2013 is to You

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Winter, and Womanhood, and Medicine

So I've been waking up early this week, say around 5:00am, so I can join my dad for a day at the office--him writing a sermon, planning worship for Sunday, making hospital visits, lashing a pair of deer antlers to the crown of an old Minnesota Vikings helmet so it can be used for a game at the annual church youth Christmas party; me studying organic chemistry and dabbling in research for a global health paper on podoconiosis.

It's been a blessing, these early mornings and short days: In the office from 5:30 or 6:00am until about 3:00pm, probably with a quick jaunt home in the middle of the day for some leftovers for lunch and then back to work.  It's really astonishing, seeing all those things I didn't learn during the hecticness of the semester, and now being able to see--wow!!--just how amazing it is that you really can predict the acidity of a single proton relative to another protons in the same molecule, or that you can somehow sketch out the structure of an unknown molecule by measuring the different responses to differing chemical environments that carbon isotopes or atoms with spin (like protons) have.  Like... what?!?  What a world.  Wow.  When I study I know it's all praise, learning about an awe-inspiring world made by an awesome God.  Sometimes it's so overwhelmingly awe-inspiring that I even take a quick morning nap on the pews to refresh my mind, and when I come back to my little table and faithful space heater and textbooks and lecture notes in the tiny church library, I am impressed all over again with the wonder of it all.

And then the coming home, when the work is done, leaving the textbooks and lecture notes neatly stacked on my dad's desk overnight: That's a thing of beauty, too.  To put aside the work and just relax, because nothing's due tomorrow (or the next day, or the next week, or really for another month, anyway).  This is the sort of balance I imagine is most healthy for working people.

So I come home, and just relax.  Our TV is in the shop, so partly because of that and partly because this winter I'm being more intentional, I'm reading a book that my aunt gave me, one of those sort-of-for-no-reason gifts that she'll occasionally surprise me with: things that maybe she sees and then remembers me, then buys for me just because she thinks they would be affirming or challenging or good for me.  This aunt in particular has always been conscious that I've grown up in a home of brothers, and has always affirmed my womanhood (when it was that, and my femininity, or girlhood, or whatever it was back then before I had womanhood) in a special way, sometimes with these gifts, and sometimes just with words.  All my aunts, actually, have done this, but this one in particular.

Back, in a moment, to this book, but a digression on womanhood, because it's really a cool thing: I got my ears pierced in September.  They're not pierced now (did you know that about 15% of people have a dermal nickel allergy?  I don't know where I read that, but I feel like maybe it's true), but they were.  They lasted a few weeks before the allergic swelling got too bad and I'd wake up in the middle of the night in pain, or have to call my best friend to help me put them back in when I'd tried to give my ears a brief moment's rest, so I took the earrings out permanently.  And the holes are gone now.  If I feel my earlobes, there's still some tiny, circular scar where I know they were pierced--but no holes.

Since I went to Ghana on Bridge Year with the Abenas (Fitaa and Tuntum, white and black, we called them, to everyone's confusion, though it was true), I'd wanted to pierce them.  These past few years, see, have been a lot about growing into womanhood, about loving being a woman in every way.  I love being able to dress up every once in a while and affirm that I am beautiful with a particular feminine beauty--though looking nice on the outside doesn't mean so much for so long.  I love getting my period, because it means not only that my body is a capable one--oh hey, world, I could have a baby someday!  And that's exciting!  And I want to celebrate it!--but also an active one, living in--making--the same sort of rhythms that go on around us in seasons, stages of life, and day and night.  I love doing dishes and cleaning the bathroom and washing clothes (by hand or with a machine), even though I love mowing the lawn and fixing blown fuses in the car too, because part of being a woman is serving (which is not to say that part of being a man is not serving, too, because doing all these tasks are more related to maturity than to gender roles anyway... but I do tilt toward traditional gender roles--my theology, which in turn cannot help but be my politics--that say women, in partnership with men, bear much of the responsibility to the day-to-day smooth running of a house.  I guess if I'm a feminist, I'm a very weird one.).  I like thinking that someday I'll get to have my own home where and family for whom I can do all these things--and that includes doing the dishes and cleaning the bathroom and washing the clothes.  I love the idea of wearing earrings, some small, not-too-noticeable daily reminder of being a woman: little studs, maybe, when it's time to shovel the snow, or some dangly, sparkly ones for a nice evening out.

My former roommate once shared with me a paper she wrote about feminist expression (or the stifling thereof) in Judaism, and one of her arguments discussed a prayer Jewish men pray thanking the Lord for not making them women.  And, thanks be to God for men, especially those who are strong in the Lord, but this is my prayer: Thank you, Lord, for not making me a man.

I really think this growing into my womanhood has informed my understanding of my medical calling tremendously: I want to be an obstetrician/gynecologist.  There's a lot of fear, I think, or at best uncertainty or misunderstanding, that women have about their bodies.  Childbirth might be one of the easiest examples of this: It's hyped up in a lot of the media as one of the most painful and terrifying experiences a woman can have.  And, well, I've never given birth.  But I've learned a lot about it, and, yeah, I'd have to say I'd agree with the part about it being really painful (also, I've read Genesis 3), and it can also be very uncertain.  But I've also seen babies born, and I have to say that women's bodies are a pretty wondrous creation: Bodies that can grow other bodies from a single cell to billions, separate themselves from the smaller body, and then nourish that other body.  Wow.  Each of these stages wondrous for its own unique reasons!  But too often women's bodies are also be the site of a lot of cultural subjugation and neglect, and that's painfully sad.  Women's bodies should be well affirmed, and well cared for.

But back to this book: It's wonderful.  Truly, truly wonderful.  It's called God's Hotel by Victoria Sweet (who graciously omits the title from the cover, but who is an MD).  Thank you Aunt Ruth!  In it, Dr. S. (as she is known by her patients) tells of her experiences working at Laguna Honda, which is more or less the last almshouse, or hospital serving the poor and chronically ill, in the US.  It's her account of trying to understand what a body is, like what's the anima, the spirit, that makes a person a person and not just a body (amendment to previous note about women's bodies, and bodies carrying, birthing, and feeding bodies: That was in the full, "embodied" [hehe] sense of bodies, as in... Jesus took on a body.  And we are embodied, in a powerful, so-physical-it's-almost-spiritual sort of way.  But now when I'm talking about bodies, I just mean the piles of DNA and proteins and cytoplasm and stuff).

During it, Dr. S. shares about her PhD research (a.k.a. sojourn) into the premodern medicine of Hildegard of Bingen, a mystic and nun who treated patients in the 12th century according to the principle of four [insert plural noun here: humors, seasons, elements, times of day, etc.].  She also leaves the (Lord-willing) future doctor in me yearning for what I understand too well, despite my naive optimism about a profession in healing (or what I pray is at least not just a profession of diagnosing and treating and dragging babies out of birth canals), to be a dying cadence of medicine: Slow medicine.  The sort of medicine that allows doctors enough time with their patients to figure out, hmmm, that patient who has long since been diagnosed as having Alzheimer's (i.e., she seems demented but we're not sure why), diabetes, and depression and who is taking all the associated medicines--and more--actually has a dislocated hip after having a hip replacement, and can safely be taken off of literally all of her medications when her pain is mostly gone after her hip is properly realigned.  It's a remarkable thing, the way medicine is practiced at Laguna Honda, what with the "white-haired little old white ladies" in one of the wards each wrapped in a hand-crocheted blanket made by the head nurse of the ward and the patients going out for a drink just outside the admitting ward.  Romanticized, yes, without a doubt--but the whole thing just tugs at my heart.  Maybe obstetrics and gynecology is different in some key ways from internal medicine, but it's the same philosophy that inefficiency is sometimes the most efficient way of caring, and that often an hour-long physical exam and really full patient history speak more articulately than a full blood workup, that I'd like to think compels both me and Dr. S.

