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Well, our home has “extended” as they say here in Uganda.

Count the feet.

1, 2, 3, 4. Yes, we brought home the preemie twins from the orphanage down the road. The peds residents from Norfolk who were here a few weeks ago will not be surprised that these sweet babies have found their way into our home. We met them a few days after we arrived when their mom brought them in to see the PMI team pediatricians. They are both underweight. The girl (Nyakato Imelda) has some muscle weakness in her arms and legs that might be neurological. The boy (Isingoma Innocent) is tongue-tied and is having trouble gaining weight. Their mom was way too sick and weak to take care of herself, let alone two babies. At the orphanage, they were being given cow’s milk and not responding very well. One of the PMI team members donated enough money to get them both on formula, but the money is running low and the babies spend most of the day in the orphanage lying on a little bed on the ground. They are both improving, but their nurse at the orphanage is leaving tomorrow and when we went to check on them today, both had high fevers. We decided to bring the home “for now” to see if we can do some physical therapy with them, get their eating/sleeping under control, and just love on them one-on-one. They are such sweet and happy babies. We are working on names for them that suit them. Andrew (Drew) is seeming very fitting for the little boy. It means warrior, which he certain is and will have to be. Lucy is our first pick for the little girl. It means light…and as soon as we got her feeling good, she totally lit up the house with her awesome, wrinkled nose smile. But, we are open to suggestions. So…we are settling in to life with twins…and trying to get them on the same schedule. After we got them home, fed them, and gave them baths, they have both been sweetly smiling and cooing and just generally making our lives so much more exciting.

Many of you who have known me since Honduras know that this is not the first time I have come home unexpectedly with a baby. Having Cindy in Honduras, watching her health and spirit improve, and then letting her go was one of the hardest experiences of my life. However, I have always said that no amount of pain would keep me from loving another child who needed care, so I’m diving in to loving these babies as much as they need me and then letting Jesus step in and take care of me when it’s time to let them go.

Thank you for your continued prayers and support of me in Uganda. I have several more blog posts in the making and will be updating you soon on daily life.

love you all so much!!

Mandie Joy

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Joy will be my African name. I have grown tired of trying to help people pronounce Mandie…Meddy…Maddy…Marie…Manny. They get confused and it makes me sad to not have people remember my name. These past few weeks, I have introduced myself to people as Joy and received the most beautiful responses. Many people smile and repeat it back to me as if to ask me, “Joy? Like the word joy?” and then they say “What a beautiful name.” The most recent response I got was literally,

“Joy. That is a crushingly beautiful name. The joy of the Lord is your strength.”

yes.

Before I came to Africa, I went to my grandparents’ house to say goodbye. In the driveway before I left, my grandpa let loose one of his 3 minute sermons that never fail to stick with me for years to come. He told me that my middle name, Joy, was to always remind me that I get my joy from God. The Bible says that “the joy of the Lord is your strength”. He reminded me that this means “doing what brings God joy will be where I get my strength”. What freedom! That means that I am free to move into things that bring God joy…and he will give me the strength to do them well.

August 15, 2010: Today, I worked with Brittaine, a PA from the states who is here for a week with the PMI team. Together we saw dozens of patients, working well together and effectively listening to and treating their main complaints. We prayed with anyone who wanted prayer. All in all, we did a good job. In the late afternoon, we took a break and sat down on the grass outside where an 8 year old boy was lying limp and still in the grass. His legs were the same size as my wrists and he was burning up with a fever. He had been seen by another doctor and given medicine, but the antibiotics were making his ever-empty stomach ache and he was too dehydrated to even want to eat. We talked as we fed him sips of water and peanut butter crackers. “You belong here, you know”, Brittaine said as if in response to the questions in my head. We have both been asking ourselves where we belong, I in response to the displaced feeling of living in Africa and Brittaine in just a general wondering of what is next for her. Watching her with patients today, I wondered if Jesus had made a mistake in sending me here…maybe he should have sent Britt. Her love for them is apparent in every look, word, and touch. There was no smell that made her turn away from a patient, no miscommunication that made her sigh in frustration, and rarely a question that she couldn’t answer. She belongs here, if you ask me. I on the other hand felt useless, impatient, and incompetent. I listened to her diagnoses and wondered why I hadn’t thought of that. I watched her eyes as she listened to the patients and wondered why I didn’t care that much. The funny thing is, at dinner we both turned to each other and confessed that we had both felt inadequate, frustrated, and impatient. We both thought the other had it all together and that each of us was the only one who felt less than Christian that day. It was a good reminder to me that when we give ourselves practically to Jesus, he can show up through us even when our insides are messy. We both saw Jesus in each other and I can only hope that our patients saw the same thing.

