ali's african adventures

enyo gangi

nospam@example.com (Ali C.) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:48:00 +0000

She came almost hesitantly around the door, her eyes searching for her son's. When she saw him, propped up on the shoulder of the recovery room nurse, she came close, peering at his face. Her eyes widened, and she threw her hands up to the sky, one short burst of praise before taking him in her arms and beginning to rock him back and forth, back and forth.

On a stretcher across the room sat the surgeon, divested of his gown and gloves after the operation. The hands that had placed the knots so carefully in the little baby's lip were still, folded in his lap while he watched the scene unfold in front of him. The mama who couldn't take her eyes off her baby's face, patting his back to soothe his cries.

I love watching the way their foreheads wrinkle, he told me. The way they just take it all in, like they can't even understand what they're seeing. I stood by his side, watching the mama and her little baby, a tiny family on the road back from brokenness. Later, I saw the tears fall from the grandma's eyes as she stared at the smooth, unbroken line of the little boy's lip.

And like the surgeon, I sat across the room, just watching them take it all in. Watching them turn his face to the light so they could look again and again, making sure that it was true.

Enyo gangi, Francois' mama told me, knowing that I speak just enough Fon to understand the cry of her heart. Gangi gangi.

It's good. It's so, so good.

all around the ward

nospam@example.com (Ali C.) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:36:00 +0000

Last week was hectic, to say the least. After all the rigamarole of opening the wards, orienting new translators (so many of whom don't seem to speak English) and ironing out the kinks in a system that seems to change on a daily basis, I was exhausted. Knowing full well that it was only week one out of thirty for the outreach, I was well aware that I needed to rest or else I wouldn't be able to head back down there this morning. To that end, I spent the weekend in my cabin. I ate zero meals in the dining room; the HoJ brought provisions and I subsisted on popcorn and garlic bread.

This morning, feeling well-rested and energized, I walked onto a completely different ward than the one I left on Friday afternoon. The patients were quiet and relaxed (all but Bobo, who felt the need to cry all. day. long.), the translators moved about their work with quiet efficiency, and the nurses were confident in their tasks.

The best part of the day was the very end. As the evening shift nurses filtered in, I realized that two of our ward disciplers were there too. Could we have worship, I asked them, and before I knew what was happening we were packed into the ward, singing and dancing. Someone had brought a drum from D Ward, and the sasa was shaking. We clapped and shuffled and belted out sings in three or four languages.

In my arms I held two-year old Kodjovi. He had his cleft lip fixed on Friday, the steri strips and little sutures sticking out of that lip the only indication that anything was ever wrong. When I moved, he bobbed his little head in response. When I held up my hand he used it to clap, his little feet rustling against my hips as he danced along with us.

We stood there, all of us, raising our voices to God at the start of the new shift. We put our arms out to each other, and all around the ward we joined hands. Small and tall and brown and white, some laying in their beds, others sitting on stools beside them, we intertwined our fingers and bowed our heads to pray.

While all this was going on, Francois peered over from his bed in the corner, his bright eyes making him look for all the world like a little baby bird. Our little chicken baby, once so scrawny, now weighs in at over eight pounds, complete with round cheeks and little rolls on his thighs. His mama mixes his bottles and baths him in a blue bowl and covers him liberally in baby powder. He is absolutely thriving under all the love.

Tomorrow, Francois will go to the operating room to have his cleft lip repaired. The mama who tried to leave her baby in an orphanage will have the chance to take him home with a smooth, straight lip. So while we all stood around praying, I snuck a peek over at Francois. His grandma was holding him, his mama's eyes shut tight while she mouthed the words of her own prayer along with us.

Tomorrow, we're going to see that prayer answered.

elections from afar

nospam@example.com (Ali C.) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 09:21:00 +0000

Being on the ship during the Togolege presidential elections is underscoring for me yet again just how isolating this life can be. I've always felt that we were living next to Africa rather than right in it, and the feeling has never been stronger than right now.

