ali's african adventures

Without further ado, I'd like to present the reason for my lack of blogging over the past couple months.



We're due August fourteenth, and we're more excited than I can possibly put into words.

Much more to come on this and many other subjects, but for now I'm heading to bed. At least now I don't have to make excuses about why I'm so tired!

We met in Esther's office early on Wednesday morning to work out the plan for the next two days. Twenty patients would be coming to the ship who needed to be evaluated for surgery. Tumors and jaws fused shut and gaping holes in the roofs of mouths and finally D Ward was going to have people in it again, if only for the day.

We sat at the table, she handed us a stack of pink sheets, and suddenly it was a year and a half ago and I was sitting in front of this computer again, sending e-mails around the world deep into the night.

These were twenty of the same pink sheets left over at the end of the outreach last time we were in Togo, twenty of the people that you prayed for so faithfully. Every single one of them had the telltale black dot in the top righthand corner. Someone is praying. You can set this one aside. You don't have to carry them in your heart any longer; someone is praying.

It was so overwhelming to watch them file into the ward, to match each one with a black-dotted pink sheet. To know that in the time we've been apart, someone has been lifting them up to the Father.

Only ten out of the twenty showed up between yesterday and today, and of those ten we couldn't schedule all of them for surgery. One little boy, Koffi (he was three when I sent out his name, just in case you recognize it) has a tumor on the back of his head that might be a break in his skull. He will need to wait for his CT scan to be reviewed by a radiologist somewhere in the first world before we can make a decision, but we're not even sure if the surgery will help much, since he's already so developmentally delayed. One woman tested positive for HIV and we had to send her home because her body would have rejected the surgery we wanted so desperately to perform.

These are hard things to hear at the very start of an outreach, hard things to say to aunties and women with hope-filled eyes. But all day long those black dots in the corner of their papers sat as a silent testimony. This is not your load to carry. It has been given to Him, and He holds it in His hands.

As we welcome new staff and train new nurses and get ready for the mass screening day on the first of February, this is the reminder I so desperately need. None of us are in this alone. None of us has to shoulder the entire burden. We rely on each other and we rely on you, scattered around the world, praying for names on little pink sheets of paper.

We're in this together.

I was giving a tour of the hospital to some new doctors yesterday and they asked me how long I'd been on board. Four years in February, I answered, and then stopped short. Somehow, it's hard to believe that I have been a bona-fide, full-time, long-term missionary for almost four years. I know it's nothing to the warriors of the faith who spend entire lifetimes in their adopted countries, but it's quite a significant chunk of my life thus far.

As the calendar marches on and we prepare for yet another Field Service, I've been thinking a lot about short-term mission teams and how much we need them. Here on Mercy Ships, the years follow a predictable cycle. (As predictable as anything in West Africa can really be.) We sail to a new port in January, untie everything that's been secured for the sail and scrub down the hospital before setting everything up so that we can function. We train the crop of new nurses, hold screening and admit the first patients for surgery. For the next ten months, we operate and care for the patients on the wards and in the outpatient clinic and eventually it's time to close up shop and move on. We double-bleach every surface, pack everything away in carts and on pallets and we tie everything back down to the bolts in the floor. Somewhere in December we sail away to a first world port so the crew can have a break and maintenance can be done on the ship. Christmas, New Years, and it's January again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It can get old.

Not the surgeries and the patients and the lives changing in front of my eyes. That will never be commonplace. But all the in-between. The cleaning and packing and unpacking and setting up. It's an endless set of jobs that we have to do every single year, and I'll be completely honest when I say that I'm not a fan.

This is where the Mercy Teams come in. They don't live this cycle year in and year out,so they don't remember how much their knees hurt from scrubbing the floors just a few months ago or how tired they were after securing yet another strap. They don't remember because they weren't here.

They're a breath of fresh air for those of us who are used to doing all this on our own. We have a team here from Texas (and one random guy from Rhode Island, but we won't hold that against him), and the amount of work they're gotten done in the last week is incredible. They emptied a room that was packed literally floor to ceiling, wall to wall, in a single day. They've set up beds and put together tents on the dock and made medication packs for pharmacy and I just saw them getting roped into helping unload a container with the sales team.

I've heard a lot from people who say that short-term trips aren't really beneficial, that the money should just be given to the organization rather than paying for plane tickets when the people on the team aren't really going to have that much of an impact in two weeks.

And you know what? It wouldn't matter if these guys and girls never even talk to a single Togolese person while they're here. They've blessed and encouraged and strengthened those of us who will be here for the long haul. We'll go into this Field Service energized by their energy, more ready than ever to pour out our lives for the people here in West Africa.

They say that silence is golden, but my mother would beg to differ. She told me a little while ago that people are going to think we're still in Ghana, and since we've actually been back in Togo since Thursday, I guess I do owe you all an update.

Thursday was what will probably my favourite sailing experience of my life, which was one hundred percent due to the fact that it lasted less than twelve hours. I've driven the road between Tema and Lome before, and it only takes a couple of hours. Sailing in a ferry is another matter, and we were told to expect around ten to twelve hours on the water. I had a perfect plan, fully approved by my boss, which involved not setting an alarm, sleeping through the first four hours (except for a few unruly minutes as we first left port) and staying in bed for most of the rest of them. I'm a big fan of a sail that ends before you really have time to realize it's begun.

This is the first time that we've sailed into a port we've been in before, and the feeling of coming home was strong among those of us who were here in 2010. As night fell and we realized that immigrations wasn't going to clear us to leave until morning, we spent the time talking about all the places we're excited to revisit. Unsurprisingly, our favourite restaurants got top billing as the various merits of Akif Burger versus Al Donald's were quietly contested.

Unfortunately, either the HoJ or I has been on call ever since we dropped anchor, so we haven't had much of a chance to head out and enjoy ourselves yet. This week the real work will start up in earnest again as we set about untying and setting up the hospital to get ready for the field service that will begin with screening on the first of February.

Six months are ahead of us, and I'm ready to get started.