Muddy

It happened so suddenly. One minute we drove in the middle of the road through puddles left from yesterday’s rain. The next thing we knew, we slid sideways and stuck a tire’s depth in the muddy ravine beside the road. It’s hard not to feel panicked as my passenger’s side of the car leans ever closer to the muck. Whether Greg tries to drive forwards or backwards, we just stick deeper in our rut. Mud spews everywhere, and Greg worries that the growing crowd of onlookers will not only get splattered, but might be at risk if the car suddenly lurches out. But it’s going nowhere. And suddenly the locals multiply – dozens of people arguing over who will help us and how much we will pay them. We’re three hours from home, and our friends, the local pastors who could control this type of crowd, are not picking up their phones. Their house is less than a mile away, so I ease open my door and stretch across the side of the ravine toward dry ground. I drag one of my visiting residents with me. He already ran this morning, but he jogs along the village road with me anyway, and I’m grateful for the backup. He holds my phone as I try to keep my skirt over my knees while I run. Surely the villagers have never seen anything like this before – a white woman running down a road which rarely sees cars. I’m wearing a patterned skirt that the pastor’s wife made for me almost three years ago when we attended the opening of their Nazarene church in this village. The church is now hundreds strong and more churches are springing up in this area traditionally known for thievery and witchcraft. The pastors, who once had to convince the community to let them build a church by promising to build a well, are now community leaders. We arrive breathless at their house, and they come out to help us immediately. They divide the crowd and select the few to help us and negotiate a reward we can pay. We would have been in trouble without them and their influence. We thank them, admire them, and hope that people will trust us like that someday. I look at our car, pulled from the mud but covered in muck and splatters. An hour ago, Greg’s student in that village spent over an hour washing it until it sparkled. He was with us pulling it out. He saw it completely messed. I am embarrassed for him to see his work of love devastated, and I grieve for it. My pastor friend smiles at me. “That’s Ministry” he says. We pray that we can be as faithful, patient, and gracious as him in the days and years to come as we strive to be partners in this sometimes messy ministry.

This month, please join us in prayer for:

- The people of Malawi who are suffering from a particularly difficult hunger season, as it is the furthest time from harvest

- Safe travels as we plan to go to Greece for a Medical Education conference, or peace if plans must be cancelled due to Corona Virus

Thank you for your prayers and support, Greg and Christina

Safety Net

It started as a simple patient education project. Our Dutch nursing student wanted to educate pediatric patients and their patients about sleeping under bed nets, and then one thing led to another. First of all, we realized that there were no bed nets available for patients in the pediatric ward. How could we educate about using bed nets if we weren’t modeling that while the patients were in the hospital? That led to interesting discussions with nursing, finance, pharmacy, and even the cleaners. The student updated me as she learned each piece of the systems-level problem: there used to be bed nets, but funding stopped, so we stopped getting new ones. The old ones were not washed regularly, and so many became infested with bed bugs that nobody wanted to use them. So they were all taken down, and we found ourselves moving ever closer to malaria season without bed nets for our hospitalized patients, much less a planned intervention for the community. It was incredible to watch this student tirelessly working to get to the bottom of the issue. She raised more than enough money to buy nets for our hospital, and she had enough left over to distribute to some nearby health centers. The best part was that multiple levels of the hospital leadership and clinical staff were prepared to make this a sustainable change. It was an exciting day when the bed nets came. But even more exciting for me was watching this student discover the complexities of Global Health and systems-level solutions. Sometimes the problems that seem simple have deeply rooted causes, and just pouring resources into a system doesn’t always mean that the system is ready to receive the change. By the time she finished her time at Nkhoma, she knew she had made a difference for us and our patients. And I had a suspicion that her time here would change the way that she approached patient education projects, hospital needs, and global health in the future.

Hunger Season

The people of Malawi are hungry. Women come to our front and back door throughout the day. The young man who works for us comes and lets us know. “There is a woman looking for work.” We want to help, so we give them a coat to wash and pay them half a days’ wage. We first negotiate with our employee which of three little jobs we should give them, and how much money would help them without being too much. We save a job or two for him and his wife to do as a bonus. We have to explain to our employee that we know that even the coat washing s a job he can do, and we know that we are paying more than an just hourly wage for the job, so we don’t want him to be offended by what we give to them. He nods understanding. “People are hungry,” he says. There is green maize in the fields now, and people can start roasting it for food. But they are waiting for mature crops so that they can pound it into the doughy paste that forms the staple of their diet and really fills their stomaches. Bags of maize flour are the most expensive they have ever been in this area. The foreigners in the community are visited regularly. A woman comes to my office at work and kneels down with her baby asking for help with fees. My friends give 50 cents per person on Thursdays. One time, eighty people showed up. When the money ran out before the people had each received something, their eyes went wide that white people could run out of money too. Another friend, a Malawian nurse, kept extra bags of maize flour throughout the year so that she could give to those who ask. But she didn’t know that her storehouse roof had a leak. 150 kg of flour molded. Hundreds of extra empty tummies this hunger season.

We’re Christians, almost all of us. But we struggle knowing how to live out the teachings of Jesus and His followers. To give to everyone who asks. To share food so that nobody is hungry. To ensure that everyone works so that everyone can eat. There are not enough jobs. There is not enough food. And the foreigners with the connections to foreign donors and consistent salaries cannot understand the languages and cultural nuances enough to understand the stories that people are trying to tell us. We can give indiscriminately, but then as people flood to our doors, it we know that we are caught between being selfish and irresponsibly perpetuating cycles of poverty and dependence.

So we talk to the head of the Presbyterian church in our area. We talk to our closest national friends. We survey the foreigners. We meet with the head hospital chaplain. We discuss the details of storehouses and finance office. We learn that the chaplains have dozens of people coming asking for food daily, but they have the capacity to hear their stories and pray with the people. They can tell if dozens of people are coming from the same family, or if a single mother is all alone. They can add love and relationship into an encounter that risks being purely transactional. They can add soul where we just exchange guilt and pride. So we discuss plans and details. We can provide regular donations to the chaplains during the hunger season. The finance office can keep it in a separate account which the chaplains can use for areas of most need. We can direct people in need to those who can understand their needs and give from storehouses in culturally-responsible ways. We are no longer white saviors, flooded by petitions of people placing their hope in us. We become partners with existing systems, with our national counterparts being able to do more for establishing community hope and trust than we ever could.

Hunger season is still in full swing. The needs are overwhelming. But we’ve learned how to respond as a community of believers, each with their own role, instead of hiding in guilt or assuming savior complexes ourselves. The challenges are immense, but God is good.