cousins.

So when I log on to Google and see the name all made out of ties, when the speaker at the Sunday meeting opens by talking about dads and reminds us all that we still have time to make that phone call? That doesn't really mean too much to me.

Except that, all of a sudden, it does.

It might be because he was just here, this dad of mine. He picked up and came halfway around to world just to see me, and he did it with his trademark Cheshire-cat grin on his face the whole. entire. time, and something about that is making me think tonight.

I think I have the best dad.

When I was little, I never knew that I was one of four kids, never had any sense that I needed to compete for his attention. He was just there, whenever I needed him. He would take me to the hardware store when he went to gather supplies for projects around the house. One time, he let me pick out the wood he would use to make the banister for our basement stairs. Stepped back across the aisle as I struggled to hold it up all by myself, one eye squinted shut as I looked down the length of it to make sure it was straight. When I said it was, he bought it, without ever checking.

My brothers and sister and I used to wait all afternoon for him to come home from work, hiding behind a neighbor's bush on the corner of our street and then racing his old, blue car as he inched his slow way up the street to the house. We won, more often than not, arriving back to our front door sweaty and triumphant while he grinned from behind the wheel. I was seven years old, and I believed I could run faster than a car.

He kept doing that, too. Kept teaching me that I could do things bigger than myself. When I told him I wanted to come to Africa, he sent me off with his love. And when I told him I was going to stay, that I didn't know if I was ever coming back, he didn't tell me I was crazy. Didn't try to stop me. He just got on a plane and came to see it all for himself.

I could tell you a thousand stories about my father today. Instead, I just want to say this:

I could not have asked for more in a daddy. I have never felt anything but unconditional love and acceptance from him. He taught me that piles of snow in a parking lot can be mountains to climb. That there is a world of wonder inside the covers of books. That it's okay to be smart. That it's possible to raise four children without raising your voice. (Except for that one time that we ran across his freshly-laid lawn, but I'm fairly sure the yelling was only because we were on the far side of the street by the time he got his window open.)

And in my darkest hours, when I shared with him the worst parts of me, he said nothing to accuse me, just sat me down at the kitchen table and made a piece of toast and poured me a glass of wine. From my vantage point four thousand miles and a few years away, I can see Christ in that so clearly, His body and blood offered to me without hesitation.

I think it's because of my own daddy that God as Father makes so much sense to me, that I'm so easily drawn to that aspect of His character. I think it's because I grew up with a man who modeled that to me in just about everything he did.

Happy Father's Day, daddy. Even though we all think it's a load of crap and don't really celebrate it, I just wanted you to know that I love you.


Sssssssssssssssssk.

I remember a couple of years ago when gas prices over the summer went through the roof. I was here on the ship, watching the news from Liberia, but I heard people were getting pretty worked up about it all.

Here in Togo, we do things a little differently.

Gas prices went up almost fifteen cents a litre the other night, and taxi drivers here in Lome have reacted badly. There's nothing to worry about for those of us on the ship, but out in the streets there are barricades and burning tires and flipped cars. We're not sure how much longer it'll go on, but our security team is doing an outstanding job of ensuring that not only crew but also day volunteers are safe.

To that end, there is a massive slumber party down in C Ward tonight. The translators who live too far away to get home safely are being housed in the empty ward, pillows and mattresses and blankets all over the place. It feels like being a nurse during a massive snowstorm. You know you can't call in sick, and you know there's no way you can make it home and back again in twelve hours, so you sleep at the hospital. Everything feels different after hours, like you're somehow home but in the middle of a grand adventure.

There's only one real answer to a ward full of translators, once the excitement and despair over the Ghana game has died down; pop some popcorn, throw on a movie and break out the soda. Unfortunately, I've fallen victim to the same cold that has Tani coughing her dear brains out (which is hardly surprising, considering she spends her days wrapped around my head), so I haven't been able to take part in the festivities as much as I would like.

Outside, the tires may be burning, but down in C Ward, they're just having a big old party. Reason #257 I love this life.

We put up a curtain in the middle of D Ward today. Split it into two sections. One for the patients, all four of them. Tani and Gafar and Josee and a little boy having his crossed eyes straightened. On their side of the ward it was crayons and bubbles and brightly coloured paper cut into strips so we could each make a rainbow zebra.