In some ways, my ex-pierced ears remind me of the story of Terry, whom Dr. S. writes about.  Please, I'll request of you, read the book, for the details are worth it, and such a summary does no justice, and yet: Terry was confined to a wheelchair, and out from under the care of the nurses at Laguna Honda, developed terrible bedsores.  Surgeons spent hours grafting tissue from her thighs onto her buttocks and lower back.  After she disappeared for several months after having been taken out "for an afternoon" by her boyfriend, Terry's bedsores were back with a special vengeance, the grafts having turned gangrenous and the sores themselves revealing internal organs, decaying deep enough to expose parts of her spine.  Modern medicine had given an answer with the grafts, and they--and here we'd like to assign blame, and probably much more of it to Terry than to the surgeons, but let us for now merely remember the social context in which Terry may have lived, and then press forward, keeping our pointing-prone fingers to ourselves--had failed.  She would almost surely die of infection, what with such a huge breech in her primary protective mechanism against all the pathogens not only of the world at large, but specifically of an almshouse full of the poor and sick.

She didn't die, at least not soon.  She broke up with her abusive boyfriend, quit drinking and smoking, and over the course of 2 1/2 years (people, that's 365 days * 2.5 = 912 days!  that's so long!) literally regrew the tissue that had been robbed by her bedsore.  Two and a half years.  My ears only took two and a half days to mostly much heal, and two and a half weeks until I could scarcely notice that there had ever been a hole there, save for the the tiny, circular scars.  But somehow both healings are about becoming: For Terry, becoming free from what had entangled her; and for me, becoming the woman I am.  I don't want to be contrived, because I'm not Terry, and bedsores are not ear piercings (though let's be real: how amazingly surreal that our bodies heal like that, just making flesh from what we can't see?  Bodies are intricate handiwork to be sure).  I want to get my ears pierced again (nickel free earrings this time, no cheap stainless steel!) within a few weeks, and my holes will be back.  But there's something profound in healing.


It's late, past my bedtime (the wonderful consequence of waking up so early is going to sleep early, and now that it is already 10:00pm I've transgressed my bedtime by an hour), so here I'll conclude.  No simple thesis restatement, as I was taught in school.  But let me say that I've been blessed by my winter break so far, and when I wake up tomorrow morning to study more organic chemistry, it will be my prayer for God to keep me grounded in the present, believing Him for what it to come (medical school!  residency!  ob/gyn practice!) and thanking Him for what has been--and studying that day because He has put it before me for the now.

AWESOME.

I wish I could shout this to everyone I know, but I don't have a Facebook or a Twitter or anything, so here it goes:

GOD IS AWESOME!!  Always!!

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Last night I was trying to study for my weekly physics quiz today, and it was going horribly.  I prayed, "God, you're good, and I know that!  You know I didn't sleep last night, and I'm so tired.  But you can give me the energy to stay up and study to your glory.  So could you either give me the strength to continue, or just let me know it's okay to go to bed?"  I felt release to go to bed, but I wasn't quite sure whether it was God or my mind speaking, so I prayed again, and it was clearer: Go to bed!

So I trundled back up the hill to my bed and fell into it at 9:30pm, falling asleep instantly.  Before I did so I turned off my phone, which is usually my alarm, and told God, "Thanks for letting me rest.  I'm trusting my physics quiz (and the recommendation I have to write and the application I have to finish by noon tomorrow) to you by going to bed now.  But I'm also trusting you to wake me up when I need to wake up"--which I figured would be about 5am to finish everything before my 10am physics class.  

I literally fell out of bed at 9am the next morning, confused about why God had not woken me up earlier.  But I figured He always knows what's up, so I finished and submitted my friend's recommendation and stumbled off to physics.  When it came time for the quiz, I approached my professor and the first thing he asked me was, "Do you want to take the quiz on Sunday?"  

God is so good!!  I'm grateful for His kindness, for giving me the chance to sleep, for letting me have more time to study for this quiz.  HE'S AWESOME.

Peace to you for today!

Love,

Jessica

Don't Wear Filthy Rags!! (or, Everything Outside of Christ is Rubbish - sermon by Zac Poonen)

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Thanks to my friend Lydia for sharing this with me; Wow, powerful stuff here!  Basic idea (but you should listen to it yourself): We are so quick to become indignant when God does not act like our business partner, to whom we give things in expectation of something else in return, but we fail to recognize that what we are trying to give God is based on our own merit, which is... worthless.  When we think like that, we're like people who have been given hundreds of thousands of dollars by a kind relative when dire straits befell us, and then ask the relative to pay us after doing a favor for him; or like people going to a wedding banquet who are offered free, new clothes to wear but  reject them because we think our clothes are better when in fact they are our ratty workout clothes.  So the bottom line is this: God does not owe us anything and is not impressed by our works, and that is why we pray in Jesus' name, not ours--because in Jesus' name, each of us takes on righteousness that is not ours and is set on equal footing with infant and mature Christians alike, whereas in our name and by our merit, we are not even worthy to come before God in the first place.  Thank you Jesus!  I'm excited for Advent :)

Prayer for the Week

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Yesu, woy3 m'akoma so ade3; Awurade: mehyia wo ky3n bebiara. Ma menhu wo!  

John 16:33

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Testimonies from the past few days

(because they bring glory to God and edify the body!)

. : I was walking to gospel ensemble rehearsal after a long day of classes, the sort of 8:30 to 5:00 day (granted, with two hour-long breaks, so no complaining!) that I thought I had left behind in high school, in the wet and cold, and, having not gotten to eat lunch, was feeling pretty hungry--and tired, and cold, and a little overwhelmed by the tasks swirling around in my head, and in a less-than-wonderful mood overall.  But see, I'm learning to walk by faith and not feelings, so I prayed, "Lord, thank you that I get to go sing to you right now!"  As I looked up I noticed a woman walking toward me.  We'd been classmates the first semester of our freshman year, and often said hello in passing, but never really talked.  She was carrying a steaming bag of fresh popcorn.  As we passed on the sidewalk, she stopped and asked me how I was doing, where I was going, and where I bought my rain boots--and then offered me some of her popcorn!  God provides even in the small ways :)

. : Because of the project I did this summer, combined with the perks of being an assistant RA, my financial aid statement looked pretty good this year.  I didn't even have to turn in any money from summer earnings to contribute!  So when I checked my monthly financial statement, I was surprised to see a large credit to my account billed as a "Department Transfer" appear.  I figured it was a mistake, but was convicted to pray: "Father, thank you for this money that you've given to me!  I'm claiming it to do your work, however you would lead me to use it."  The next day I emailed the Finance Office to ask where the money had come from, and I was surprised when they replied to say it had not been a mistake, but that it was a credit from my summer project--which I had thought had already been given to me in its entirety.  So I thanked God, because that money was his all along; He was just gracious enough to let me be a channel to funnel it where it needs to go.  Now my prayer is to be a good steward with it, and I'm asking Him to show me where to give it.

