community

So it turns out that I'm a good sleeper. Once I enter dreamland, it's no easy task to call me back. I'm the one who can sleep through the alarms for four separate roommates before hitting snooze on my own without ever realizing it. This morning, however, this was thankfully not the case. At the first tone of the overhead paging system, I was wide awake and sitting bolt upright in my bed. Emergency Medical Team report to B Ward immediately. The message is repeated in case you missed it, but by that time I was already halfway into my scrubs and searching desperately for my pants.

I've been on the EMT for a couple of months now. We muster for fire drills and respond to any emergencies on board the ship. It's a good way to keep my ICU skills sharp, and it can apparently function as a fairly foolproof alarm clock.

The situation on the ward was quickly resolved and we went our separate ways. It was only a little after six in the morning, (a morning on which I didn't have to report for work until two in the afternoon) but sleep was far from me. I grabbed a book and curled back up in my bed, making the providential decision to keep my pants on. This came in handy a couple hours later when the speakers came to life again. Emergency Medical Team report to B Ward immediately. This time the patient was a lot worse and was quickly rushed back to the operating room. He's in ICU now, resting quietly, and he should be fine in time. He's not the real reason I'm writing about all this.

As I started packing my bags to come to the ship, everyone asked me what I was expecting for the upcoming year. I told them all that I had no expectations. That I was a clean slate, ready for anything. Truth be told, I had some suspicions. I thought my living conditions would be worse. I thought the hospital would be more primitive. I thought I would feel like I was living in Liberia. I was wrong on so many counts.

Looking back through my blog, I found an entry that makes me laugh now. It was a list of things I was going to miss, and it makes some pretty big assumptions about this place.

. Long, hot showers when I just stand and let the water beat down on my shoulders until I'm done thinking.
. Stretching myself diagonally across my bed, limbs splayed out to cover the entire space.
. My mother's cooking (especially the rolls she just made, the ones with butter melted over their crisp tops).
. Calling a code and knowing that, within seconds, I will be surrounded by nurses, attendings, respiratory therapists and pharmacists.
. A closet so full of clothes that some days I find it hard to decide just how to cover my body.

I've gotten so used to ship showers that leaving the water running for a full two minutes feels luxuriously long. There's a double bed in the cabin they let us use for day sleeping when we work nights. I frequently sleep diagonally across it. Instead of mum's rolls I get fresh croissants and delicious cinnamon buns. As friends leave the ship, they give me their old clothes as mementos; my tiny closet is full to bursting.

But the thing I was most wrong about was the code situation. I'm ashamed to think about how scared I was before I came. I had horrible visions of myself, alone and coding some poor Liberian child who wouldn't have a chance in the world with just little old me there. Instead, I'm living on a ship where, almost as soon as the alarm rings, the wards are filled with people. I think they arrive faster than in my old hospital, if that's possible. The captain comes for an update and he writes it on the whiteboard at the front desk so everyone passing by (who have also been wakened by the announcement) will know what's going on.

My favourite part of all? I run to emergencies knowing full well that all over the ship, people are lying in their beds or stopping what they're doing to lift us up in prayer. At the beginning of the outreach, when I was still a peon, I was mustered on the dock during a fire drill when we heard the team called to the OR. A minute or so later, the captain's voice was heard over the speakers, informing us that there was a child in surgery whose heart had stopped. He asked us to pray. Muster stations splintered into tiny knots as, all over the dock, we stormed heaven. My friend, Mark, was one of the surgeons in the OR that day. He told me later that they heard the announcement too. And seconds later, as soon as we had all started to pray, the little boy's heart started to beat again.

There's such peace in knowing that, no matter what happens, I'm among people who are looking to God for guidance and strength and who are supporting me in prayer.

I just wish they'd pray for me to find my pants a little quicker next time.

It seems that people think my love language is food.

I'm working nights again (just two more until I get to see daylight), and I guess all my friends decided I might need a little help in the eating department.

