Joy (..and the story of Whinnie)

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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