. : My freshman and sophomore year roommate, who had joined my Bible study and dedicated her life to Jesus about 8 months ago, always encourages me by sharing how God is answering her prayers.  She has really incredible faith to see Him working and speaking to her!  I don't see her too much any more, since we live on opposite ends of campus, but I bumped into her on my way to a noon prayer meeting yesterday and invited her to come.  She agreed, a little hesitant if we were going to be praying aloud, but I assured her she could just pray silently.  When we got to where everyone was gathered, one of the leaders was finishing sharing a message about how that prayer time was a "prayer training ground" of sorts, where we were all encouraged to pray out and learn to let our prayers be shaped by God's leading.  She added that even when we are hesitant to pray, this time is a time to lead out anyway, trusting that God will give us words as we step out in faith.  After that we broke up into small groups to pray, and I got to pray with my former roommate.  It was so encouraging to have that time together, and to see how God had prepared both our meeting and that message for such a time as that.

. : On Sunday night as I was studying, I began to feel sick, in that creeping-dread sort of way when you just know that tomorrow you will feel much worse: The lymph nodes in my neck where swollen, my throat was beginning to feel sore, my body ached, and I felt weak and tired.  Right now there are more people on campus than I think I've ever seen who are sick with similar symptoms, and, almost convinced it was my sure fate to join them, I was not looking forward to a week of illness while trying to study for an organic chemistry midterm.  The few days prior I had been meditating on healing, and the prophetic verse that declares "by His [Jesus'] wounds we are healed" (Isaiah 53:5) was called to my mind.  Now, I think this verse is mostly about spiritual healing, in that through Jesus' wounds on the cross, we are healed of our spiritual disease and given peace, but Jesus also healed many people physically, so I decided to pray into that.  "I'm not sick; by Jesus' wounds I am healed!" I declared.  And I waited to see what would happen.  I kept studying into the night, and when I woke up for class the next morning after fewer than the recommended hours of sleep for healthy college students, there was no remnant of sickness in my body.  And there still isn't!

Praise God for all these--and (many, many) more!-- things.  The reasons I gave above for sharing them were true, but I want to explain a little more.  Each of these testimonies relates to faith, which I've come to define as standing on spiritual truth.  What I mean by that is that there are two ways of looking at the world: physically, and spiritually.  For example, when we look at the world physically, we see death: famine, evil, genocide, robbery, rape, and all sorts of evidence that the devil is indeed the prince of this world.  Yet when we look with spiritual eyes, we see what is promised: life, healing, hope, victory, and many testimonies of the truth that, though we do not always see it with physical eyes, Jesus has already won the battle between Heaven and Hell by his sacrifice on the cross, and indeed is the Lord and King of this world.

Testimonies, then, aren't a sign of God's material blessing in itself.  There are plenty of times that good things happen to us and we attribute them to our good planning, our charisma, or even dumb luck, and plenty of times that bad things happen to us and we recognize the truth of the Gospel hovering just below the physical surface (i.e., when my passport was stolen the day before I was supposed to leave Uganda last summer, it was a chance to rely on God to provide, and praise Him for protecting me; see also Joseph's story in Genesis 37-50, particularly 50:20).  I don't have testimonies because God likes me more--though He does love me (and you!) more than I imagine.  Rather, testimonies are a sign of faith, because it takes faith--which is a gift from God, not something we can conjure up by ourselves--to see beyond the physical and into the spiritual.

Thanks, Father, for testimonies of your faithfulness--and for the faith to recognize them!

Experiment

This semester, I've decided to try something out: Eliminate the phrases "I was too busy" and "I didn't have time" from my regular use.  Instead?  "I didn't make time."  Since that's more true, and I hope it will 1) show me my priorities (since time spent is a huge indicator of that!) and 2) keep me accountable to investing my time well.  Tangentially, I hope I have to use any of these three phrases less overall as I try to discern where I should be committed, and where I shouldn't.

on repeat

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At the beginning of this semester, with all the requisite uncertainty of a class schedule with lab times yet-to-be-determined and problem sets that take 1/5th of the time that they will take in a short week or two and no research papers looming just yet, I was feeling good about my time management, and about how I'd pared down my commitments from last year.  Maybe it was the book on boundaries, or how good it felt to live, as one of my friends commented insightfully last year, with "margins," or my new understandings that 1) expectations are not obligations, and 2) being able to do something doesn't automatically mean that you should.  But mostly, I'm convinced, it was God's grace, and his patient lessons on doing the important things, not all the things.  He'd given me a verse from Matthew 5:34--"Simply let your 'Yes' be 'Yes' and your 'No,' 'No;' anything beyond this comes from the evil one."--and had been teaching me what this meant.

I was involved (in a sort of confusing, nebulous way... oh GOD!! I still really need your wisdom!) in a Christian fellowship, was dedicated to singing in the Gospel Ensemble, and had a job tutoring.  And that seemed just about right.

But I'm still learning, and far from there yet.  Boundaries, and saying no, are a work in progress.  I got an email at the beginning of last week that was mostly a series of questions about whether I'd be able to do several different things, and it was still overwhelming.  I probably should have said no, and been clear, and let it be--but I didn't.  In a sort of misguided concession, I said yes to half the requests, and no to the other half.  And then other things started to come up: mentoring, and volunteering, and whatever else.  Soon I was asking myself not if the things I'd agreed to were what I should be doing, but where I could fit in the time to do them.

This is foolish.

So I've been trying to rectify this, sending out emails to clarify and adjust my commitments, trying to make sure that, even if I'm having to change my 'Yes' to a 'No' (still learning!  teach me, Father God.), at least then the 'No' in my heart will match the 'No' I've spoken--and the same for 'Yes.'  Although I think this passage in Matthew is admonishing Christians to be clear with their commitments and to be able to say, 'No' when it's necessary, I am coming to see that it's also about the sheer importance of having a mouth that says 'Yes' only when the heart is also saying 'Yes.'

Now, to make one vital clarification: Jeremiah (17:9) rightly points out, "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.  Who can understand it?"  So no, it is not enough--in fact, it is dangerous!--to act merely based on our whims.  After all, we are clearly instructed to "live by faith [the things of God, I'd say], not by sight [our fickle hearts and emotions]" (2 Corinthians 5:7).  But there is a still, small voice in our spirits that, as I learned in Pursuing God's Will Together, has long been recognized as the Holy Spirit, who can work through desolation (making us feel uneasy and "wrong" about a decision) and consolation (giving us a profound sense of peace when our decision aligns with God's will).  (The terms desolation and consolation are from St. Ignatius--check it out!!)

So, I'm saying NO to a lot of things these days, almost infinitely more than I used to (since I used to avoid that word pretty carefully).  I know that, as I learn I'll say yes to some of the wrong things and no to some of the right ones--but I trust that God will correct me.

Thoughts on Hands

Today's thought comes from a sermon by Zac Poonen (listen here!):

If your hands are not functioning well together, say, by causing you to drop things you try to carry, it's not because your two hands haven't spent enough time clasped together in "fellowship," but rather because one or both of them have lost connection to the brain from which they receive directions.  Take hands as parts of the body of Christ, and Christ himself as the head, and this is a powerful message to all sorts of churches and fellowships.

Get connected to the head!

things will fall apart without You

So I'm sitting in my room, the lone junior in a hall full of sophomores who have just returned to school today, and man, I am so convicted of this right now: Everything (everything!) will fall apart without Jesus.  There's just no way it stands--anything stands--without Twereduampon, the tree against which we lean and do not fall, as the Akans of Ghana call him.