On the other side of the curtain the lights were low as a group of nine women sat in a huddle of chairs and stools. They were silent, eyes fixed on the floor, the translator working with them failing in his feeble attempts to bring conversation to their side of the ward.

The only thing connecting the two groups was the smell. It seeped around the flimsy curtain, reaching its fingers into every corner. Stale urine creeps sharp into your nostrils, impossible to ignore. Today, it was everywhere in the hospital. Ladies in beds in A and B Wards, recovering from surgery. More in the Pilot's Entrance, waiting on plastic chairs for their turn to be called. And in C Ward, curtains set up to make little rooms where woman after woman was examined and then sent back to wait. All up and down the corridor they waited.

My little group in D Ward was quiet as the time wore on. Once I had settled my kids on the other side with their latest craft (something to do with styrofoam plates and cardstock feathers), I pulled back the curtain to see them all still sitting, silent.

I asked them through the translator if we could sing, expecting the usual brightening of faces and lifting of voices. Instead, one woman, clad in bright blue and green that belied her downcast face, spoke for them all.

We cannot sing until we know the result of our exams.

I don't know yet either whether or not they'll get surgery. There are two weeks left until the VVF surgeons leave, and there were so many women there today. And because I didn't know either, I did the only thing I could do.

I sang for them.

After what seemed like forever, with my poor wavering voice shouting out words in a language I don't speak, the lady in blue and green joined in, lifting her eyes to meet mine for the first time. One by one, they added their voices, until they were teaching me new songs and we were laughing and finally I couldn't smell the urine anymore.

Sometimes things are good, no matter which side of the curtain you're on.

-----

In other, completely unrelated news, we're all going to be on TV! Very soon! Wednesday, in fact! If you're in the Eastern time zone in Canada, the Mighty Ships episode featuring Mercy Ships will be airing at eight PM on Discovery Channel Canada. Program your VCRs kids, because none of us have seen it yet and I wouldn't mind hearing if it's any good.

(Granny and Jenn's mom, I'm talking to you.)

I've had weeks here on the ship where I'm so overwhelmed with the work that I lie awake at night, worrying about the kids on the wards. I can't sleep, wondering if they will heal, grow, thrive or even live. They fill my mind, whether I'm on the wards or not.

This week, I've been losing sleep over something entirely different. This week, being an Assistant Ward Supervisor means some kind of cross between a Sunday School teacher, daycare supervisor and camp counselor. With just a tiny bit of nursing thrown in for good measure.

With the VVF ladies taking over B and A Wards at the other end of the hospital, D Ward has become the haven for pediatric eye patients and the three stragglers left over from plastics and maxillo-facial surgery.

Tani, Gafar and Josee, and between the three of them, they are enough to keep us busy.

The busyness isn't in nursing tasks. Josee gets the bandage on her foot changed twice a day, Tani needs some antibiotic cream to the tiny open area on her head at the same times, and Gafar has his bandage re-wrapped every other day. That's it, along with a couple of vitamin and iron pills thrown in for good measure.

Instead, our time is taken up in entertainment. Josee is eighteen and should be able to amuse herself, but she's confined to bed with her foot up on pillows to keep it from swelling. Gafar is ten, and Tani is nine, and they're stuck in a small windowless room for twenty-three hours every single day, and the bottom line is that it's a hospital. There's not much to do.

That's where the Sunday-School-teacher-daycare-supervisor-camp-counselor role comes into play. Instead of IVs and injections and NG feedings, we're focusing on Noah's Ark (complete with cotton balls for the clouds), crayon-coloured creation-story books, and glittery butterfly masks that don't quite fit over faces with eyes either missing or bandaged.

So these days, I lie awake at night and plan out crafts for the next day. It took me far longer to fall asleep last night than it should have, because I couldn't for the life of me think of anything that was going to take up more than half an hour's worth of time.

However, you'll be pleased to know that I've just had an epiphany. Back when Dina sent me that big box of craft supplies back in April, there was something in it I wasn't quite sure how to use on the wards. A little blank canvas and a set of paints and brushes. I took one look at it and pushed to the bottom of the pile, seeing all to clearly in my mind's eye the fights that would break out over such limited resources.

