So Far Away

Today.... Africa feels like worlds away.... the ocean feels so much bigger than it did yesterday.... and to be honest I am mad at it. I am mad that the ocean is so big. I am mad that I spent the whole day feeling helpless. Nurses don't like to feel helpless, we are fixers and today nothing was to be fixed, at least by my hands.

The morning started with tragedy... a call for the emergency teams to A ward it was only a few minutes before we heard the news and it took my breath away. In moments like this time stills for just a moment. The call was for Anicette and she was gone. This ship has a long history with Ani, she came to us last year a malnourished tiny little thing with a cleft lip and palate. She went to and fro from the hospitality center to the hospital and back again as we fought the uphill battle for her to gain enough weight for surgery. It only took one look at Ani and she had you hooked. She was famous on the wards in no time and everyone knew her by name. She had her surgery and went home a healthy looking happy little baby girl. She returned this year severely malnourished again, what had happened to our dear little Anicette and could we get her to gain the weight back. At 14 months old she weighed just over 8lbs. We admitted her again and began the fight again. Then this morning without warning she was gone. I know this happens, in fact one child every 5 seconds dies from hunger related causes. But its not supposed to happen in here not when we are fighting so hard. When you know the face and the name and you have held her in your arms.....it is not supposed to happen then. By midday you could feel a weight on the whole ship, here when something happens in the hospital the whole ship mourns and today we are sad.

I felt like I didn't have the time to process it. I was trying to figure out some logistics for my VVF women and making sense of things with your African contacts is like a big maze of confusion. Who am I meeting with when, and who has found how many women where? and no I didn't talk to that women from the rotary club I have never even heard her name before. It was an uphill battle that has yet to be won.

About 10 minutes before I was to go into a meeting to try and sort some of these details out, one of the gals from the office came down the hall, your mom is on the phone she said.... I thought well this cannot be good. It hit me like a brick. It doesn't matter that the words include she is ok I am still on  a completely different continent and never feel the distance quite as much as in these moments. I have spent the rest of the day crying out to God. Lord heal her wounds, bind them together. Guide the hands of the surgeon and give her body, mind, and spirit your divine healing.

I feel so helpless, but the truth is the prayers are the most important thing I can offer. And tonight Jesus, I lay it all at your feel. Give baby Ani a kiss for me and hold Megan in your arms.

Mosquito Hunting

So just a little glimps into my Sunday evening, I spent about an hour on the gangway with one of my favorite ghurka's Lok (affectionately nicknamed Papa Lok). There are a lot of flys here more than I noticed last year in Benin, don't know why. So the ghurka's have the most awesome version of a fly swatter I have ever seen. It looks like a small tennis racket and when you push a red button it gives a little electric zap that kills the fly or mosquito and makes a super cool zappy noise. So Papa Lok let me play with the electric fly swatter. Apparently all the fly's were scarred of me and had been warned by all the other flys about the electric fly swatter of death. But I did manage to kill one mosquito, I am sure the misquito I zapped was carrrying the malaria, so now thanks to me Togo is now one malaria ridden misquito less. Now if only we could kill the rats and the cockroaches that are such great company as I walk the dock just as easy.

Screening

Today I helped with screening. This year instead of doing one big day of screening where thousands of patients show up we are doing multiple small screenings every week. I think the members of this team have some of the hardest jobs on the ship.

So this morning I had signed up to go along and help. My job was to stand at the front of the line and direct the patients to the next available screener. The patients are seen by nurses at this screening then if it is thought they may be possible surgical candidates they are given a card to come to the ship and be evaluated by the surgeon who then makes the final decision.

What makes this day so hard is the nos. I don't know the numbers for sure but we maybe saw 100 or so patients and gave less than 10 cards to come to the ship. I know that we cannot help everyone, I know that.... but it still doesn't change the fact that I want to. The girl the same age as me with severely bowed legs who is too old for surgery, it would simply take more time than we have for her bones to heal even if we did have a surgeon and a surgical space for her (which we don't). The mama who brought her 8 year old boy who has some sort of palsy with severe delays in that he cannot walk or talk, even though he does crawl around and laugh and interact, we have nothing we can do surgically. The women with the goiters growing from their necks, who we must say sorry unfortunately we cannot help you because their goiter isn't big enough to be life threatening.