There's a lot of shouting three floors below me, on the vast, dewy quad traversed by overeager students zealous to make up for summer evenings not spent partying with their college friends.  And I think of the last week of training I've undergone, training as an assistant resident adviser, and how everything's just sheer chaos without Jesus at the center.  How you can keep searching for that intangible sufficiency, searching as you run across the quad with the breathless exhilaration of the night that beckons, for some drug that will quell your insufficiency.  You'll search as you drink (RA rules: As long as the situation isn't "high risk," let kids drink), have sex (RA rules: Just make sure you have a condom, and try not to go asking for the morning-after pill too often), and study (RA rules: Weekly study break.  Go.).

And you'll never find that thing.  It breaks my heart.  The whole spectacle reminds me of Yeats' "The Second Coming"... "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."  Why don't we hear the falconer?  Jesus isn't a thing--He's a person.


"The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.  For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.  He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.  And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.  For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross." - Colossians 1:15-20


If I have any hope of surviving this year, it's not going to be because of my RA training.  It's going to be by grace.

Jesus At the Center

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Enough Angst Already

Yep, I've had quite enough of my angsty self in recent weeks, consumed with angsty thoughts about "development" projects-- and how to keep on living when you've lived somewhere very different and aren't sure how much you miss it-- and where (or if) I fit in with certain people and certain groups and certain places and certain dreams.

So I'm choosing to leave that behind and throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and run with perseverance the race marked out for me, fixing my eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith, who endured the cross and scorned its shame and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God, and consider Him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that I will not grow weary and lose heart!!  Amen.

Theme for the year:

CHOOSE TO SERVE THE LORD

White people in Africa

I have some pretty strong, pretty emotional, and sometimes pretty convoluted thoughts about this.  (And I realize my title is blighted by broadness and bluntness that go both ways: Africa, obviously, is a vastly diverse continent, and white people certainly have all manner of diverse reasons for being in Africa, including having been born there.  But sometimes I think generalizations are more expressive than political correctness.)  So rather than offer a tirade or lengthy exposition, all I'd like to do for now is offer a little intro and share an article that may add a new dimension in your thinking about what Africa is, and what it means, especially when you're the one living there.

I'm tired of hearing people talk about "how happy" people they meet in Africa--or Haiti, or South America, or wherever they've recently come back from spending a week or two--are, "even though they are so poor." Yes, there is material poverty of a different flavor in these places (for simplicity's sake, let's term them the "Global South," since I'm not big in a developed/developing dichotomy) when compared to the United States.  Yes, I've met plenty of happy people in Ghana, Uganda, and Haiti, and many of these people are indeed very materially poor.  And yes, it is definitely a good and humbling thing for me to be reminded on my visits there of just how many things I assume are at least normal, if not essential, for life are actually just obfuscating luxuries that distract from some of the realities of life I'd rather not face.

But it's too easy to release ourselves from responsibility, much less ask ourselves if we in fact do have a responsibility, much less give careful consideration to how we should respond to this maybe-responsibility, by telling ourselves that, well, it's a shame that my friend can't buy food this week because the government decided not to pay rural teachers on time, or that a 10-year-old can't have an asphyxiating tumor removed because government health insurance doesn't cover for surgery and there's no private health insurance in Ghana, but at least they're happy in the midst of their poverty.  To an extent, maybe there is a sort of Pauline contentment going on here: "I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty.  I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want" (Philippians 4:12).  Or maybe not.  So, even though one journalist's account of his experiences is not authoritative for a nation, I don't think we white Americans (yes, "we," including me!) get to pick which is the answer.

So, too much exposition already, but here's the article:

http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/29/world/africa/op-ed-chude-jideonwo/index.html

Thoughts?

the things u promise sometime ago

I mentioned in passing a little while back that I should address the idea of obligation at some point... so here goes:

Last spring I struggled a lot with what it means to love people--fully and really, and even when that means not giving them what they want, and even when what they want is you and time with you.  Oh God!--That's painful.  I really want to love people, but let's be honest: my love never saved anyone, ever, so as much as I yearn to be present to and care for people, I have to remember that it is Jesus' love is preeminent, and that my attempts to love can go too far.  (And sometimes, rather than failing by trying to be more than I can for someone, I run the opposite way and am downright unloving in my own selfishness.)  Love is confusing.

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.  And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.  If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person?  Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth. -- 1 John 3:16-18 

How much should we lay down our lives?  Laying ourselves down doesn't mean, I don't think, being totally available to everyone at all times; Jesus, for His part, withdrew to a quiet place many times when there were still huge crowds pressing in around Him.  Is pity really enough?  Because when Jesus was moved with pity, He was also moved, as in to heal or provide food or something.  Or is it more about giving possessions away and not being selfish?  Certainly enough of Jesus' teaching is dedicated to dealing with people who love their possessions more than Him and His people.  But what actions are loving?  What does it mean to love in truth?

There's a small, simple notebook I keep of sermon notes, prayer requests, testimonies, revelations during Bible reading, the ways in which I feel God speaking to me and directing my path in specific moments, and sometimes just desperate prayers.  I wrote in it when I started having this love conundrum.  Perhaps to illuminate how overwhelming it is when people want more of me than I can give, and how confounding it is sometimes that anyone thinks I have much good in me to offer them, I'll share my entry from 28 March 2012:

Oh God.

People are looking for Jesus and they find me.  God!  Help me point them to Jesus.  I'm falling flat on my face. 

I think a little clarification is useful here.  Firstly, I don't think I have nothing to offer relationally, or that it's anomalous that anyone would want to be my friend, or that I don't have fulfilling friendships.  But what I do know, and cling to, is that if there is anything beautiful in me, and I believe there is, it is there because the Holy Spirit made it grow there and because I'm made in God's lovely image.  Secondly, nothing about Jessica can fulfill anyone, but the closer I grow to Jesus, the more I look like Him.  I think the best explanation of why I found myself overwhelmed, feeling like people expected things from me that I could not give them, is that I must have looked enough like Jesus to have been attractive.  Thirdly, I fall flat on my face--every time!--trying to be more to people than I can be, trying to take on others' weariness when it's clear that it's in Jesus, not me, that people can find rest for their souls, and that it's his yolk, not mine, that's easy.  (Fourthly, let it also be known that, in spite of all this, I value human relationships very highly, and affirm wholeheartedly that God created humans as relational beings and that faith is to be pursued in community.)

God answers prayers, usually in unexpected ways, and this was no exception.  The day after I scrawled that desperate little prayer in my notebook, I felt God revealed to me something new; it was like He spoke it to me while I was praying.  On 29 March, I recorded:

When Jesus paid my debt, He paid it all.  I don't owe anyone anything.  At all.

There is a certain perverse understanding of love in which we're constantly trying to pay everyone back.  It's a well-known and widely accepted anthropological theory that gift-giving is in fact just a subset of exchange relationships.  A sense of indebtedness and obligation can be fostered by many things, among them another's actions (the feeling you should reciprocate someone's kind gesture), or another's need (someone needs something that you have, so you feel you should give it).

It's like the agonizing process of making out your childhood birthday invitation list when you're trying to decide if you have to invite the annoying kid in your 3rd grade class just because she invited you to her birthday party the month before.  Are you expected to?  Well, probably, at least by your classmate.  Are you obliged?  No, certainly not.  But might you feel like you are (at least if you're a particularly emotionally sensitive 8-year-old)?  I can't speak for you, but for me the answer is resoundingly "yes"...  This has been something like the background music of my life.  So the idea of not owing people things is radical to me.  But it's also amazing, and liberating--it is for freedom we've been set free, not to be burdened again by a yolk of slavery (Galatians 5:1)--even slavery to others' expectations!  Because Jesus cashed the check for my wages of death, I'm free (Romans 6:23)--and I cannot claim credit (Ephesians 2:8-10) or pay back this debt.  Therefore, I don't respond to Jesus' gift of Himself out of obligation (I actually think trying to pay Jesus back would be sinfully prideful, as if I could equate my sacrifices with His ultimate sacrifice), but rather out of--wait for it--LOVE.  So here we are again.

