You ever want to write something profound but the words just don’t amount to the feeling you have in your chest? That is where I am. I find myself sipping coffee in Paris, waiting for my next flight, speechless. Over the last five weeks I have worked on D ward for my third service on board the Africa Mercy, my 5thmission trip to the continent of Africa in the last 6 years. That literally blows my mind. I can close my eyes and see myself sitting at my desk in the UNA Office of Student Engagement pushing through the struggle of nursing school and 3 jobs and campus life and imagining what the finish line would look like. Graduation. Dream job. Travel nursing. Maybe spouse…then once that all took approximately 5 years I hoped to get to Africa to “save babies.” That was my 5-year plan. People hear me talk about my 5-year plan and I am sure they think I am nuts, planning out my life just so. The thing is what they miss is the trauma that led to the wakeup call that I was settling for a life far less than the one I was called to live, that led to the focus on the God that had a beautiful plan for me, that led to the 5-year plan, that has me here.
Show me a person doing amazing things and I’ll show you a God that made lemonade out of rotten tomatoes.
Nope I didn’t screw that up. That’s what kind of impossible, illogical work God does. I serve a God who has made the most unimaginably beautiful life out of the most ridiculous moments of pain and darkness. Impossible to possible. Pain to passion. Who in the world am I, the most unlikely choice (in my opinion), to be chosen to be the hands and feet of Jesus himself to the forgotten poor of Africa? Growing up I always wanted to be like everyone else. To have the “normal” family, to have the name brand clothes, to go to the cool restaurants, and be in the cool crowds. Even after becoming a Christian I wished I had grown up in Sunday school and Vacation Bible School like everyone else. Lock ins and father Abraham, am I right?! Lol! The thing is, I was a misfit. I didn’t have the likely background story. And as an adult, I thank God for that multiple times a day.
Why fit in when you were born to stand out?
And that’s the thing isn’t it? I look back and smirk at all the times I was lost and felt like I was drowning. Asking why me? Why this? Impatient. Angry. Restless….
And I see it now.. All part of the plan. A misfit so that I could understand the misfits. Different so that I could understand the different. A story to be shared so that people will not see me but will undeniably see God through me.
My pastor recently put it in a way that I find appropriate as I sit in the airport. “When we fly, we can only see out the window at where we are but our captain can see where we’re going.”
Guinea was not unlike the previous African countries I’ve served in. Bustling streets of people working hard to survive. I love Africa. I think my favorite thing is that despite how hard life is at every corner imaginable, you help your fellow human. I often ride through the streets at dusk on my way to dinner and am just struck by the beauty of it. Children bathing in basins while their mothers cook over an open flame, groups of men stopping by a local stand for a drink after work, people still carrying items for sell atop their heads throughout the streets…living life together. Perfect strangers watching a tv show on benches in the open air, a lady hands her baby to the lady next to her waiting for a taxi so she can buy a papaya off the head of the lady walking by…Such trust and community and love.
Of course, it isn’t that way for everyone. Guinea was another country where I got to love and care for the most beautiful babies…I’m not kidding when I say in 5 African countries, I have yet to see an ugly baby. Babies born with congenital defects that deemed them unworthy to sit at the table of the human race. Mothers who had been told to bury their infants alive and when they didn’t, were mocked and scorned as cursed and damned by their communities and families. Adults who were once those children, grown up still carrying their deformity as a scarlet letter for all to see they are less than human somehow. Cleft lips, cleft faces, cleft palates, encephaloceles, Noma scars, and large benign tumors is the D ward clientele. While there are 5 wards and a whole list of amazing surgeries done on board the Africa mercy, D ward is the island of misfits I call home. The stories are always similar…
For the babies it’s something like this: A baby was born different, a mother was told to kill it but she didn’t, she is blamed and cursed and often left by her husband and shunned from her village…but then Mercy Ships comes and repairs the abnormality and the mother visibly is transformed just as much as the baby we did surgery on. A once furrowed brow disappears and a smile takes over her face. Almost always she states that she had convinced herself that she was cursed just as everyone told her, but now she knows that God sent Mercy Ships specifically to help her baby.
For the Noma patients: Oh man the Noma patients get me…A recap on Noma: it is a gangrenous bacterium that is only found in the poorest corners of the world. This bacteria is an opportunistic bacteria that attacks children predominantly between the ages of 2-6 and has a 90% mortality rate. What that means is these Noma patients that we see are the 10% that survived with the odds stacked against them. Their mark of survival is on their face. Noma rots the tissues of the face down to the bone and leaves these patients often with gaping holes where their nose or cheek or eye once was. Just prepare yourself for disturbing images and then google Noma. Its horrific. These patients have stories of getting a cut on their way home from school or something similarly minor that changed their life forever. Once they get Noma they are now deformed and no longer allowed to go to school, no longer able to be a part of their village or families or society, no longer considered human. They are the strongest people I have ever met in my life. There is no textbook that covers how to repair Noma cases because it doesn’t exist in the developed world. Doctor Gary (he’s a freaking wizard) has just made up his own techniques over the course of his 30+ years on board in order to help these patients. He takes muscle from the skull and stretches it down to the nose where he keeps it attached for a few weeks to grow new skin and then releases it and builds them a new nose, takes a muscle from their shoulder and does the same to build a new cheek, the skull or the hip or the rib to make bone grafts….The list goes on..These walk up the gangway with fabric strategically wrapped around their faces to cover their scars of survival and leave unrecognizable. Their external scars still healing but their internal scars untraceable.