I mean, I understand why we're laying low, restricted to a very small radius of ship and dock. I understand the need for canceled shore leave and daily updates on the Captain's Board. In 2005 during the last presidential elections, there was widespread violence when the opposition party felt the vote was rigged. There are still refugees from that time living in a camp in Benin, so I fully understand the potential gravity of the situation.

What I can't wrap my head around is how disconnected I feel.

There are Togolese patients sitting in beds in the ward exactly forty-six steps away from me. (I counted on the way to work the other day.) I'm sure some are for Gnassingbe and others support Fabre, but we're on the ship, where politics can't touch us. The opposition party started to protest yesterday when it was getting obvious that Gnassingbe was going to win again, and police threw tears gas into the crowd and arrested several people. While all that was going on, I was sitting in my cabin, munching on fresh, homemade garlic bread and watching an episode of American Idol.

Because I can't be out on the streets right now, I can't seem to really fathom what all this means for Togo. I should care more. I should pray more. I lived in (or next to, at least) Liberia for ten months. I've seen what happens when democracy fails, when power corrupts.

But I'm lulled into this false sense of complacency, encased here in the steel hull of my world. The whole situation loses it's urgency when it's filtered through handwritten updates on a whiteboard. I'm right here, not halfway across the world, and still all I can do is read articles pulled down off a Google search. I want to be safe, but I wish it could be more than that.

As of a few hours ago, it seems that the official results are in and Gnassingbe has indeed won another term. The opposition has promised violence if this were to happen, so we'll hunker down for another day. We'll watch movies on our laptops and eat leftover pizza and drink tea with our friends.

Somewhere in the midst of all that, I'm going to try to actually understand that I'm right next to history being made. And I'm going to pray.

Here are a few articles about the elections:

From Wednesday, explaining how people have prepared and some history of the situation.
From Saturday, when both parties were claiming victory.
From Saturday, the tear gas incident.
This morning, the results are in.

be strong

nospam@example.com (Ali C.) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:15:00 +0000

We couldn't do it.

The discussions went on through the morning, with doctors weighing pros and cons and reviewing x-rays and trying to see their way clear. But at the end of it all, the message was delivered to me in the ward. It's a no. We can't do the spinal, and her condition's not bad enough to risk it under general.

And yet again I'm faced with the reality that where you are born so often determines the course of your life. Because this little girl was born in a village in West Africa, there was nothing that could be done when her parents saw that her leg was twisted. Because Togo has just one doctor for every twenty-five thousand people, there was nowhere to go, no way to have it corrected.

It feels so wrong that we started to show her a way out, allowed her to hope maybe for the first time and then were forced to pull that hope out from under her and pray that she doesn't break when she falls.

I could see the tears in her eyes when she left today, dressed in her Sunday best, the clothes she had picked out to come to the ship for the surgery that she isn't going to get. I watched her walk slowly down the hall, her head weaving side to side with the broken rhythm of her walk, and I wanted to scream. To beat my fists against the walls and rail against the unfairness of it all. But instead I watched her, watched her walk away with her strange, jerky grace, and I prayed that I could learn to hold my head just as high as she did in the face of disappointment and pain.

And as her hand came to rest for a fleeting second on her still-flat belly, I prayed that she would teach her baby to be just as strong as she is.

fourteen

nospam@example.com (Ali C.) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:08:00 +0000

What do you think?

Dr. Gary asked me that question so matter-of-factly, standing in the hall outside the OR office. Like my opinion would count in all this confusion. Like I would somehow know what to do. Like anyone could really know.

What do you think?

The day had started out less than desirably. Today is the presidential elections here in Togo, and as a result there are travel restrictions and the potential for civil unrest. We worked with a skeleton crew of translators, only one for each ward, and brought all the patients we wanted to operate on through next Tuesday onto the ship yesterday. The result was somewhere around fifteen or twenty admissions, all in various stages of paperwork with no fixed plan as to when they would be going to the operating room. It's usually a big jigsaw puzzle around here; the elections just magnified that exponentially and the result was something that felt vaguely like chaos.