But this explication of love and debt has mostly been a prelude to what I want to share, that is, a four-part text message I got this afternoon from Nana Sarfo, the chief of Naama, a village nearby Asaam.  After learning that the midwife with whom I was supposed to be working was essentially on medical leave for my entire 5 weeks in Ghana, Nana Sarfo accompanied me on a series of visits to the Mampong regional hospital and the hospital in nearby Kofiase, hoping to gain permission to shadow and research in Kofiase but ultimately gaining nothing more than a lot of dust on our feet and a close-up view of bureaucracy.  Here's the transcript of the text:

Hello akua Afriyie,how are you doing? You are doing great by God's grace.please another batch of SIT [study abroad students] are coming to Ghana this september so i would like to know whether you can get in touch with them,i mean those around your area so that contact them and give them the things u promise sometime ago.my secretary's email is ********@yahoo.com or facebook.i would be grateful if u could give me your email or facebook address.thank YOU goodbye.Nana sarfo Adu-Naama Ashanti

I've been long-winded already, and I'm slowing down, but here's where I've been getting: I remember many conversations with Nana (the name means grandpa or grandma, and is the title of all Ashanti chiefs) about the past study abroad students who came to visit.  Some of them had built a solar panel station for the village to stabilize their electricity; another group had dug a borehole to provide clean drinking water; and one of his particular favorites had bought him a laptop computer, sending it to him by way of the next crop of Naama-bound SIT study abroad students.  He carefully scrolled through each of the contacts in his cell phone, pleased to tell me when each of the Americans had come, and what they studied, and whether they stayed in his compound or nearby.

He'd often remind me of the borehole and the laptop and the solar panels when I'd thank him after yet another fruitless, cramped taxi ride between Asaam and Kofiase and Mampong.  He'd pay the fare and tell me that when I got home I should tell my father about the way he'd taken care of me by accompanying me on these trips, and that when I bought him a gift I could send it with the next batch of SIT students.

And there are others: The pastor of the tiny Asaam Presbyterian Church who wants me to send money for the congregation to build a church on the plot of land they somehow scraped enough money together to buy years ago, but that has sat fallow for so long weeds seem to have squelched the decaying foundation into submission.  The physician's assistant at the Asaam Health Clinic who wants me to apply to an American college on behalf of his daughter so she can study nursing, mostly unaware of the exorbitant expenses and the complicated application and the necessity of the SAT.  The fellow teacher and friend from my Bridge Year who will expect me to contact my fellow Bridge Year students to cobble together the $450 that will pay his school fees for next year, since we've already set that precedent this year.

It makes me weary.

It makes me angry at all the other white people who have traveled to Africa, seen poverty, cuddled some dirty-but-adorable kids as their unbelievably-poor-but-still-so-you-know-happy families stand around nearby, and whipped out their figurative checkbooks to make it all better before going back home to their cable TV and all-you-can-eat buffets.

Sometimes it makes me wish I had a checkbook like that so I could whip it out too.

It makes me want to explain the cost of living (and of college!  and med school!  and shipping!) in the US, sort of to justify it to myself that I haven't bought a laptop or a borehole or a field of solar panels.

It makes me wonder what Nana Sarfo thinks I "promise sometime ago" to give him, since I never told him that I'd buy him anything.

And it makes me wonder if this obligation-free life is tenable outside an abstractly theological realm.



This is probably why I was never supposed to give my phone number out in the first place.  Forget that; I'm frustrated and uncertain and glad that I did.  Love is confusing.

It Is Well

(link)

My sin--not in part, but the whole--

Has been nailed to the cross

So I bear it no more

Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul

August Books

I have this habit of picking up books wherever they're lying around and starting to read them, sometimes in the beginning, but sometimes not, without really making a commitment to finish reading them.  I'm just not one of those people who has to finish a book after I've begun, unless maybe it's really good.  So here I present a list (in no particular order) of the books--two of which I've finished, three of which I've started this month, three of which I first began between 6 months and 2 years ago, and one of which has been a friend for quite some time--I'm hoping to read this month.  I'll try to give you an update on how everything goes... (and maybe this will help :) )

1) Pursuing God's Will Together: A Discernment Practice for Leadership Groups by Ruth Haley Barton

This book met me, challenged me, and offered practical perspectives on some deep longings and questions I've been struggling with this summer regarding how to discern God's voice, and how to follow the Holy Spirit's leading not just as an individual, but as part of a body.  On a side note, the author is my dear aunt :)

2) Renovation of the Church: What Happens When a Seeker Church Discovers Spiritual Formation by Kent Carlson and Mike Leuken

So far, so good, though I'm not done yet.  I've enjoyed seeing how God prompted the authors of this book to completely reorient the focus of their church; though at times it's lacking specifics, I've been encouraged by this testimony of God's guidance and grace.

3) A Heart for the Work: Journeys Through an African Medical School by Claire Wendland

I should have finished this long before summer began because it was assigned reading for my Medical Anthropology class in the spring, but in the heat of the semester I didn't give it the attention it deserved. Better late than never?  Inspiring so far, and a very insightful blend of anthropological analysis and a gentle exploration of simple human relationships and experience.

4) A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League by Ron Suskind

Required reading for incoming Residential College Advisers (and Assistants/Alternates, like me!).  The main character, Cedric, is one of the most raw, unapologetic participant-observers I've ever read.  Not to mention I was left with much to reflect on, many blessings to be thankful for, and an unexpected instance or two of identification with Cedric.

5) Christ & Culture by H. Richard Niebuhr

... since Ravonne lent it to me almost a year ago and I haven't finished yet!  (For shame.)  But so far, an interesting and useful explication of secular perceptions of culture.  I'm excited to finish because the title leads me to believe that it should be required reading for Anthropologically-inclined Christians.

6) Reclaiming the Body: Christians and the Faithful Use of Modern Medicine by Joel Shuman and Brian Volck, MD

Hopefully the title says most of it; I'm not too far into it yet, but my mom bought it for me (thanks!) and I am certainly not planning to leave Jesus out of my future medical pursuits--particularly because it's He who led me to pursue those pursuits in the first place--so it should be a good'n.

7) Letters to a Young Calvinist: An Invitation to the Reformed Tradition by James K. A. Smith

Another one of those that's been sitting around awhile, having been left in limbo, it was a gift from my parents when I decided to check out Pentapresbycostaterianism, a.k.a. remembering that the Holy Spirit is an actual, real, live, active Person while not forgetting that God's main mission is not to make everything cushy for me here on Earth.

8) Organic Chemistry by Thomas Sorrell

Just kidding.  Mostly.

9) The Bible by God

I'm very behind on my 3-month reading plan, and my prayer is to love the Word, not just get through because I made it a goal... Finding the path of discipline that doesn't cross into obsessive, Pharisaic rule-keeping while not just giving myself a free pass of laziness.

You are holy.

(link)

Abba, how I forget.  Forget this, any and all of it, unless I commit all of it to You.  I have been foolishly, willfully selfish recently, I just want to be back with You without me in the way.