I keep coming back to the fact that we are helping those we can. The precious little one only a few days old with a cleft lip and palate who we will begin on our feeding program and hopefully will grow to be healthy enough for surgery. The little girl with a leg that can no longer straighten after a burn where the skin grew back holding the leg permanently in place bent at the knee. Another precious little boy who had surgery for a large tumor on his face in another country and they took away part of his jaw bone, not bothering to replace it with anything, and now his mouth just hangs open, he cannot speak or eat well and he drools constantly. I know God has all his little children in His mighty hands and we will help the ones we should but even resting in this truth... on days like today it just simply doesn't feel like enough.

Words I didn't have

Last Friday I spent trying to make contacts with a number of doctors throughout Togo who have been helping to find VVF women for us and referring them for possible surgery coming up in a couple of months. One local surgeon here in Lome said he had over 10 women for me, so when we contacted him my translator Caleb realized he was going to be going to the same hospital this doctor worked at later that day with some other nurses from the ship and thought it may be easier to meet in person. I was game to go and thought it would be a fun field trip to get to go see the local university hospital.

I went with 2 of the nurses here Suzanne and Becca, who coordinate the Burkitt's program. I had the opportunity to meet 2 of their patients, two precious little boys. We spent a couple of hours at the hospital trying to get everything sorted and I spent most of the time just playing with these little guys along with some of the other children in the pediatric unit. I have been wanting to write a little about my experience that day. About how these little boys and their stories break your heart, but I just couldn't find the words. So here is a link to Becca's Blog. Please keep Suzanne and Becca in your prayer's along with this program that is just getting underway this outreach.

Night Shift

There is something I really love about this ship at night. It feels so peaceful. The wards are dark and the patients all tucked it, the babies snuggling with their mamas. Little casted children with their legs propped up in the air on pillows and their parents sleeping on mattresses on the floor under their beds. When you walk around the ship all is quiet, just a few of us awake making sure everything runs smoothly until the morning.

In just a few short hours all of this quiet will change. Everyone will start to wake up, to prepare for the week ahead. The patients will start lining up on the dock. Some to be admitted for surgery this coming week, some to be screened by the surgeons, and some to come follow up after their already completed surgery. As they arrive this morning they will be filled with hope that maybe this big floating white steal box filled with strangers will hold the miracle they have been praying for.

Life on God's Terms

"The Christian landscape is strewn with the wreckage of derelict half-built towers. The ruins of those who began to build and were unable to finish. For thousands of people still ignore Christ's warning and undertake to follow Him without first pausing to reflect on the cost of doing so. The result is the great scandal of Christendom today, so called nominal Christianity. In countries to which Christian civilization has spread, large numbers of people have covered themselves with a decent but thin veneer of Christianity. They have allowed themselves to become somewhat involved, enough to be respectable but not enough to be uncomfortable. Their religion is a great soft cushion. It protects them from the hard unpleasantness of life while changing its place and shape to suit their convenience. No wonder the cynics speak of hypocrites in the church and dismiss religion as escapism," -John Stott