But there are just three of them left. Two, if you count that fact that Josee can't leave her bed and is far more interested in watching the World Cup than the current craft.

Tomorrow, I'm going to head down to the wards and get Tani and Gafar to paint something beautiful for one of you. The two of them have hit it off, and alternate between playing together and fighting like brother and sister, and I think it's only fair that they work together to create a masterpiece. Once it's finished, whatever it is, we're going to have another giveaway on this here blog, and one of you will get to have an authentic piece of African art by two of the continent's premiere up-and-coming artists.

(Please note: I am basing my assessment of their skill solely on how their glittery butterfly masks turned out. This has the potential to either go very, very badly or be totally spectacular. It's going to depend, in large part, how much Gafar is able to control Tani's boundless exuberance for everything craft-related.)

I'll post a photo of the finished product and let you know when it's time to start commenting!

Finally, all those years at camp are paying off.

And just like that, they're gone. My mother just texted me from the airport to let me know that the workers there were more interested in watching World Cup football than checking them in. She called it fun, which is a good indication that this place has rubbed off on them at least a little.

I've lived here for over two years, my parents were here for twelve days, and yet I'm having a hard time seeing it all without them anymore. They've woven themselves into our lives here so seamlessly that sending them home feels like tearing at the fabric.

I'll take that tearing, though, since it means they were here at all. They raced to the top of a mountain on rickety motorbikes and made it safely back down again. They danced with special needs kids in a colourful classroom with a concrete floor. They've been up to the top of the mast and down to the engine room, chopped potatoes and snorkeled in the port water to help clean the hull. They learned names and faces and the twisted corridors of this ship, and they did it all with love just pouring out of them.

They've told me before that they're proud of me, and I get that. They're my parents, after all; they're supposed to feel that way if I'm living my life properly, and these days it sure feels like I am.

It's just that, right now, I'm learning how it feels to feel the same way about them. I'm so proud of the way they jumped into this life with no hesitation, throwing themselves into every experience that I could cook up for them without questioning anything. How they embraced Africa with wide open arms, the dust and the heat and the smells. All of it.

I just wish I didn't already miss them so much.

Since my parents were only going to be in Togo for about twelve days, I knew I was going to have to do some planning. Somehow, in less than two weeks, I had to show them what my life is over here. I needed them to understand my fierce love for Africa, my deep heart for her people. I needed them to experience all this place has to offer, and I had to make sure it happened in a very short time.

Oh Africa. You so seldom disappoint.

This past weekend, we headed north to Kpalime, a scenic two-or-so hour drive from the ship. It was a short trip, as road trips in West Africa go, but it seemed that everything was conspiring to make sure that my parents got more TIA (This Is Africa) in two short days than I've experienced in over two years.

Here, I present to you a number of experiences that kind of explain why I love this corner of the world.

We called ahead to book a van to transport us, agreeing on a price per head. As is customary here, this did not exactly go as planned. First, we had to go to the bus station, which actually looked more like a petrol station, if the pumps were any indication. This was for three reasons: a) We needed to speak to the actual owner of the car to argue for half an hour about the price. b) We needed to get gas. Doing this was not possible during the argument with the driver, but had to be taken care of fairly slowly afterwards. This is typical c) We needed to pick up a Wingman. This becomes more important on the return journey. Stay tuned.

After being informed that they were asking a higher price because there were empty seats, we in turn informed the owner that we did not mind the seats being filled. He then proceeded to inform us that this was, in fact, an impossibility, since the car was unable to stop once it had started. (Keep reading to see why this becomes rather funny.) In order to get the originally agreed-upon price, we had to also agree to having two strangers in the van with us. This was no problem, as we were ready for an adventure. We packed them in and set off on an uneventful journey northwards.

Upon arriving to the hotel, we were greeted warmly and began to search through the book in vain for our reservations. It was starting to look grim, until I realized that Celine et Sandra was actually just a fancy way of saying Philip Chandra. It's practically the same, right?

Now, the third room, the one that should have only been available on Sunday, (two on Saturday, one on Sunday, remember?) turned out also to be available on Saturday instead. However, we were told we could not have it because the hotel across the road would be expecting us, and it wouldn't be very nice if we didn't stay there. We were allowed to have it on one condition; that I march directly across the street and explain to them why we were bailing.