Relational Responsibility

I was in the middle of a run this afternoon (on a treadmill--you know it's August when the Midwest is hotter than West Africa) when a number with a familiar country code flashed on my cell phone screen.  It was Victor, the Roman Father of the village of Asaam, where I spent a month working at the Asaam Health Center, just calling to say hello, so I paused my workout and we chatted for a minute and before he hung up.  A few minutes later, another call came in, also from +233, but before I could pick it up my phone stopped ringing.  I had been flashed--a term that is initially disorienting to Americans but is completely innocuous and means, at least in Ghana, that someone has called you long enough for you to see they've called but that they've hung up before  you can pick up.  They have "flashed" you.  This indicates that you should call the original caller back, since presumably you have phone credit to spare and although all incoming calls are free, you'll pay per minute for each call you make.  Without widespread voicemail and with very few things (including attending church or a funeral, or having a face-to-face conversation) that take precedence over an incoming call, once you've been flashed, you're pretty much expected to call back in a few minutes, otherwise you're likely to be flashed again.  Not having rushed upstairs to look at my notebook of Ghanaian phone numbers and find my international calling card in the middle of my workout, I heard my phone ring at 2:55, and 2:58, and 3:05.  

The first time I went to Ghana, I went with several warnings: no greeting or eating or paying or receiving with the left hand, remember to take your malaria prophylaxis, and don't give out your home phone number.  I made sure to hold whatever I was carrying with my left hand to prevent any mishaps, gave my tall bottle of pills a prominent spot on my floor so I'd be forced to see it each morning, and became quite adept at explaining that, no, I couldn't give my US number because, you see, when I get back I'll have to get a new phone, so I don't know what the number will be yet, but how about you give me your number and then I can call you and give it to you once I have my new phone.  Not so bad.  I only broke the last rule with four of the many people I met over those 9 months (two of whom were my program directors and one of whom was my host mother, for goodness' sake), and that calculated lapse resulted in a phone call every three or four weeks--comfortable, and nice for keeping up my Twi besides.

All that caution went out the window this time.  Within a month, I managed to give my American cell phone number out to at least 15 people, a clear break from my previous digital stinginess.  

By now I've been away from Ghana for almost a full week, and back home in the Midwest for five days.  And my cell phone call log looks quite a bit different than it ever has, including the week after I got back from Ghana round one.  When I reached home July 28, I put my international phone card through an intense workout, using it to place 17 calls--"Akua, woaduru ho?"  "Onyame adom, aane, afe na maduru fie nti mafr3 wo aka kyer3 wo"/"Jessica, have you arrived?" "Yes, by God's grace, I just got home so I'm calling to let you know."  And since then, of the 35 calls I have received, 26 of them have been preceded by +233 and several of the remaining calls have been from a woman I met on the flight from Accra to Casablanca and then helped to catch the Amtrak from New York to DC.  

And then there was that third call from +233 at 3:05 this afternoon.  It was Alice, I figured, a fiery and boisterous (and, according to some of the disapproving adults in the village, somewhat disrespectful in her audacity) soon-to-be-7th grader from Asaam, who during the course of a month of casual friendship had explained to me her very literal definition of teenage pregnancy (i.e., that it would be fine if I were to get pregnant, despite the fact that I'm not married, because I'm 21 and therefore no longer a teenager, while a 19-year-old who got pregnant would be contributing to a societal vice); insisted that she was not an "obibini," an African/black person, but rather "kokoo," or red, despite the fact she shared her complexion with her family, whom she dubbed abibifo), Africans/black people; convinced me that she was a Presbyterian so that she should go to church with me despite the fact that she'd always gone to the Methodist church across the road; and told me that I was unlike any of the whites who had come to stay in Asaam for brief research stints a few years ago because 1) I speak Twi, 2) I know how to do my laundry by hand, and 3) I know how to greet so I'm not self-absorbed.

Alice.  I'd talked with her the day before yesterday, and she'd promised to call me yesterday, which she had done (if you count flashing me as calling me, which I guess I will).  We said a lot of the same things over and over, that everyone in Asaam including her family is fine, that everyone in Wisconsin including my family is fine, that she's missed me, that I've missed her, and 10 minutes later hung up.  And when she called me today, I didn't quite know what to do, because I was starting to feel like maybe 15 people was a few too many.  Because those 15 people aren't just people who randomly have my American phone number; they are 15 people with whom I built relationships.  I bought bread or apples (imported from South Africa, and conveniently available from a hawker through the window of your tro-tro, provided you don't try to pay with your left hand) or chocolate (I've heard rumors that you can buy chocolate in Kofiase, the town about 15 minutes down the road, but certainly not in Asaam) or Don Simon or ripe plantains (it was early in the season, but I snagged some in Effiduase since there weren't any in Asaam, or Kofiase or Mampong for that matter) or whatever was requested by these people, these friends, on the few times I went to town.  And on more than a few occasions I was given raw peanuts, fresh corn, a pile of yams, or some cocoyams to take home for my mother by these same friends.  

See, relationships are complicated, and the funny thing is, as much as we curious oborunis (foreigners/white people) like to remember with fondness all the cute babies we got to see at the clinic where we were working or how quaint those days when we had to do our laundry by hand were, I think we like to forget relationships.  It's usually easier to remember our time as visitors in other cultures in strokes of static, remembered relationships--or at least not to let the vibrant streaks of dynamic relationships interfere too much with the tidy picture we'd like to paint about our experiences with people in AN AFRICAN VILLAGE.  About our one FRIEND WHO CALLS US FROM AFRICA so we can practice speaking THE LOCAL LANGUAGE and the rest who we've sort of forgotten.  We emphasize the parts that make us look like good, compassionate volunteers and humanitarians, and are prone to whittling the rest (including people) down into sound bytes that curious people back home can digest.  In the world of international friends, one is comfortable, and predictable: a phone call every three or four weeks; 15 doesn't let you forget, and refuses to be made into a neatly packaged sound byte.

Of course every relationship that you begin cannot be sustained, at least not at the level of friendship (which, despite the fact that many Ghanaians "afa m'adamfo"/"have taken me as a friend," is a pretty intense commitment, as a very dear friend has reminded me).  

I stumbled across this quotation from an article about a Princeton grad, Shivani Sud '12, who won a fellowship to work in India next year.  Perhaps what I've written thus far has been colluded by the emotions of coming back home when I'm not quite sure whether I'd rather still be in Asaam, so if it is, perhaps this will help to clarify my intentions for writing:

While interviewing a female patient, the woman told Sud that academics and government workers often come to her community and take a lot of notes, only to leave after the obtain the information they need for research purposes.

Boom, our indictment: Using relationships when they suit us, and throwing them away when they don't.  Taking lots of notes and leaving lots of unfulfilled relational expectations.  (Sorry for all the parenthetical clauses, but no this is a complex thought in my head and there are no footnotes for blog posts, so, to clarify... I know that expectations are not obligations.  And I don't much believe in obligations, anyway, but that's for another post.  But I think expectations, if not met, should at least be acknowledged between the parties whose relationship has created expectation, and certainly not ignored.)  Honestly, this is why it quietly pleases me to hear from Alice that I am different from the other oborunis who have come to Asaam: I hope she is right, and that what Shivani Sud's interviewee has experienced will not mark the way I move about in and engage with other cultures. 