Among the things that slipped through the cracks from the admissions process was a pregnancy test on the little fourteen year-old girl in Bed Seventeen. Since everyone was pitching in and helping out, her nurse sent off the sample to the lab this morning, expecting to be able to call the OR and get her scheduled for surgery to straighten her leg when the results came back.

The lab technician slipped through the door a little while later, her face ashen. I just need to make sure this is the right patient. Please tell me it's not. We compared ID numbers with what was marked on the slip and confirmed the truth. My little teenaged friend was going to be a mama.

Which is where it all gets heartbreaking and where I'm not sure I'll sleep well tonight, thinking of her down there on the wards. Normally we'd just say no. It's incredibly risky to give a pregnant mama general anesthesia in the first trimester, so sometimes for small procedures we'll hand out an appointment card and some multivitamins and tell them to come back in a few months. But in a few months the orthopedic surgeons will be long gone and this little girl will be sentenced live life a cripple, her foot twisted and her leg bowed inwards.

So when I stood in the hall and explained all this to Dr. Gary, our Chief Medical Officer, all I wanted was an answer from him. Yes or no, just don't make me be involved. Don't make me weigh a little girl's future against the future of the baby inside her. Don't make me give an opinion when I can't see straight through eyes blurred by these tears. Don't let me help you decide, because what if we decide wrong?

What do you think?

In the end, I don't know what will happen. There are doctors and anesthetists and surgeons all consulting with one another, trying to come up with a way to do the surgery without general anesthesia, trying to find a way to give both these little ones a future.

And tomorrow, when I go back to work in the morning, we're all going to have to sit down together and decide.

What do you think?

like, totally

nospam@example.com (Ali C.) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:17:00 +0000

The day started off a little strange today. It wasn't even eight in the morning when the orthopedics team started wandering into the wards. The surgeons decided that they wanted to do a few things before starting rounds, something we don't necessarily encourage because all of a sudden it's nine thirty and we're only rounding on our third patient. When they grabbed handfuls of casting supplies I was naturally curious as to whether they would really have the time for all that so early in the morning.

Following them over to the corner to find out what they were planning, I was more than a little surprised when Doctor Frank handed me a pair of gloves and a roll of fiberglass casting tape. You want to wrap some casts?

Not entirely sure whether he was serious or not, I accepted the gloves and headed to the side of Stephane's bed. The casts little Stephane had had put on in the operating room were split neatly down the sides to allow his legs to swell a bit without causing too much pain. Before he went home, he needed new material wrapped around the outside to pull the halves together and make the casts strong enough. Today turned out to be the day I would learn how to do that.

As Doctors Frank and Gary coached me through the process, I had that stupid grin on my face that comes when I get to do something new. It was when I opened by mouth to express my excitement that I made my fatal error, the one that was going to get me laughed at for the remainder of the morning.

This is totally awesome. Totally.

It was at this point that Doctor Frank underwent a sudden personality change and began talking like a valley girl. Every time he addressed either me or my friend Jenn, who was orienting to charge nursing with me today, he did so with a lift at the end of every sentence, his speech liberally sprinkled with likes. He spoke normally to everyone else on the team; only Jenn and I were treated to his head tilts and raised eyebrows, which naturally had us practically rolling on the floor with laughter.

I wasn't planning on learning how to cast this morning. I was also not planning to hear a grey-haired surgeon suddenly transformed into a valley girl.

If nothing else, this life isn't boring.

the fake-out

nospam@example.com (Ali C.) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:16:00 +0000

Little five-year old Jean Claude has more trouble than just the twisting of his left foot. We're not sure why, but he suffers from cerebral palsy. It's not always easy to get an accurate health history here; in North America mamas would be quoting Apgar scores back to us and citing down to the second the time their children were without oxygen. Here, it's a little foggier. We don't know if something happened at birth or before, but the result is our little boy in Bed Fifteen.

