A Day in My Life: January 2022

A day in my life January 2022

I stayed up late on conference calls last night, hearing from experts in California about ways to improve maternal health outcomes. I’ve been having trouble getting to sleep at a normal time when I don’t stop working until 9 or 10 pm, but the good part is that I can sleep in and often don’t have to start working until 10 am. And today’s a good day for that, since we’ve been out of power for 36 hours, then out of water for 24 hours, and now out of power again for 12 hours. We praise God that the tropical storm Ana bypassed the country, but not before it wrecked havoc on the country’s main hydroelectric dam. But we collected rainwater last night and there’s still gas in our backup stove, so I figure today is going to be a good day.

I start off the morning boiling filtered water for tea. I brew my first cup and put the rest in a thermos, no need to re-boil as I re-steep throughout the day. Next I assess the fridge and pull out some of the few remaining items which haven’t spoiled yet: feta cheese in brine, tomatoes, and spinach. I scramble it up with some fresh onions for a healthy breakfast and set aside the rest of the fresh veggies for soup and snacking, they won’t last beyond today. Greg heads out to buy some drinking water and I prep some stove-heated rainwater for a shower. I don’t want to admit how long I’ve waited to wash my hair, hoping for a day when the water and power were both on at the same time. But it turns out that a bucket shower is incredibly satisfying. My hair is longer than it’s ever been, so I have to measure out a few cups of water into a bowl and then dip in my hair, lather with shampoo, then dip again to rinse. In the end I had a very satisfying shower with 3 liters of water. The warm water that I didn’t use will make dishes easier.

Now, it’s time to sit down and work. I spend the first half-hour checking my emails: two email accounts which patients use to contact me, one for ministry, one for friends and family, and one for the work I’m doing in California. I must have logged out of four accounts last night because I have to find passwords and gather access codes through text messages, but overall not too bad. I plan to spend 20 minutes planning priorities for the day, but it takes an hour due to communication about a training, consideration about a volunteer editorial position on an open-source preventive medicine journal, encouraging residents to submit some abstracts to a conference, and communication about deliverables and funding remaining for our Preventive Medicine training program in California.

Suddenly the power is on. Quick break to brew more tea (herbal this time, shouldn’t overdose on caffeine) and to start some soup for lunch. While cooking I decide priorities for today. I shoot off an email to our clinic pediatrician about the protocol for neonatal sepsis, print some forms for clinic, then read some papers for professional development. Took some time for lunch (Greg made grilled cheese to go with our soup). I head off for my afternoon in the clinic, but there aren’t too many patients at first, so I take some time to read through Lifestyle Medicine information on disease reversal and to talk to Todd about plans for the new ER and trainings at ABC. Later, when the patients come, I really feel like a Family Medicine doctor. One family comes in together and I treat the URI in the son, the constipation for the father, and discuss the pregnancy complication for the mother. I also feel like a Lifestyle Medicine doctor as I discuss smoking cessation, cutting back on alcohol, and eating more fiber with the father. The Preventive Medicine side of me comes out as I discuss antibiotic resistance and weight loss with another patient. I only see a handful of patients this afternoon, which is pretty usual for me when I take an hour with each patient, and when I come home I have to send a few emails about test results, clinic protocols, and an electronic follow up form for a patient a few days ago.

The rest of the evening passes uneventfully. We watch a Korean TV show on Netflix and then I read some Chinese comics online. In the future I want to be a bit better about walking and stretching more in the evenings and reading more books that lead to self-improvement, but tonight is a veg night. The power comes off and on, just enough to keep our battery going and our lights on. I go to bed later than I plan, but since I also worked a few more hours than planned, I should be able to sleep in tomorrow.