August 17, 2010:  I’ve gotten to work with Brit for the last few days and have continued to learn from her way with patients. I’ve also noticed something spectacular happening in me. Some days, I wake up in the morning wishing I wasn’t here. I want to sleep in. I want to take a normal shower without having to squat on the floor in order to get enough water pressure. I want to walk into a functional kitchen that gives hot water from the faucet and is not home to a family of albino lizards. I want to walk to work without being stared at by EVERYone. I want to live in a country that has fast food restaurants on every corner where you can be sure to find a bathroom free of flies and that provides free toilet paper. I want to live in a place where girls aren’t forbidden to whistle and where the Ramadan call to prayer doesn’t wake me up twice between 5:30 and 6:00am.

However, in spite of all of the things that I wish were different, I am realizing that they are not as important when I’m sitting in front of a beautiful 9 year old girl who is dying from Malaria…. she becomes the most important thing in the world.

Yesterday, I started the day with a bad attitude. I did not want to smile at the people in line for the clinic. I did not want to take their blood pressures and I certainly did not want to love them. All I could think about was that they smelled bad and they were so so dirty. But, I think sometimes we have to act out what we want to feel and then the feelings follow, so I acted it out all morning and then I met Whinnie. Heather carried her in from the line. She was too far back in the line to be seen, but someone found out that she had a high fever and Heather went to get her. She was about 9, but way too weak to sit up by herself. She laid across Heather’s lap while I took her vitals and started an IV. She had diarrhea on Heather’s lap and neither of them skipped a beat. She just kept being pitiful and Heather just kept loving and holding her.

That made me feel like a pretty sad excuse for a Christian. Then I remembered that every Christian is a pretty sad excuse for one, which is the whole point.

We sat with Whinnie while her bag of fluids dripped in. We fed her tiny bites of banana until she started perking up enough to swallow her first doses of parasite, malaria, and antibiotic meds. Her mom was pretty clueless and very emotionless with her and I think she was just soaking up our hugs and kindness. After about 4 hours of checking on her, hugging her, feeding her, and keeping fluids going, I realized that Whinnie had become more important that all of my selfish frustrations. This has become a pattern here…that if I let myself become invested in the person right in front of me, my problems become so small I almost forget them. I forgot to mention that when we first started triaging her, my main concern was for her foot. At 1 month old, she had fallen into a fire and the subsequent scarring had pulled all of her toes up into her leg, causing her to have little more than a stump there. After we rehydrated her, she hopped off of the bench and hobbled on hands and knees over to her parents. She was grateful to be alive…with only one foot. That’s something to remember.

{Heather and Whinnie}

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It takes a long time to fall asleep in Africa. At least, that is my conclusion after my first two nights here. It’s very dark, very quiet and very, very noisy. All of the noises that I am used to are missing. There is no dryer tumbling, no air conditioning humming, and no fan blowing. Instead, there are insects and birds chirping that I’ve never heard before, calls to prayer from a nearby mosque, people talking to each other in a language I don’t understand, a wolf howling in the distance, and in spite of all of these noises, it’s just eerily quiet and dark. On the bright side, the darkness is a comforting reprieve from people’s curious stares and friendly visits to our house. We never know when we will hear the “woohoo” of a neighbor at the door. The all want to come in, extend their “you are most wel-o-come here” and “how is America?”, and ask how we are doing. This does not present a problem until the 5^th or 6^th person comes by and you realize that you have not been able to accomplish anything all morning.

We arrived in Masindi late last night and were shown around our new home by the housekeeper, Audrey, who is an interesting character. I think we are both overwhelmed by how big it is. There are three large bedrooms, two bathrooms, a sitting room, and a kitchen. When we first walked in, we were amazed at how clean the whole house was and for the first few hours we just enjoyed the ease of moving in, settling our things into closets, and arranging the few items we brought to make the house feel like home. As it began to get dark, however, my attitude changed. I noticed the spider webs in almost every corner, the lizard poop on the walls, the mud in the bathrooms, and the bugs that crawled out of every cabinet in the kitchen. TIA. As we continued exploring, we also realized that some of the locks don’t work, some of the windows won’t close entirely, some of the lights don’t work, and the electrical outlets in my room are dead. So, the end of the story last night was that in a house with three bedrooms, we both decided to lock ourselves into the one bedroom that had functioning locks and electricity. As we fell asleep to the deafening silence broken only by the howling wolf, I was VERY glad to not be in a room alone. This also happens to be the one room that has direct access to a bathroom, which comes in handy in the middle of the night when you don’t want to have to find the key to unlock the bathroom in the hallway. Every door in this house has a lock and key, so we joked last night that we hope we never have to leave in a hurry, because it would take us forever!