One look in his direction, and his face is transformed by the biggest, toothy grin I've seen in a long time. He shrieks his joy when toys are placed before him, rising up from his classic indian-style pose to rest on his knees and reach for whatever you're holding. He unabashedly grabs pens and cups and hair, and will nestle into your embrace like you're the love of his life.

We sent Jean Claude off to the operating room this morning knowing that he'd be much less pleasant when he arrived back. We're so used to seeing our happy, smiling kiddos transformed into growling bears, flat out on the stretcher when they're wheeled back from the recovery room.

Jean Claude tried to fake us out.

When the recovery nurses rolled through the door, my little friend was perched in the middle of the stretcher, sitting straight up with his newly-casted foot crossed over the other one. There were tear tracks down the sides of his face, but he was looking around at all of us, sharing small smiles from underneath the blue operating room cap that some kind nurse had tied around his head. From all appearances, he was absolutely unconcerned with what had just happened to him in the operating room.

His fake benevolence was short-lived. As soon as we got him into bed and left him in the charge of our pediatric orthopedics nurse, he took the first opportunity that presented itself to let us know how he really felt. With a small sigh, he flung himself face-down, his little body half off the side of the bed. His little blue hat floated to the floor, and I think it was only the new weight of his cast that anchored him to the mattress at all.

We posted a stricter watch over our little friend after that, and by the time I left the ward, I had only to call his name from across the room to be rewarded with his familiar wide smile.

I think Jean Claude is going to forgive us after all.

my backyard

nospam@example.com (Ali C.) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 21:56:00 +0000

Please don't get used to all this posting, especially not the ones coming on the weekend. Chances are, once things are back in full swing, I'll be lucky to let you know what's going on three or four times during the week at best. But I get the feeling that I'll have so many more stories to share that the little details might slip through.

Details like what it even looks like here. When I talk about the dock I know exactly what I mean. I can picture the wall of containers marking out our little territory. I can smell the garbage and almost hear the tiny feet of the cockroaches as they skitter away from our feet in the night. But you have no idea of these things. For all I know, you're imagining a much more classic scene, picturesque wooden planks reaching out into crystal blue waters.

This is our dock. It's smelly and oily and noisy and we love it. There's space to run and play, space to draw on the concrete with chalk and space to set up chairs when the galley decides that Friday is a good enough excuse for an outside barbecue.

Click to see it bigger, and you can see, really blurry to the far left, the gate. That's the second level of security, the first being a fairly well-guarded main gate at the entrance to the port. Our gate security leaves a little to be desired; it's the classic West-African rope-across-the-road type, manned by a man who is more often than not fast asleep on a mat on the ground. Continue on towards the right in the photo and you see the start of our container wall, the division graciously provided by the port to give us our own space, free from random dock workers and erratic forklifts. Our fleet of vehicles is parked all along the wall, and on the other side, taking up the whole top of the photo, you can see why it's nice that we have a place marked out for us. That's where there are conveyor belts and cranes and all sorts of people working. On the far right of the photo, lined up against the ship, are our dockside tents. We'll be doing admissions there, along with outpatient physiotherapy.

It's not your typical backyard by any means, but we feel pretty lucky to have it.

suffering for Jesus

nospam@example.com (Ali C.) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 22:12:00 +0000

Whenever I tell someone I'm a missionary, I'm fairly sure they're immediately envisioning those pot-bellied, wide-eyed kids on the TV commercials. The ones with outstretched hands and raggedy clothes who steal your heart with a glance. They're probably thinking of what I'm missing out on, all the comforts of home and family and such.