They didn't actually care.

When I had made the reservations, I made sure to mention that we wanted to put two mattresses on the floor of each room. They had agreed to this, and even made a note in the book, next to Celine et Sandra's reservation. However, we were informed at check-in that calling ahead and requesting mattresses was not okay. They correct way to go about this was to book too few rooms and show up with too many people; these extra people would then be given mattresses. The advance warning made everything far too complicated. Naturally, this resulted in an argument. Which I had to carry out in French, sounding for all the world like a three year-old with terrible grammar.

We then decided to ride zemidjahns up the mountain to see the view. My mother somehow agreed to this, proving that Africa does indeed make you crazy. We learned that it is possible to take a self-portrait of you and your driver while navigating rutted roads at unsafe speeds without crashing to your death. In fact, it's possible to do this with all three drivers you might have over the course of a weekend. (I'll get to the part about Liz and I being on the same bike in just a moment.) When at the top of the mountain, my first driver (the one in the red shirt) asked to take a photo with me. He then proceeded to lean in close and get a good handful of my rear end, despite having been told all about my Husband of Joy on the ride up. This particular driver looked more than a little afraid when it was pointed out to him that the biggest guy in the entire group was, in fact, my father. The rest of the drivers thought all of this was the funniest thing that had ever happened. I felt slightly uncomfortable all around.

The clouds had been gathering as we rode up, and it turns out that refusing to take the Yovos back down the mountain while the rain starts to fall is a somewhat acceptable method for extorting more money. It also turns out that we're more stubborn than they are, and we rode triumphantly back to the hotel and paid the originally-agreed-upon price with only another half hour or so of arguing. (Are you keeping track of the arguing time? It's starting to add up.)

We settled in back at the hotel to soak our feet in the pool and enjoy a delicious dinner and a football game on a small TV. Watching England and the USA tie in their World Cup opener is, unfortunately, not terribly fun when the power goes out for a while in the middle of the match. This is, however, to be expected in Africa, and we counted ourselves lucky that we didn't miss either of the goals and that the place looked lovely by candlelight.

The next day dawned overcast and relatively cool, so we decided to hike to a waterfall. Now, something you may or may not know is that, when taking zemidjahns to and from a hiking point, it's not necessary to have enough zemis for the number of people riding them. Putting two on each one is no problem, except near a police checkpoint. Here, you'll be dropped off around the corner while your driver speeds away, calling over his shoulder, Just walk. Stopping in the middle of a village to find more zemis is a good idea, especially on Sunday. This is when babies are at their cutest and the most goats are roaming around.

Later in the day, just after lunch, when a driver arrives at the appointed time to head back to Lome, this is shocking. It also somehow garners him enough brownie points that he can do whatever he wants during the rest of the ride. Which is where the Wingman comes in. His job is to sit next to the sliding door and slide the door open and closed each time we stop to pick up another passenger. (You'll remember, please, that this is the van that was "unable to stop once it started.") On this trip, the Wingman had to open his door for a total of eight extra passengers. Counting himself, the driver and the ten Yovos, there were twenty people inside a smallish minibus at one point. Twenty. Nevertheless, we arrived back at the ship weary and squashed and filled to the brim with Africa.

I am so glad my parents got to live all this. When they go home tomorrow, I hope they settle into their seats on the plane and instead of feeling cramped, look around and revel in the space afforded by not having anyone sitting nearly in their laps. I hope they hesitate in the supermarket and wonder whether they can haggle the price down just a little. I hope they move to lift a stranger's baby from its mother's arms before they remember that it's not okay on their continent. I hope they turn on their shower and eat their dinner and can't help thinking of all the little ones who are going without the comforts they enjoy every day.

A little boy in Zambia once told me, totally unaware of his own wisdom, that the dirt in Africa never gets off your shoes, no matter how hard you scrub.

I hope their shoes stay dirty for a long, long time. Because mine are never coming clean.

Having my parents here is so much better than I thought it would be. And I thought it was going to be pretty awesome.

Here's a sneak preview of the past weekend. Lots more photos and stories to come. This life is sweet.

