What a joy it has been to be welcomed back ‘home’. Our lives are full and our hearts feel warm
and at peace. But that ease and peace is
often destabilized by the flip side of being welcomed back to Nyankunde- the lack
of resources, poor organization and all around relative dysfunction of systems
and institutions. Here are a few
vignettes from just one day…..
I arose early to a once again grey sky, very abnormal for
here. Another day of wondering if the
sun would sufficiently charge our batteries or not? Will we be able to keep things in our fridge
and freezer from going bad? How will I
heat up the kid’s water for baths tonight?
At 7:00 AM I went down to the hospital, late to hospital women’s
prayer and found them in the middle of intercession. Often there is a short prayer time, then a
Biblical teaching, and then announcements. But the weight of life led them to focus on
prayer this morning. Life is HARD for hospital employees these days. Salaries have been 20-40% of what is due the
employees, leaving some of them with a $20/month salary. Cost of living is not low, $20 doesn’t go
very far. Many have become desparate. Four
of the six urgent care nurses accepted bribes as payment from patients who fled
the hospital and didn’t pay for their hospitalization. They are all lovely people, but made poor
decisions in their desperation.
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| A birthday party at our friend's house |
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| Some Congolese friends had us over for a welcome back to Nyankunde dinner |
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| Luke and Miriam beg to go to Papa John and Grandma Cher's house to watch birds, play ball and just get loved on! (dear MAF friends) |
I left prayer early as I had agreed to teach nursing
students this morning. But I arrived to
a classroom full of students and a teacher already in full-swing. Ooops, they had forgotten to tell me that
they had changed the schedule and I wouldn’t be teaching today. Really?
I decided to go see if I was needed in Pediatrics and on my way was
consulted about 2 patients. One of the
patients is a 10 year old orphan with HIV.
I was told the hospital hadn’t been able to supply him with
anti-retroviral medications for the past 4 days. Just as I was heading to the health center to
try to figure out why not, I stopped by pediatrics and found out that the malnutrition
inpatient program had been out of their special fortified treatment milk for
the past 2 days. In the past, when the NGO that supplies the therapeutic milk
doesn’t show up, the hospital buys local milk and they make their own
‘medicated milk’ by adding sugar, oral rehydration salts and oil. Unfortunately, they haven’t paid the ‘milk
ladies’ for their local milk and have a huge debt, so the milk ladies are now
unwilling to sell more milk to the hospital for the malnourished patients. Two weeks ago the pediatric service brought
this need before me also, that they were once again out of therapeutic
milk. I talked with the administration
and asked them to try to start buying local milk again, but in order to supply
milk right away, I found a local missionary who was willing to donate a large
quantity of powdered milk. Today they
finally ran out of this stock of powdered milk.
No progress has been made in paying the debt to the local dairies, and
no more powdered milk exists. Ahhhh!!!!
How to move forward? Lack of resources
isn’t the main problem, mostly just good organization, planning and
communication.
I made my way over to the administrative offices to try to
work through the milk problem and ran into one of the hospital chaplains. Recently quite a few toys have gone missing
from our home. The other day I noticed
that beyond a missing soccer ball, both boxes of markers had disappeared and
many parts of our lego sets. I asked
some of Luke’s friends who happened to be around if they knew what had happened
to all of our markers. “Oh”, they said,
“We saw Johnny (real name not given for obvious reasons!) at school giving them
out to his friends”. Luke’s friends left
and showed up 30 minutes later with a few of the markers and multiple lego
toys. “We found these at Johnny’s
house!” they said. Johnny is the son of
the hospital chaplain I ran into. I
explained the situation and asked if he had seen his son with any of these
items. He hadn’t. Awkward.
But I think it was the right thing to do. Not to shame Johnny, but so he’s given the
chance to learn, grow and change if he did indeed steal.
I finally decided I’d just go home early and had made my way
most of the way home when I was stopped by the nursing school teacher who had
been teaching in my classroom this morning.
“Oh”, he said, “The students are all waiting for you at the school. I was told to stop early so you could teach
at 10:00”. WHAT?! No one had said a thing to me. Ah, what I would give for organization and
communication. Soooo, I turned around
and went back to the school. My
materials hadn’t yet been copied for the students because it had been cloudy
with insufficient solar energy, but soon I was set up to teach.
In the afternoon I returned to the nursing school to lead a Bible
study with a dear Congolese friend. It
was a really special time, and at the end we shared prayer requests. My friend asked for prayer because of fear
she’s been having. She grew up in
Nyankunde and had to flee when war came as a little girl. Now she is a mother of 3, two of which are
little girls. She is struggling against
fears of war coming again, and having to flee with her young family. She said her oldest daughter, 7, has been
breaking down crying recently, asking if war is coming, because she now
understands French and hears reports of instability in the region. My heart could hardly hold this prayer
request. I think we in the western world
often think that Africans are just sort of used to instability, and it doesn’t
affect them much, they are resilient, right?
Oh please pray for our friends, for peace in their hearts. That God would meet them, encourage them and
love them, despite the circumstances.
Pray for peace in our region.
Thanks for joining me for one day in Nyankunde…..
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