It started while we were getting report. Beth, PICU nurse extraordinare and former Team Greg-er, quietly informed me that there was a plate of the famous Sajj Chicken Bread (so good it needs to be in capital letters) waiting for me in the ICU. My mouth, I must admit, starting watering immediately.

My next visitor was Maria, my lovely Kiwi roommate. She slipped in behind me as I sat at the desk, finally looking at my charts after almost three hours of non-stop kissing and cuddling and laughing with my small friends. Sporting our co-owned dalmation-spotted vest (a piece of clothing which only narrowly escaped a sad demise in the boutique), she came bearing halloween candy corn and christmas gingerbread cookies.

Once Maria had left and I was finally getting some charting done, my boss/friend/altogether awesome Red snuck through the door with a bag of golden oreos. We may or may not be convinced that golden oreos are made with illegal drugs (coughcrackcoccainecough), and we may or may not be addicted to them. But this is Mercy Ships, so I'm sure everything is actually on the up and up.

Todd, the nurse I'm working with tonight, looked at my growing pile of provisions, shook his head and disappeared to go do some work of his own. At which point the door opened one last time and Murray, receptionist-turned-writer, entered bearing a plate of ribs from Man Night. I thanked him profusely, closed the door behind him and burst into laughter as Todd came around the curtain and joined in the hilarity.

We will not go hungry tonight.

This is what a birthday looks like in Liberia.

I turned twenty-five two days ago. When I woke up for community meeting, I was met by two bleary-eyed roommates, a pile of balloons, a plate of made-from-scratch raspberry muffins (which tasted amazing despite looking slightly gory) and a six-pack of diet coke. Over the course of the day I got a chance to visit with Marion (which I'll write about later), ate a fresh birthday coconut and delicious African food, played touch rugby, went for a swim in the pool and just hung out with friends who have become family. I will submit that birthdays don't get much better than that.


Or so I thought. Because the mail came today, and in it were two boxes for me. One contained all the music ever and a drawing from my little cousin Cammy. The other was possibly the best package ever, for reasons which follow in an itemized list. (Click the photo to see what I'm talking about. I numbered it all to make sure there's no confusion.)

1. Comfy t-shirts are my uniform around here. Adding one more to the pile is always a good thing.
2. The kids on the ward go absolutely nuts for colouring books and crayons. Come to think of it, half of the sixty-year olds do too.
3. Perfect size candies for bribing small children with.
4. Speaking of going nuts, the patients play Uno like it's their job, but there's only one set of cards at the moment, which means that squabbles sometimes erupt. Not any more!
5. Pajamas. I need not say more. (Especially since I wore jeans the other day and no less than eleven people asked me where I was going so dressed up. Apparently I've stopped trying.)
6. A happy birthday napkin is cheery yet also so practical! I'm sure I'll need to mop something up around here soon, given the rate at which I spill things.
7. This is my favourite kind of gum! They used to have it at the ship shop and ran out a couple months ago. My stash has just been effectively replenished.
8. We also just ran out of post-it notes for phone messages in our cabin. This bad boy even has a magnet on the back, just like everything else on this ship. Perfect.
9. Anyone who knows me knows that I'm absolutely obsessed with coloured markers. I label things. I write signs that get posted all over the ward. I use them in any way possible. Now I have an entirely fresh pack, just when the ones I brought with me from home have started to go dry.
10. And who doesn't love gummies? My roommates and boyfriend, apparently, aren't numbered among the haters, since I'm sitting here looking at suspiciously half-empty bags at the moment.
(Please note, there was also a pair of flip-flops in the box, but they didn't make it into the photo because they were already on my feet.)

Colleen and Pam - a thousand thanks. What an absolutely amazing surprise.

And to everyone else at home and elsewhere who took the time to send a card or write an email or message me on Facebook - being 4,500 miles from home has never felt so good. Thank you.