I hate to disappoint those people, but this just happens to be where I spent my day. (Click to see it bigger.) I relaxed on a blue-cushioned chair next to the pool. I sipped on ice-cold Coke (the kind from the glass bottle, which tastes better than anything else in the world) and chatted with one of my best friends from Liberia who has finally come back to the ship to work alongside me again after a long outreach apart in Benin. When our rumbling stomachs told us it was time for dinner, we packed up and headed home along the sandy path next to the road. The air was quickly losing the day's heat, and a cool breeze brushed against our faces while we stared around us at the palm trees and flowers and children waving a shy hello.

It's not always like this, but sometimes this is actually what it looks like to suffer for Jesus. And because all this also comes as the side order to a healthy dose of those little brown babies who need to be loved on, I'm not sure I ever want to stop all my 'suffering.'

emiline

nospam@example.com (Ali C.) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 23:27:00 +0000

It's late in the evening on Friday. Unless I'm badly wrong, the patients downstairs are tucked in their beds, sleeping the night away. All except Emiline; she's going to sleep in her own bed tonight.

Emiline was the first. The first patient to be carried through the doors of Operating Room Three this outreach. Her left leg was twisted, and her grandma wasn't shy in praying for her healing. She did more than pray, though. Despite Emiline's classic five year-old Yovophobia (Yovophobia: noun. An intense, often irrational fear of white people. Not limited to nursing staff, although these tend to be the scariest.), her grandma brought her to the ship. They waited in the hot sun outside the admissions tent on Wednesday while all around them we pretended to evacuate the hospital. (This commotion, unfortunately, did nothing to allay little Emiline's fears.) They made their way down to the wards while Emiline staunchly refused to smile or even acknowledge the countless attempts at friendship; she wanted nothing to do with the scary Yovos.

Unfortunately for her, the Yovos weren't going anywhere. In fact, one of them (potentially a very tall, Canadian-American one) wrapped her up in a blanket and carted her off to the operating room, handing her over to a bunch of strangers wearing masks while a camera crew filmed the whole thing. (I'm getting to that, I promise.)

Afterwards, things weren't much better. Emiline came back from the operating room with a cast on her little left leg. We propped her up in bed like a tiny queen, making sure she was getting her medicines for pain, making sure stickers were always close at hand, making sure someone was always there to comfort her, but she just stared at us, stoic and unsmiling.

This morning, all of that love paid off. I was walking past her bed in the corner when I saw a flash of red. I peeked over to see Emiline hiding behind a piece of construction paper, the product of the latest attempt at friend-making on the part of her nurse. I gently tickled the toes sticking out the end of her new, white cast and was rewarded with the crinkle of a grin in the corner of her mouth. I tickled her again, and a tiny giggle escaped from behind the paper. We were finally friends.

Which is why it was bittersweet to round with the surgeons and realize that Emiline would be another first; the first patient discharged this outreach. Everything went perfectly with her surgery. Her bones are straight, her pain is almost gone, and she has a little orange card telling her when to come back and see us.

Emiline is sleeping in her own bed tonight, having survived her time with the Yovos, the first patient to be won over by love poured out.

Now, if you want to see Emiline, instead of just reading about her, there's a good chance that she'll appear on a Discovery Channel Canada show called Mighty Ships, airing sometime in April or May, I believe. There was a crew from the show here for the past month, filming the sail and the setup and everything that goes on on this crazy ship, and we're all going to be on TV! At least that's what I figure the snazzy hat they left me is all about.

The guys said I'll be on the show, but I'm not sure what part of the footage they shot of me is going actually make the cut. This may or may not be because I spent most of the time laughing / looking the wrong way / making faces / forgetting what question they had just asked me / goofing off. Which, really, is par for the course for me, so they'd better just go ahead and leave it all in.

We're all excited about how this is going to turn out; I'll keep you posted as I know more details.

something new

nospam@example.com (Ali C.) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:42:00 +0000

There are patients in the hospital.

After what has felt like forever waiting, there are West African children snuggled beneath the blankets in the wards again. There are caregivers sleeping under the beds, translators speaking for us and teaching us a few faltering words in Mina and Ewe and Kabiye.