Tumor patients: The thing is, at home we find a lump or bump the size of a pea and we immediately run to the doctor to have whatever it may be removed. Being told it is benign is cause for celebration because in our minds, benign means survival and malignant means cancer. Well really the only difference medically is the borders that define that growth. A malignancy means the cells spread and benign means they are condensed to one spot. The difference in Africa means you’ll either die quickly or slowly. The tumors we see in D ward are all benign as we don’t operate on malignant tumors (because we will not help them by doing so). These benign tumors are anywhere from the size of an orange to the size of a watermelon…on the face…no joke. These patients will die a slow death by either starvation or suffocation if left without surgery. Their stories are that of knowing that they will die without help but having no help in sight. They watch their tumors grow bigger and bigger and their difficulties with it get worse and worse until they are sure they won’t make it another day and then Mercy Ships arrives. Again, there is no textbook procedure for the removal of tumors this large but the surgeons on board have perfected life change in a way that can only be divinely explained.
These stories are endless. Stories of shame, hopelessness, fear, pain….but then God…but then Mercy Ships.
A surgeon on board gave an in-service that struck me right in the heart strings. Dr. Chong started out with a photo of these white blood cells called fibroblasts. Fibroblasts are just your everyday connective tissue cell that by all intents and purposes are unremarkable. The don’t look that impressive, they don’t do that impressive of a job within the body..They mainly just help other cells do their jobs and wait around until there is something to heal. What is cool about these cells though, is once they are called into action they are adaptable, resilient, and powerful. They actually thrive in the face of adversity!
What is the Africa Mercy but a boat full of fibroblasts? A group of people who have sacrificed all the easy and comfortable ways of their lives back home to answer the call to heal. As Dr. Gary states, “We facilitate the impossible in a tangible way. Planting seeds of hope. That maybe they would go back to their village and the things that seemed impossible, like clean running water and good schools..that they might start to have the courage to do the impossible.”
Facilitate the impossible in a tangible way…
Yep. I wanna do that every single day. Live my life in such a way that people will rethink what they once thought was inaccessible, impossible, unachievable. Then to say, how is it possible? And look up to the God of possibility.
I think we are quick to be like Abraham or Moses and disqualify ourselves from life’s big challenges. You know the ones, those that God speaks to you loud and clear…”You WILL be the father of nations..” “You WILL lead your people out of Egypt…” “You WILL ……(fill in the blank with your personal mountain)…..We say “OOOOHHHH heck no, that’s way too big for me, chose someone else God, I am not your guy”…….But just like the patient’s we treat on the Africa Mercy, they can’t receive their blessing until they first embark on the journey to the ship.
…..You have to depart before you can arrive…
You can’t stay where you are and receive the blessings of where you’re supposed to be.
My biggest advice, find a squad of human fibroblasts to be on your team. One of the biggest things God showed me while I was gone was just how many amazing people I have in my life. Iron sharpens iron after all, so look for people who push you. Who tell you what you need to hear even when you don’t want to hear it. Who listen and impart wisdom on you. Who grow you and make you think. Those who pay attention to the whole of you not just the part that is different. That look you in the eyes and get you. Who see the whole of you and not just one talent or mistake or story or quality that sets you apart. Those people who know the part that makes you different but doesn’t make that your whole identity. People who may even love your bilateral cleft smile (only D ward nurses will know) that deems you weird.
I guess what I am saying is people are just people. The only difference between you and me and the patients that I serve on board the Africa Mercy is really just the geographical location we were born in. We all are called differently and I am called to missions. But no matter where you receive the call in your life, answer it. Nothing can prepare you for the hard parts of life except for knowing you are in the will of God. Live life seeking God’s will and you will always find strength to deal with the parts of life that are simply inevitable. Count your blessings, including your human fibroblasts. Be a human fibroblast yourself. Don’t disqualify yourself from the amazing. Help your fellow human. Don’t keep up with the Joneses on Facebook or otherwise. Live the life God has planned for you. It is ALL possible, trust me. One step at a time…I’ve seen the impossible happen time and time again on board a floating hospital full of human fibroblasts.
Disclaimer: Actually none of the photos above are from Guinea but are from Madagascar and Cameroon because I mainly have photos of craniofacial patients from Guinea..Ill post them soon but here are the after photos for the first and third patients above (the middle one is an after as the before pictures of Noma patients are far too graphic).