Just a quick note to let you know that I'm alive and well and very much enjoying my time with my parents, although it leaves me with little time to write. I'll be sharing stories and photos soon. For now, we're heading up north, to Kpalime, with a bunch of friends for a couple of days to show them the countryside.

When I called to hotel we wanted to stay at to make a reservation, I said that we would need three rooms. In what is potentially the best TIA (This Is Africa) moment of my time thus far, the answer was quickly passed back to me through the translator I was using to help my dismal French-on-the-phone skills.

They have three rooms available. Two on Saturday, one on Sunday.


Oh, how I love this continent.

Having my parents here means I'm doing a lot of things I don't normally sign up for. By the time the weekend rolls around, I'm generally exhausted enough that I spend the entire time relaxing in my room, sleeping in and doing very little that could be considered strenuous.

But now my parents are here, and they haven't been living in Africa for the past two years. They haven't grown inured to the sights and sounds and smells of this place; they want to see and hear and smell it all, and being alongside them as they take their first steps on this continent is like starting all over again.

So on Friday, I donned booties and a cap and headed into the OR after work. It was the end of a long week for me, one marked by the constant shuffle of patients from one ward to the next. When Monday had dawned, the list of patients was far longer than the number of beds that were going to be available. Hannah and I put our heads together, scrutinized the nursing schedule, and came up with a crazy scheme to open an empty ward, just for the week, just for the cleft lip babies. It would work, as long as the nurses and patients all stayed relatively healthy. At the bed assignment meeting that morning, we proudly called out the numbers. C1. C3. C7. Twenty minutes later, we had two nurses call out sick and it looked like everything was going to fall apart. I started to count the numbers, mechanically working through the list to see who was actually going to be admitted without C Ward opening, until I realized that each number was a child, a baby who was going to grow up with a face split wide open, battling demons I know nothing about, unless we could come up with a plan.

And so we made it work. It involved a lot of transferring and updating and list-making and admitting on faith, but the the time Friday rolled around, every patient on the list who had arrived had had his or her cleft lip repaired. That afternoon, we were watching the last few, along with three who had showed up on the dock and had their hopes answered. When I arrived, my parents were already there with eyes wide, almost as wide as their grins as they watched lips being sewn back together right in front of them. I watched as Amavi was put to sleep, her lip marked, and the first cuts made that would allow this last girl to present an unbroken face to the world. Together, we watched little boys saved with little tiny stitches from the ridicule that would have followed them to school every day.

On Sunday we crowded into A Ward with a press of patients and crew. I held Tani on my lap, a little one who's had her lip and nose rebuilt after falling into a fire. (The photo of her here is before surgery; I can't wait to show you her afters.) We sang and clapped together, standing to dance in the line of translators and nurses that snaked through the throng with the beat of the drum. Across the ward, my mum sat next to Amavi whose swollen lip showed the telltale signs of surgery. Amavi's papa was a few seats down, clutching his new Bible, her mama next to him with little sister fast asleep on mama's back. Together we raised our voices to God, and when I stretched out my upturned hands, Tani curled her maimed fingers through mine.

She leaned back to rest on my chest and whispered into my ear the phrase she learned along with Aissa. I love you, she told me, while the man in the middle of the room spoke words of healing over us all. After today you will leave this place with a new name. Forget the past. Forget anything they said to you, and go from here with a new name.

All around me sat the congregation of the broken, clutching rags to drooling lips, carrying drains and cradling bandaged limbs. They had limped into the ward for church, some barely making it out of bed. Staples shone silver against brown skin and catheter tubing hung beneath gowns, and as the preacher's words were translated they understood in a way I never will.

You will have a new name. Forget the past. These are people with a past to forget, children who have endured shame like I will never know, women torn apart with no one to put them back together. For maybe the first time they were being told that their future was more than just their pain, that the promise of hope was a sure one.

Together we sat, the broken body of Christ in a tiny hospital ward on a ship off the coast of West Africa. All of us worshiping together with outstretched hands, and I have maybe never understood so clearly why I'm here.

-----

And in case you're a visual person like me, here are a few photos of my parents and I at the orphanage we visited on Saturday. I won't write about these precious kids yet, because I hope to go back and learn their stories off by heart before I share them with you.