In the morning, when we first reported to work, we found nurses and translators and housekeepers and laundry workers but no patients. The beds were still freshly made, the patients all waiting outside in the admissions tent. We had a day to fill with more waiting, so like kids on Christmas morning we gathered in a circle in an empty ward, the feeling of anticipation filling the air and twisting in my stomach.

We sat together, brown and white and brown and white and we prayed and we sang. I sat with my hands outstretched while the Spirit flowed through my fingers straight from the lilting tongue of one of our translators. It was all consonants and sounds I'd never heard, but in her words I knew that she spoke of the same God who pulled us all here from our old homes around the world. When Kokou prayed in English, asking God to do something new here in Togo, the words of a song sprang to my lips. Before I knew what I was doing I had begun to sing.

Do something new in my life,
Something new in my life,
Something new in my life
Oh Lord.
Do something new in my life,
Something new in my life,
Something new in my life
Oh Lord.

Such simple words, ones I've sung so many times before in Liberia and Benin, but I felt tears in my eyes when I realized what I was asking. What we were all asking.

And so it felt natural when I raised my voice and prayed what the Liberians call a strong prayer to Daddy God, one filled with the name of Jesus and extravagant claims on His promises, echoed by amens from around the circle. It felt right to sit there surrounded by people I barely know and realize that we are about to start something that will change so many lives forever. It felt right to admit that things should change, that God should show up and do something entirely new. And it felt so right knowing right to the corners of my soul that He will.

(I should maybe have thought it through before praying so heartily for something new, since shortly thereafter we ran the first-ever hospital evacuation drill in the history of this particular ship. Far too much new all at once for my liking, I have to admit, and a little stressful for me; since I ended up being one of the ones to set up the whole thing and could see more than a few holes in the plan while we ran through it and couldn't help feeling a little responsible.)

But when that was all over, when all the fake patients were safely back in their classrooms (we used Academy students instead of the real deal, since that might have scared them beyond healthy levels), when I finally had time to stop and think, all that came to me was that time this morning. Sitting in a circle, feeling like the first day of school with my heart open wide.

It was all I could do to keep from dancing up the gangway while I led the first patient onto the ship, a little boy in a pink shirt who isn't going to be laughed at anymore. (That uncharacteristic attempt at professionalism may have had something to do with the fact that I was being followed rather closely by a camera crew from Discovery Channel Canada. No joke; more on that later.)

I tucked him in, kissed his round cheeks and felt the corners of his eyes crinkle as he smiled his shy little smile. I'm hoping to see that smile grow over the next few days as he realizes that, finally, everything is going to change.

Something new is going to happen.

this blog is a theological goldmine. or not.

nospam@example.com (Ali C.) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 23:27:00 +0000

Every so often, I take a look at a website that tells me who's stopping by this little corner of the world. Generally, there's not much information available, most of the visitors being classed as unknown. Every once in a while, though, I can see that a Google search led someone over here. Today, I found what I think might be my favourite so far:

how do you open the door to Jesus?

Which is a great thought and all, but unfortunately they turned up at this entry, which most likely did nothing for their soul searching.

Oh well. I'm hoping they at least got a laugh out of it, spiritual enlightenment being somewhat lacking.

lily anna

nospam@example.com (Ali C.) — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 23:27:00 +0000

Every once in a while I stop talking about my little brown babies and ask you to pray for a white one instead. Today is one of those days.

Meet Lily Anna. She was just born this morning, weighing in at a not-so-hefty two pounds two ounces, the beautiful daughter of my friends from the ship here, Lorah and Justin. Lily has a long road ahead of her, and I know Lorah and Justin would be more than appreciative of prayers for their little family. I don't have all the details, just what I can glean from Facebook updates and photos from across the ocean, but it looks like she's off to a good start, especially blessed with the parents she has.