One of my best friends, in a hurried (did you know it's more than 3x more expensive to call Tanzania than the US from Ghana??  I didn't either...) conversation a few weeks ago--ironically, about some money matters related to a mutual friend from Ghana, where we did the Bridge Year Program together a couple of years ago--, mentioned that she feels she might have made a mistake in the way she handled relationships while studying Swahili in Tanzania this summer.  She speculated that by worrying so much about failing to keep up her end of relationships with Tanzanian friends after returning home to the US, she pushed almost everyone away without giving much space for even a fledgling relationship.  And we agreed that by all means, yes, she may have mishandled the opportunity to forge relationships.  But we've both seen enough pictures of American college kids hamming it up on camera with some African friends whose names they'll soon forget in the name of having a great Facebook picture that I think we're right to be wary about how we conduct relationships--after all, we don't excuse ourselves from Facebook temptation.  Especially now that, after our respective leaves of absence, we're back online in hopes of doing better to keep in touch with friends far afield.

I don't know what I'll do when Alice calls again tomorrow, as I'm sure she will.  I expect I'll call her back, and she'll ask how the people of Wisconsin and my family are, and I'll ask how the people of Asaam and her family are, and she'll say she misses me, and I'll say I miss her, and we'll hang up.  But it will be more than that, too, at least more than those words.  Because as silly as it seems for a college kid thousands of miles away from a tiny village that most Ghanaians have never heard of to keep in touch with a middle school student who lives there, I am going to try as I wrestle out this question: What does it mean to be responsible in these relationships?

To close, let me send a shout-out to my new, true friends Evelyn and Gloria.  Now that I'm home in Wisconsin, we don't get to be home in Asaam together, cooking together, washing Evelyn's laundry together,  eating together "abom," laughing together about how often I say, "3firi s3..."/"because...".  But I've promised that when I get married someday, they'll be invited, and I'm quite looking forward to our future reunion, by God's grace, "daakye, Onyame adom."

God, make me a good steward.

Hospitality and Gratitude

It's a pretty wonderous thing to be greeted the way I've been since arriving yesterday morning in Accra.  I was greeted at the airport (after my 5:00am arrival!) by my dear friend Yaw, who directed the Bridge Year Program in Ghana--and not by my request, but at his offer after learning that, after traveling from Saturday to Monday, I intended to make the journey 8 hours to Assam, where I'll be living for the next month, directly after arriving.  I should rest first, Yaw insisted.  So at Kotoka airport, we greeted--"Wo ho y3?" "Onyame adom, na wo nso 3?" "Me nso me ho y3." "Y3da Awurade ase; ei, mafe wo-o!"-- and he took my bag and led me through the parking lot, past the taxi drivers, and stopped in front of a van--"I got you a private one!", he laughed--into which he and the driver loaded my backpack and suitcase.  During the ride from the airport to Yaw's home, we chatted, catching up on a few years' happenings, and I was back.

Arriving at his house, I have the privilege of meeting his wife and son.  Yaw handed me a phone--"an extra one"--with a sim card already installed and told me it was mine to use while I'm in Ghana, then asked me what I would eat for breakfast and directed me to a room of my own where I'd spend two nights resting and catching up from my crazy flights.  Wow, what an honor to be here!  After waking up from a nap, finding a cold water bottle for me next to my bed, and eating breakfast, I bade Yaw goodbye as he went to town to run errands, including exchanging money for me, and called my friend Clara to let her know I'd arrived and ask what she was doing--"Meny3 hw3." "Nti memmra b3hyia wo?" "Aane, bra!"--to see if I could visit.  Of course!  Talking and laughing and just being back together; wow, thank you Jesus. 

Today I spent the afternoon at my homestay family's house, which was incredible: seeing my two little host brothers, neither of whom is very little anymore; calling all the family members who were not home and hearing how they are doing; having my older host brother come home early from town to say hi; learning all the news from my host mother; and most of all being told, "Welcome home."  My host mother, who has a car, graciously picked me up from Yaw's home and dropped me back off in the evening; it's the rainy season, see, and nsuo t)) saa!

So what I'll say is that I am overwhelmed with gratitude.  Thank you, God, and thank you, Yaw, and thank you, Ma Adu Gyamfi, and obiara.  It's so humbling to be welcomed like this.  And I'm being reminded of gratitude, and what that looks like sometimes to receive hospitality: to offer to help wash the dishes, and mean it, and then to graciously sit in the living room when the offer is refused; to plan to sa my own bathing water, but instead to straighten up my room when I'm told that no, Nana Kwame will do it for me; to enjoy the pleasure and freedom of playing with Yaw's son Kofi, dangling him upside down as he laughs, while dinner is being made.  Meda mo, mo nyinaa, ase--paa-o!  Nyame nhyira mo bebr33; na mo ba US a, me nso mema mo akwaaba saa.

Tomorrow I'm off to Kumasi by bus; I'll meet up with Yaw's cousin, who will accompany me to Assam.  And there, I'll meet Aunt Gladys, the midwife with whom I'll be working and whom Yaw knows. 

I'd brought a few small gifts for Yaw and his family, and they accepted them graciously.  And Yaw told me, "I'm grateful; thank you.  But the real gift, the one I'd rather have, even if you hadn't brought a gift, is friendship."  Woaka nokor3 no; he's spoken the truth.  God, teach me gratitude as I'm learning to understand it, and even more teach me hospitality as I've been shown it.

Casablanca

Whenever I travel to a country where English is not the primary language, I feel a bit guilty, somehow, that I speak English but usually not the local language.  I’m all too aware that some of my fellow Americans feel entitled to having their native language spoken wherever they go, and at times I wonder whether I partake in that sense of entitlement, or merely hold rational expectations, when I assume that—regardless of how embarrassed or guilty I may feel—English will probably be spoken in most places where I travel.  Arriving in Casablanca this morning en route to Accra, I sensed acutely the Arabic and French words being tossed about around me, and yet when it came time to go through customs, obtain a voucher for free hotel accommodations for the day, or check in to the hotel, I found staff who correctly summed me up as American and addressed me, with a smile, in English.  No one seemed even a little repulsed by my inability to communicate in either of the most common languages of Morocco.  Which is funny, because I was—even if only a tiny bit.

I’m careful not to assume that people I encounter all speak English.  When I approached a security guard to ask directions to the Office of Accomodations, I sidled up and smiled: Office d’Herbergement?  He pointed me outside the terminal, and noticing my quizzical look, responded, “Do you have a voucher?”  No, I didn’t; he sent me back inside to claim my free hotel voucher.


When, in the crowded hotel restaurant, a man sat across from me and began speaking in French, I just smiled.  Je ne parlez Francais, I practiced in my head, trying to pull together at least a half-coherent response but with next to no knowledge of French.  I stubbornly refused to reply in English.  Anglais, I replied softly, shaking my head.  The smile on my face was friendly but, beneath it all, betrayed frustration that I had studied Spanish in high school rather than French (a transient regret, to be sure; I’ve often been very grateful for my background with Spanish, and sometimes have wished to have studied German or Russian or whatever other language my peers were speaking instead).  He quickly switched to English that, as he admitted, was “not very good,” but that surpassed my French by lightyears.


Ultimately, I think I’d prefer to meet people where they are, rather than force them to step into my court and accommodate me, and language is one of the most subtle but common and powerful ways in which to do this.  So when I learned of the fistula hospital in Addis Ababa, I went online to see if I could find a good introductory Amharic book.  Or when I considered broadening my travels in West Africa, I bought a basic French listening course.  Or when I had the somewhat random idea of going to Pakistan at some time in the future, I sent my roommate an email asking her thoughts about studying Urdu in school.  My feelings toward my language capacities are a bit extreme; I’m thankful to know English, and there a probably twinges of the linguistic version of white guilt mixed in with them.  Obviously I cannot learn all languages, and it would be silly to try, but still I’d love to keep learning—and in the meantime, to fantasize about traveling back to before the tower of Babel.