Today I listened to the second week in the radical series and again was completely challenged by the message. David Pratt started off with a question asking "Have you ever really lived on Jesus's terms?" When I ask myself this question I think well yes I'm a christian I go to church, I pray, I serve the poor but then as we started to dive into the text and I began to be challenged by those same passages from last week (Luke 14: 25-35), I began to see I may never have let go enough to truly live on His terms. Unless you hate your mother and father... you cannot be my disciple. I have never really been able to fully wrap my brain around this scripture. To hate them....it just doesn't make sense to my head. I know God also says the greatest commandment is to love God and then to love my neighbor, so how can I do both? Love my neighbor and hate them. The idea was presented in this talk, that our love for God must be so supreme, so elevated above all other love, that our love for those around us looks like hate in comparison. I had to pause the and think on this for a minute, but after it settled in a way it does make sense to me. I must love God so incredibly much and then from that love stems everything else including my love for my neighbor but this is nothing absolutely nothing compared to my love for God. So as I thought about how much love this takes for God and how much love He deserves I feel like I completely fall short. Do I love him or do I love the idea of heaven and the security of having a God. I think this next week I am going to focus on God just simply Him and who He is and let myself work at deepening this love because in the end that is the greatest commandment and all that really matters, everything else will stem from that. I am going to love Him like crazy so that living life on His terms doesn't seem like a sacrifice it feels like a reward even when it does get uncomfortable.

Crazy Scary White Lady

So today on the ward I had a funny experience, not sure it should have been funny but after a while it started to make me laugh. I had a one year old patient who was so terribly afraid of the white people. Now you can see how it would be scary at one year old to suddenly be in a new environment where it is very cold and there are tons of people a different color from you running about talking in a language that sounds weird and coming at you with things sticking out of their ears and putting the other end on you and sticking pokey things under your armpit and clipping things to your toes all while your mom holds you down so they can.

So every time I walked over to this little guy he would start to whimper then when I would reach out to touch him he would cry and try and squirm away. Early into the afternoon I noticed that if I even got within 2 feet of the bed he would whimper then if I would back up a couple inches he would instantly stop. Lean in = whine. Lean out = quite. I thought it maybe just me so I had one of the other nurses try it.... same thing. It was like we had found a little on/off switch for the whimpering. It made everyone in the room have a little laugh including his mom.

One last funny fact about the whole thing... his last name is the local word here meaning "white person"

A little ward lovin

Its been less than a week and I am starting to get my feet and feel back in the swing of things again. I have finished my first couple shifts on the ward and I am quickly remembering why I love this place. I have never been a peds nurse but here I do a little bit of everything. The last 2 days I've been playing with the kiddos. The most precious set of twins obviously born premature and at a couple weeks old still each weighing under 4lbs. They both are part of our infant feeding program, designed to help babies grow by teaching the caregiver about proper nutrition and how to provide that effectively for their baby. One of them has the smallest most precious casts on both her legs I have ever seen, slowing helping to correct her malformed feet.

Then there is David an 8 years old and one of our orthopedic patients, who today learned my name. Every time I was anywhere close to his bed I would hear "Maggie...Maggie" as soon as I would turn and look at him he would just giggle and turn away like, what who called you wasn't me.

Its the ability to be totally silly for the sake of a laugh, the freedom to pray with your patients before their operation or at anytime for any reason at all. It's playing a game of memory on the floor while another nurse will gladly get some vital signs or pass some medication for you so you can keep interacting with your patients. It's praying at handover with nurses and the translators from all different parts of the world, sometime in multiple languages all because this is why we are here. We serve a great and loving God who has placed us all here, and gives us this privilege of being able to serve.

Radical Challenge

Before beginning my trip back to the ship. I wanted to establish a plan for better Sunday time. My last couple trips were quite inconsistent. Some Sundays I would attend a local church, which was so great in order to be able to worship along side the people here and to see the way they interact with God and the way they worship God. Some Sundays I would call in and listen to sermon's from home which was so nice for that piece of home, that connection knowing I was listening to the same message as my family and my church family at the same moment. Still other Sundays I would go to the evening service on board the ship which is good for worship alongside my fellow workers here. Although each of these was good in there own way and I plan to continue with them, I felt like I needed some consistency from week to week.

About a week before I came I was reading another blog and there was a link to a couple of series of sermon's that had really spoken to her. I looked into them and downloaded them prior to coming. I started the first one today and am excited for this journey I feel God is calling me to take. I will post the link here to David Platt's Radical series and encourage anyone who wishes, to come along with me. I am choosing to take it slow and do it weekly on Sundays. It's a total of 8 talks focusing on the gospels and the radical lives God calls us to lead in His teachings.