Let's pray for this little one, okay?

still frames and memories

nospam@example.com (Ali C.) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:47:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

eight

nospam@example.com (Ali C.) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 02:44:38 +0000

Anyone who knows me is probably aware that mornings rank right up there with Chinese water torture on my list of Things That Are Fun. As I've grown older, I've definitely moved out of the Did you REALLY just wake me up? Now feel my wrath stage, but I'm still not terribly coherent before eight or nine. (Which, as a side note, makes it really interesting that my job has me starting my day at seven. Every single morning.)

Today was an exception.

Today, I set my alarm for four thirty, and woke up without ever pressing snooze. I was out of bed before the HoJ could even stir, gathering my things and hunting around for stickers. Because today was the first screening day.

Those of you who know Mercy Ships at all will be surprised at the term first. Screening is generally done almost all at once, on one big screening day at the beginning of the outreach. Thousand of people show up and are processed through different stations, being seen by doctors and nurses and lab technicians to get them scheduled for surgeries or sent away gently if we can't help. This year it's very different. The Togolese government will be holding presidential elections on the twenty-eighth of this month, and the campaign process has just started in earnest. No unrest is expected, but at the end of the day, this is West Africa; we've seen tragedy come from power changes so many times before, and everyone is a little cautious.

The end result of all this is that the government is not allowing large crowds of people to form. A couple thousand for a screening definitely counts as a large crowd, and so the whole process for finding patients has been reworked this year. We're going to do smaller screenings at different locations all throughout the outreach, filling up the surgery schedule as we go along, rather than all at once. This being the first of these days for the year, though, we expected a bit of a crowd.

That's where the four thirty comes in. At screening, everyone stands in a long line, and the earlier you get there, the earlier you'll be seen. Usually there are hundreds at the site who camp out overnight for a place in line. Today, after a bumpy drive through the dark, cool near-morning, we arrived to find just eight. Eight souls, huddled in a little group near the gate of the stadium we would be using.

Suddenly (at least to me) this all seemed like a bad idea. How were we ever going to fill the schedule, if only eight people were in line? Why were we there before dawn for just eight people? How was this going to work?

God, true to form, had other plans. I'm fairly sure He just wanted to get me praying sooner rather than later, because as I lifted my heart to Him and the night sky lightened to grey, they started arriving. One by one they came, getting in line with hope all over their faces. A mama carried twins, one with straight feet, one with crooked, and I smiled to myself because I knew we would help them. A little boy walked slowly past, his hand in his papa's, his legs bowed out, and I knew I would see him again, too.

All morning I moved up and down the line, handing out cards for the eye and dental clinics, learning my first two words in Mina (one of the main tribal languages here) in the process. N'kouvi? Adoo? I repeated, over and over. Eyes? Teeth? And there, too, my heart was light. Not for their blindness or their pain, but because I knew we would be able to help.

We were finished by lunchtime, the word evidently having gotten out that today wasn't the only day to be seen. It all just felt different, somehow. There wasn't the sense of desperation that so often comes at screening, the need to be seen today or else never. The latecomers calmly accepted cards and my explanation of the dates for other screenings, thanked me and left. (That's a whole different story altogether, the way I managed to speak far more French than I've ever learned just when it was needed most.)

The people we couldn't help hugged me and kissed my cheeks and said thank you anyway, and I'm wondering if it wasn't just because someone was listening to their story. Maybe for the first time, their problem was important to someone. Important enough for all these people to leave their homes and fly halfway around the world. Important enough for us to wake up at four thirty in the morning, to stand in the dirt and listen while they told us how they hurt. And important enough to look them in the eyes and mean it when we told them we were sorry.

There are something like twenty-nine more screenings still to come. I'll miss them, because I'll be on the wards, taking care of all those patients that will have shown up to stand in line and tell their stories.

I can't wait to be a part of them.

(Too many words and not enough pictures, I know. I'll post some as soon as the photographers have shared them with us.)