Hungry. That was what I felt all day yesterday and all day today. It is a strange feeling to be almost completely helpless to provide myself with food and water. There comes a point where I get tired of asking for help and just prefer to suffer. I don’t know if there is a psychological explanation for this phenomenon, but I know I have experienced it in other cultures as well. I haven’t eaten a real meal since I left home, and I keep going back in my head to that fondue that my mom made on my last night in the states. Meat. Before we left Kampala yesterday, Michael and Amanda took us to a grocery store to get a few things for lunch on the road. Fortunately, we still had one can of tuna and some bread left over last night and made tuna sandwiches, accompanied by bottles of wine that we hoarded from Delta. We kicked back and watched The Proposal (in the pitch dark, mind you, because the power was out)…and for a moment, I forgot I was in Africa. Then the aforementioned wolf started howling and I remembered, TIA.

Today was market day and we poked our heads in and out of dark and musty stalls, stacked from floor to ceiling with strange looking appliances, bottles, and vegetables. We were happy to find many things that we thought would not be available here…as well as buy a few much needed cooking and cleaning supplies for our house. Shopping in Africa (and almost any 3^rd world country) is a serious case of sensory overload. Most of the shops sell the exact same items as the one next door, so they all want your business. There are chickens, children, and streams of muddy water running through the aisles between the shops and occasionally a swinging machete aimed at a whole cow hanging from the roof will come uncomfortably close to hitting you. Bartering is also a tiring process, especially when Ugandan English can be very hard to understand. All in all, markets are packed with things and people and animals and yet, in the middle of so much noise and commotion, it is possible to feel suffocatingly alone.

I really don’t know how people managed travel and living abroad before there were computer and cell phones. Being here will be a good lesson for me in learning to appreciate solitude. I am definitely NOT there yet, but I think it is something worth pursuing and since I am here in Uganda and frequently find myself without connection or with a sever shortage of human beings nearby with whom I can have deep and meaningful conversation, I have decided to try and learn to value quiet and solitude as an opportunity to listen to myself and to listen to God. I hate it so far. The feeling of being in a city where only 5 or 6 people know me and where I don’t know how to get around on my own is very unnerving. Turning off my phone and computer at night and sitting in the thick darkness, I imagine Africa on the map and imagine how far it is from America…Australia…Mexico…Honduras…the places where I know my way around, know people love me, and know what to expect. And then, I remember that Jesus asked me to be here. This is a perfect opportunity for him to show himself strong in my weaknesses.

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As I’ve told many people, the two weeks of goodbyes leading up to my leaving for Africa were so precious and encouraging, but at the same time made it all the more painful to leave. I know that I am blessed with many, many friends all over the world who love me and who are like family to me, but to have an overflowing opportunity to spend time with so many of you over the last few weeks has just made that fact all the more obvious to me.

I literally have been just barely keeping my head above water responding to emails and phone calls and I LOVE IT! If there is anything good to be overwhelmed by, it’s people loving on you! We had a beautiful goodbye party at my parents’ house last Friday that was possibly one of the most special nights of my entire life. I was absolutely floored by the amount of people who came, even though I couldn’t talk to everyone for as long as I would have liked to. I would have been happy to have a few hours with each person who came and those of you who wrote me notes gave me that kind of time, in a way. I have already pulled them out to read in moments when I feel like, “Oh my, I do NOT want to live here for a whole year!” Your words of encouragement are holding me up in ways you can’t even imagine. Life is so hard here, even after only a few days. There are many promises from the Bible that I have hung onto during this time of preparation for Africa and in a way, the prayers and advice and encouragement I have received from you all makes those promises hold true in such a tangible way.

Here are a few of your notes. I scanned them into the computer to bring with me because they were too precious to risk losing the originals.These are among my most prized possessions in Africa…I’ll have you know.

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