So now I am in a room at the comfortable Atlas Airport Hotel in Casablanca, wishing I had studied Arabic instead of Spanish in high school so that I could understand the report of the Egyptian Electoral Commission on one of the Arabic language channels on the TV.  I had intended to try catching a taxi to drive me around Casablanca for an hour or so, just so I could actually have been there in some way, instead of only having passed through, but I overslept the time by which I had planned to leave in order to be back to the hotel in time, and am feeling a little out of sorts: I’m a female, I’m traveling alone, I don’t know when sunset is, the shuttle to where I could catch a taxi only leaves every half an hour, I don’t really know the value of a dirham or how much to expect to pay, I’d almost certainly miss dinner, I was warned by my seatmate on the flight in that Casablanca is neither extremely unsafe nor particularly safe, etc.  Plus I don’t speak Arabic or French, and when I asked a fellow passenger if many of the cab drivers spoke English, he chuckled.


Of course all these are just excuses, rationalizations, justifications; I could go if I were determined to go, and I don’t want to appear as though I’m complaining.  I’m slightly disappointed, but not too much; I’ve made my decision not to venture out to a cab, which I like to think of as the decision to try to get safely to my actual destination of Asaam, Ghana, so that my real adventure can begin.  And, of course, it doesn’t hurt that not only is Ghana an Anglophone country, but while I’m there I’ll also have the chance to get back into the groove of speaking Twi.

P.S.  The coolest thing!  Room card-activated lights!

No card = no light, but wait...

The lights on with the card in place!

P.P.S.  I fly to Accra late tonight/tomorrow morning, then spend a day or two with a friend in Accra before making my way to Asaam.  Pray for traveling mercies!

My Heart This Morning

(link here if it's not working!)

Cooking

Not that everyone, or anyone, needs to be interested in what I ate for dinner tonight, but because a dear friend has been promised an overdue blog update, here goes...

For several years, I've wished to be among people who could list "cooking" among their hobbies, activities, interests, whatever, but I'd never had any justification to declare myself part of their club.  I didn't cook much, and when I did it would be something like pasta or pancakes--and not to disparage these fine foods, but I always assumed "cooking" involved at least a little more creativity than boiling water or mixing batter.  But I'm getting there!  Starting tonight.

1)  Scour the web to search for what one does with a large eggplant bought on impulse on an earlier shopping excursion.
It turns out, there are a lot of things to do, but a lot of them involve grilling (no grill!) or frying (really?).  And with my very limited selection of ingredients, I get pretty particular; even on Princeton's dime, I'm on a budget.  I made curried lentils with sauteed onions and spinach last week, so I have leftover curry power that I don't want to tote to Ghana, and I bought a lonely potato that looked like a sweet potato but which I deemed a normal potato after peeling back a little of its skin at the apartment.  So I settle on something like this + this: aloo (potato) baingan (eggplant), a type of curry-ish Indian dish.

2)  Go shopping!
I am almost out of food, so that is the first order of business.  Among the many reasons I love being in the city in general and Manhattan in particular: corner groceries!  I head down the street and return with the following:

Note the onion, canned tomatoes, tofu... Key for the evening's success!  The rest (eggplant, brown rice, curry powder, Lawry's seasoned salt, olive oil) I already have at the apartment.

3)  Discover that the alleged non-sweet potato is, in fact, orange.
This is why even though I'm inching toward claiming cooking as an activity, I am far from assuming the title "cook."  Thus the "aloo" part of my aloo baingan disappears, because I am planning to let that cunning sweet potato stand alone for another meal.  (I really love orange foods.)

4)  Wing it.
This means I use a little olive oil to fry/sautee/insert proper cooking term here the cubed eggplant, discover there's too much to fit into the pan, hastily transplant half of it into a nearby pot, try not to let it burn, add a little more oil to the original pan to sautee the sliced onions and figure I might as well throw in some tofu, cube the tofu, add it to the pan, madly switch spatula-ing between pan and pot so that things stick a little less than they already are sticking, dump a bunch of curry powder in, transfer the pan's contents into the pot, and add some diced canned tomatoes with garlic, turn down the flame; breathe a sigh of relief that I had already put the rice on so that everything would be ready sorta on time.  Yeah.  Me as a not-cook, cooking.  In the end, since I didn't buy a bunch of different spices and herbs as the recipes request, it tasted a bit more like briami than something related to curry, but mostly I just love eggplant, whether it's Greek or Indian.

Such a good dinner!  Such a successful experiment!  Such a surprising step toward being able to add cooking to my interests!  Maybe when I eat the leftovers (best thing when you're cooking for one!), I'll try to spice it up with a little more curry and use the yogurt I bought as a side.  

I think cooking is one of those things that's just sort of grown on me, the way doing laundry and cleaning the bathroom and washing dishes other domestic things have.   Plus, there's just something about the smells and the freedom and the focus and the creation of cooking--and, as I friend once put so well, about looking at a pile of dirty dishes and seeing them clean after a lot of scrubbing; there's some shimmer of redemption there.

One of my roommates once teased me that it is a bit strange for me to be working so hard at Princeton if I want to end up married and doing these things day in and day out before too many years have gone by, but that's not a discussion to have tonight.  Suffice it to say that I think it's a pretty amazing thing to be able to serve someone, whether a future husband or my gracious host for these weeks in New York or my family, by doing the small things that matter and make people comfortable.  And whether or not I spend any of my life as a mostly-domestic-type (seeming less likely the deeper I get into this pre-med thing, but it's God, not me, who directs my footsteps, so how would I know?), I'll still need to cook and clean--even if I'm living alone.  But here's to a life of more than domesticity--a life in service to God and His people, and a life that involves making dinner and washing clothes and dishes and sinks, and a whole lot more.

And on other fronts, perhaps to be expounded in future posts, or maybe just for me to ponder, I'll give you a few more mini-updates:
... Yesterday I had the incredible honor and privilege of watching a baby be born while shadowing on the labor and delivery floor of a local hospital!  I had to wait from 8am til 9pm, but it was well worth it :)  Congratulations on an adorable and healthy baby!
... I really, really enjoyed shadowing, and had a lot of freedom to ask questions and learn about a lot of procedures and patient care strategies; both shadowing days were a huge blessing.
... On Thursday, I leave for a day in Milwaukee, where I'll speak about the Bridge Year Program to the Princeton Club of Wisconsin--plus get to see my parents!  I return to New York for Friday night, then take off for Ghana on Saturday evening, with a layover in Casablanca for all of Sunday and then an early morning arrival in Accra on Monday morning.
... Maybe parallel to this cooking thing, I'd like to become a runner.  Again, the exact definition of a runner, like a cook, is elusive, but it doesn't fit me--yet.  It will; I'm hoping to do a half-marathon this fall, and I started training last Thursday, from the ground up.
... I've been thinking about desperation, about how desperate someone would have to be to stand up in a subway pushing a stroller and announce that his ex had just dropped off their daughter with him, and he had no money to buy her formula or diapers, and would someone please help?  Just thinking about when, if ever, I've been this desperate, and why.  And why I'm not that desperate every day when I approach God.
... I still need clarity--on a lot of things.  And discipline.  Praying for that, most definitely.

Peace all!

nyc skyline tonight

8:34pm

8:40pm

8:44pm

8:48pm