Cameroon letter #14 - gifts of receiving, gifts of leaving behind

northeastern Douala

Dear friends whose hearts have gone with me to Cameroon - either while I was there, or later, reading my posts,

Sorry, this is late... but it's also on time. And probably, early. 

I didn't have time to post my last letter from Cameroon before I flew to France, where I shipped my computer back to the States so I wouldn't have to carry its weight on the Camino de Santiago. In retrospect, that's probably best. I think it takes months to trace the outline of significant events on our lives, years maybe to know their impact. What I would have written the last week of May is a shadow of what I can write now - and I write that knowing that what I write now is probably a pencil outline of what I could say next year.

Mercy Ships was an amazing experience, the kind from which you step back thinking, "how is it possible that I get thanked for doing this? All I can think is thank you for letting me do this. How could it have been giving of me to be here? I have received so many gifts."

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So many gifts from two months on the Africa Mercy:

best pineapple of my life

 the way patients trusted me, national and ship staff were patient with me, coworkers embraced me, leaders taught me...

the way my sense of identity solidified as I experienced familiar, loved, sad, or confusing elements of my international/missionary childhood now as an adult, free and confident to respond to the challenges in ways I couldn't when I was an adolescent...

the way Baby Jean nestled into my shoulder, reminding me - "there have always been babies for you to hold and there will always be, even if the way your life unfolds costs you the children you don't get to have..."

the way my patients ran up to me in the follow up appointments, looking well, feeling better, hugging me tightly - Mercy Ships does incredible things, and so do their patients...

the way I thought with life-giving certainty, "even in this context, I still want to be a doctor," and realized I'd desperately needed to know that, as I stand on the diving board of leaving nursing and plunging into medical school, student loan debt, a new profession and peer group...

the way I can dreamcast for my future now, envision all the things I could do with my career and life and experience one day...

the astounding volunteers who come to the ship - representing so many nations, backgrounds, convictions, experiences - and with a common purpose...

the way African rain rang staccato across the port warehouse roofs to mix with the finally yes oh how I've missed you tears on my face...

the chance to go back, in a way, to the beginning of my faith - being back in a context like the one in which most of my doubts and turmoil formed first stripped my heart raw and then spotlighted the seismic gaps and then opened a door for God to be someone I've never quite trusted him to be...

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Would you go back? everyone wants to know.

some of my friends walking across the shipyard

Yes, I'd go back. I recommend working on Mercy Ships. It is an amazing organization. Simply learning how it works helped me think about the types of organizations I want to work with and what I can contribute to them in the future. I met astounding people and saw astounding things. I believe more in the healthcare career I've had and the new and continuing healthcare career I'm about to have because of what I did and what I saw done. After years working on the ICU, watching chronic patients chronically deteriorate, pouring thousands of dollars into days that often climax in unsuccessful, undignified code blues - to see patients receive exactly the one or two treatments they need and walk away healed just put life back into my soul. I have a new confidence in the healing that comes through simple equipment and dedicated hands. So much of developed world healthcare is mediated by devices and computers and electronics - there is something renewing about taking it all back to a bag of saline and diluent calculation and a nurse standing there timing drops and a doctor hand writing an order while patients watch or talk pleasantly to each other, brought together because there are no deluxe private suites and individual TVs and call bells.

But I also know that I'll never go back to what my first experience of Mercy Ships was - to the newness, undiscoveredness of the ship and the role and the ministry - or to who I was when I walked aboard, lugging a backpack and heart far too full of unnecessary things, in a stickyhumid March dusk. I'll never have that experience again.  And I am thankful for the gift of that loss - losing the chasms inside me; the unnecessary possessions and beliefs and grudges; the sharp edged fear of an often-uncertain now, unknown future, and conflicted childhood memories and associations; the wondering whether med school only fit the American me and not the Third Culture me - whether it would be enough to just be a nurse in an undeveloped country or NGO for the rest of my life.

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What do you feel were the most important things you learned?

the gate to the palace of a tribal chief in Douala

Early this year I told a friend, "I sometimes want to love God, but I really don't like him. I can't get rid of him, but I feel like he doesn't try to speak my language."

The day before I packed my computer up and mailed it from Bordeaux, France, to Hershey, PA, I attended mass in the Catedral Sant Andre. A priest with a gaze both scalpel-piercing and peaceful as the lagoons in Iceland begged the children around him, dressed in white for confirmation, not to forget that "God, your father, loves you. Il s'occupe de vous (makes caring for you his business)." The same priest, administering communion, looked me in the eyes before he dipped his thumb in oil and anointed my forehead with the blessing given to unconfirmed children. He said, "May God bless you. You are the friend of Jesus." And after Cameroon, the Camino, Iceland, I really believe those things. God doesn't always speak my language, but he knows how to. I can't get rid of him, and like the kids in the supermarket who slap their mother and then still want to hide behind her legs when strangers glance their way, I'm glad to be undeservingly sure of it. Jesus is my friend, and it means something different than it used to now.

For some of you, my precious friends reading this, I know what I'm writing sounds unrelatable or crazy. Honestly, it sounds a little crazy to me too. I want you to know I don't expect you to believe or feel the same things I do. All I want you to take from this, all I hope for you, is that your hearts would be full of the clarity and peace, confidence and kindness that overflowed from that priest in Bordeaux. That you would find the safety and trust Baby Jean and I shared when he tucked his head into my shoulder and every part of me wanted to be softer, gentler, warmer against him. Whatever that means for you, may you be blessed that way.

the view from the top deck of the Africa Mercy ship

This is the last Cameroon letter. 

Photos copyright me. :)