Learning the Dance

Ten months ago, we adopted a little village dog and took over the contract for a night guard. Together, those two had been protecting for our rental house long before we saw it and decided to move in. I wrote about his experience from the perspective of us moving into their territory and the life adjustments they must have as if Dancing With Elephants. At that time, Greg and I worked hard to impress upon our big German Shepherds not to hurt the little dog, or the guard for that matter. It is interesting to watch the dogs now. The little mutt has learned the rules of being an indoor dog and loves staying inside on rainy days. He has taken to nipping at the shoulder of Hatchi, the smaller of our other two, as if he is trying to work up his way in the pecking order. He seems to know he has no chance of being top dog, Bear is by far the biggest and doesn’t have the patience to put up with pestering, but Hatchi just ignores the little one as he nips and jumps and bumps in an attempt to assert his place in the pack. Since the newcomer pays no attention to the balls that Hatchi loves, nothing upsets our stoic dog’s calm. It is fun to see the little one learn to act more like a dog, playing with toys, no longer flinching to touch, and to starting to show affection. It makes me wonder what he will be like in months and years to come.

I wish it were the same with the guard. Although we never wanted a night guard, things started out pretty well with Mr. Lighton. When he wasn’t opening the gate for us, he helped with watering and sweeping. He had good skills in woodwork and bricklaying, so he helped with a number of additional projects as we fixed up the house and got settled. But little by little, we noticed things missing from around the house – a drill, a hammer, some charcoal. It was usually days when others were around, like the plumber and the exterminator, so we couldn’t attribute the missing items to a certain person. But then things started missing from inside the house – our iron, our flashlight, a $100 bill. That’s when things were incredibly difficult for us, we’d never been in a situation where things systematically went missing from rooms nobody but us should have been in. We called in our top cultural brokers. Our former employee-turned-businessman and friend Ishmael stayed with us for hours that first night, the night we knew for sure that the bill was missing from one day to the next. He helped us figure out our options, how to address the issue without accusing anyone, leaving room for grace and understanding. The day the flashlight went missing, we asked both our gardener and our guard to take some days off work until it was found.

That’s when we called in our pastor friends. They came and stayed with us for a night, serving as translators and authority figures as the gardener and the guard shared their differing stories and seeking to find a solution. In the end, after a lot of assistance from others and prayer, we dismissed the guard. We gave him an extra month’s pay as severance, and explained to him that he was fired according to the consequences for stealing in his contract. Our gardener continued to work for us, understanding that he would be held responsible for anything missing in the future.

That was two months ago. Today, the guard’s wife knocked on our gate. My Chichewa isn’t great, and she speaks no English, but she is patient and I have a simple translation app on my phone which helps get most points across. She is hungry, she says. I know she has two small children and that this job was the only source of income for her family. I explain that we terminated her husband’s contract because he was stealing from us and not protecting our property. She says that she never knew that and never saw the items I listed one by one. She tells me that her husband has returned to his own village, a minibus ride of 4 hours, and that she has no money to travel there to discuss with him. I know that she goes to church, one of the biggest in the country. I also know that she has considerable connections with the Gule Wamkulu, an animistic secret society in Malawi. So I ask if her church can help her with food this hunger season. I ask if her family or her village or her community can help. I expected that she would say that nobody else could help her, and while I find that unlikely, I stand in no position to assess the truth of that myself. I tell her that I her what she is saying, I understand that she is trying to care for the children and I understand that she must be in a difficult position. We print out the guard’s contract and I read through it with her, highlighting the clauses about loss of property and severance. We calculate out the months that he worked and the severance that he received. I ask if she has questions, and we slowly work through the answers together. Of course this is not the answer that she wants, hearing that her husband no longer works for us and that he has received his entire salary and severance already. I apologize that the contract is in English and encourage her to find a friend to read through it with her to see if she has any other questions. Then I take a break. We ask her to wait while Greg and I go for a walk together to talk for a bout ten minutes. We discuss the situation; we discuss justice; we discuss mercy; we discuss potential miscommunications or dependency outcomes from any next step that we take. We decide to give this woman one final gift. Greg and I both had the same number in our minds. It’s not a large amount, but enough to feed her family for a week and pay for transport to go find her husband.