I have not listened to them all so cannot honestly speak to what all they will entail, but I just finished the first one and am completely challenged by it. I am going to step up to this challenge and push through some of these ideas that push the boundaries of what I truly believe and what I am willing to do in service of Christ.

Many things struck me but I will share the one question that was posed that rocked me the most at my core. Referring to the passage in Luke 18:18-30 where the rich man is asking Jesus what it takes to inherit eternal life and Jesus says "...Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me." - The question was if Jesus were to say these words to me today, how do I think I would respond? The scary thing is I don't know how I would respond, I want my answer to be yes Lord I will, and then immediately and without hesitation do exactly that, sell it all be willing to give it all and just go. The truth is I have given up a lot and have left the security of home and I am serving but there are many things that I am still clinging to. There are plans for the future, there are certain material possessions, there are relationships that I am not sure I would be willing to sacrifice. But the truth of the matter is that's not ok, God doesn't ask us to give up all but those things that are most dear, He asks no He demands we give it all. "So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake ALL that he has cannot be my disciple." - Luke 14:33 Like the pastor says in this talk, I do not know what this means or implicates for my future but I am going to start seeking to find out. What I find may lead to even more radical changes in my life, but I am choosing to be ok with that.

Traveling Mercy to Togo!

I am safely in Togo! The traveling went smoothly with no major drama, which I am so thankful for because I seem to be the queen of traveling drama. I was so grateful to be able to meet up with a fellow Mercy Shipper and close friend Beccy in London and do the second half of the trip with her. I arrived last evening around 930pm local time. My new room is great! I know 2 of the 3 roommates from last year and that is a blessing to be able to settle in a little quicker.

I will start full steam Monday with getting acclimated to the VVF coordinator role which is going to be new for me this year. If you have spoken with me or read my blog entries from last outreach you know that my heart and my passion rest with the VVF ladies. God opened a door for me to coordinate the program this year and although I am totally intimidated by the prospect of a leadership role and responsibility of this level, I know this is what God has for me, and I will go with the confidence that He is laying the path before me and the knowledge that he hasn't failed me yet. He has also provided me with the blessing of sharing this role with a good friend of mine Lindsay, and I am really excited to be serving in this role along sider her.

Now although I am excited about VVF this role is not going to be in full swing for a little while yet as surgery doesn't start for VVF until mid-May. Until then I will be back in my old role working as a ward nurse. I am excited to get back into the swing of this. I think this will be a good transition back into ship life and the outreach ahead.

He doesn't need me

Tonight is my last night in the US before heading out to Africa and it has been a good one. I have been flying around like a crazy women trying to get all the last minute details done. Then tonight was communion at church and it was really good to stop, slow down and refocus and get myself looking where I should be at a transition time like this.

I had some support money checks to turn into the mission fund tonight while at church. As I added up the amount I had and then added in the amount that had already been placed in the fund in my name I was in awe. As I mentally processed that I had the exact amount of money that I needed and I had basically done no fund raising this time, I almost couldn't wrap my head around it. Then I thought to myself, why are you so shocked? Where is your faith? How can I continue to doubt when God has been continually faithful? The truth is God doesn't need me to do the leg work. He can do it all by himself. Don't get me wrong we can't just sit back and wait for God to drop what we need in our laps, but sometimes He says just serve and He will work out the rest. He is the God of the details and the God of perfect timing and He is AWESOME!

Good-bye nonsense

So the countdown is on, I leave in like 2.5 days. It is crazy crazy how fast time goes. Yesterday started the beginning of good-byes and can I just say I am over good-byes and over not being quite ready to go. It seems as if I am forever saying good-bye and preparing to miss one person or another and one situation or another. I know this is the life I signed up for and I love it but this good-bye part stinks.

So I have decided I am not having any more emotional good-byes I am finished with such nonsense. I love you all and you know it. So I am just saying see ya on the flip side.