I write up the situation on a final piece of paper, and hand it to her in an envelope with the money. This is a gift, I tell her, and this is the last gift we will give. The job is finished, the salary is finished, the severance is finished, and there won’t be more gifts. She confirms that there is no more job or severance, and says she understands. She isn’t happy, but she understands. We pray together then, me in English and her quietly in Chichewa. Surely neither of us feel great about the interaction, but we part peacefully. She will have a harder time these next few days and weeks as she tries to care for her family. Greg and I don’t take that lightly, we will carry it on our shoulders and in our hearts. We may feel like monsters, crushing this young family underfoot.

We might have preferred to be unconditional benefactors, savior/enablers for at least one local family. Greg and I had to take a stand in this case, and it has been and continues to feel awful. We are thankful for our close friends who helped us through this time, teaching us how to manage contracts and how to extend grace and how to draw lines, and translating or brokering for us throughout. And we continue to pray God can redeem this, that He can help the couple rely on Him instead of trusting in foreigners and stealing as a way of life. We pray that they will turn to their church during this time and connect with a community of true believers and find that it is God who provides for them. We pray that they will turn away from Gule Wamkulu, the witchcraft that the group represents, and other things that might have enticed them on a path toward destruction. If nothing else, this situation reminds us to pray continually. We welcome others to pray with us, to pray for that family, to pray for us.

These are the monstrous parts of being a missionary, ugly and unsettling, fumbling in a dance from a culture not our own. Though we may miss our steps, we pray God can help us minimize harm and bring redemption.

Our Year in Pictures

Over the last year, Christina and I have done several paint-by-numbers. It is an activity we can do together, it forces us to sit down, and take some time on something. But the process, or at least our reaction to it, can be rather comical. “Why would this color be here? Isn’t an elephant supposed to be gray? Oh! I just painted 14 instead of 16! I don’t think this is gonna look right.” Most of the time, however, we just needed the surrounding colors to be filled in, or we needed to take a step back and took a look at the whole picture once it was complete. The nice thing about the paint by numbers is that besides just being a very poor painter, like myself, who has trouble staying within the lines provided, there is very little you can mess up. The directions are set before you, the map is given, and even a small picture of the end goal is provided. How I wish that were the case with so many other things in life. Sure, it may make some things boring, after all, paint-by-numbers is relaxing rather than exciting. But at least you could know and see how you were on the path you wanted to be on.

Our journey in Malawi, as with I suppose anything that is not only on a piece of canvas, has not been so clearly defined. We do have directions, written directions even: Scripture, love God, and love our neighbor as ourselves. We also have years of training behind us, giving us practical ways to show that love. But even with training, the lines on the canvas are not so clear to our eyes. The details, the everyday decisions we are called to make are not in print before us to simply follow. “Is this supposed to be green, or red?” Is this a leaf or a flower? Should we be spending our time training local pastors in community health, or should we be branching out into the refugee camp?” I am a horrible painter, and when it comes to making decisions about how best to love my neighbor, I try to do my best, but again, I am sure I make mistakes. How grateful I am, then, that God simply calls us to love Him and to love each other. He has invited us to take part in his Kingdom, to take part in the painting of it in this world.

Our actions matter, the love we are able to show is real, as are the results of our less-than-inspiring acts.

And so, we are called to take very seriously the decisions we make, and the ways in which we treat others. But we are also blessed to know that God’s grace and mercy is big enough to cover our mistakes.

As Christina and I continue in Malawi, I am not always certain exactly what the painting of our time here will end up looking like. The future brush strokes we make, and how much they will affect our community here is yet to be seen. We cannot see the final image with our eyes, but by faith we can know and see that it is one of a Kingdom where we love our neighbor.

That all being said, we are so blessed with the things that have taken place so far. Over the last year, most of the things we have been able to witness have simply been very small steps in one direction or another, yet how lucky are we to be able to see the Kingdom of God breaking into the world, correcting our misdeeds, our shortcomings, our sins, one small brush stroke, one small change at a time.