The past twenty-four hours have been so hard. I've lived the last ten minutes of Greg's life over and over in my head, staring at the ceiling all night long as I fought back the panic that threatened to overwhelm me when I turned out my light. But there's something utterly strange about this community I live in. I seem to be among people who have forgotten that our world is broken beyond recognition. Or, at the very least, if they do realize, they've chosen to live as though it were whole.

You see, grace has been poured into my spirit from every source imaginable. In the moments after Greg flew last night, there were a hundred things a nurse needed to do; I've done them all so many times before. But I was given the gift of being able to stay with Marion as long as she needed me while so many loving hands swaddled Greg and wrote out the death certificate and cleaned up his stuff and got Marion's bags packed for her. Hugs and sad looks and pats on the back and genuine, sincere questions about the state of my heart have bombarded me from every side. We have cried and laughed and prayed together, and I can't help getting excited for heaven. If this is 'a foretaste of glory divine,' Christ can't come back fast enough.


In the midst of it all, there's another, wild note in my soul; spilling out past the raw hurt is a kind of pure, fierce joy. I realized at some point as I sat there and sobbed for Marion's broken heart and my own that the pain I'm feeling is a privilege. I grew up in a country where I was safe, secure, loved. I've never known war (not really), and I've never watched my life fall to pieces in front of me. I have no idea what it truly means to hurt. Marion does. Every member of her family does. Grampa said it last night, his words halting and small. We have all lost someone. Every time, there is someone who can die.

I count it a joy that my heart feels like it's been shattered. It means that it's still soft, and it means that my life has been blessed. I must live the rest of my days in the light of that blessing.

I sometimes catch myself bitterly regretting the fact that I grew up in North America; the sad reality of American life is that we have completely forgotten what community looks like.

When I first started work here, I was amazed by the little 'families' that seemed to grow on the wards. As the beds filled up, patients started to band together, joined by the bonds of age or dialect or physical deformity. It was a joy to watch former strangers talking and laughing like old friends, but I figured the party atmosphere would taper off as the patient dynamic changed. I was wrong.

Actually, it's becoming fairly standard procedure for me during a shift to stop what I'm doing, look around me, shake my head and smile. I can't help it. The wards are full of gangs. We've had the B Ward Boys' Club, made up of three long-term guys, all in for complicated wounds. By the end of their stays, it was a common sight to find Henry holding the gauze for Andrew while he had his dressing changed. We had The Eight-Year Olds, a little mob I'm tempted to put in all capitals, if only as a lame attempt to show just how explosive that group really was. They rolled together, encouraging each other during wound care and stealing crayons in less philanthropic moods. Recently, it's been The Girls. Young mothers and a token single woman, they plait one another's hair, pass children back and forth and have real, honest-to-goodness sleepovers, mattresses and beds pushed close together, stifling giggles long into the night.

I've never gone through a shift without watching one of the patients look out for another one in some way. They translate for each other. They comfort each other's crying children. They pray for each other. They share food and stories and lives, and I've never once heard a complaint. Because this is what community means. It means living in a hospital bed in a windowless ward along with fifteen-odd strangers and not batting an eyelash when one of them throws up on your foot. It means sitting in a circle and cutting string to make friendship bracelets all afternoon long, laughing and joking with the white girl who thinks she can speak Liberian English. It means taking a child away from a tired mother and feeding him from your own plate.

I forget sometimes that our patients didn't know each other before they came to the ship. They ease so gracefully into this strange community here that I assume they have spent their whole lives living just houses away in the same villages. I sit and marvel at their effortless hospitality and the candor with which they share their burdens, and I'm humbled. I would do well to learn from their love.

Living in constant community with some four hundred people has its advantages. I end up doing things like throwing nearly-silent parties at midnight, whispering the words to the birthday song so as not to wake up the girls one paper-thin wall away in the next cabin. Or sitting together with friends at breakfast talking about anything from lab reports to harebrained schemes for cross-country travel. Or feeling unwell, heading to bed and having someone stop me in the hall and pray for me right then and there.

But community living can get tiring at times. It's nice to know that walking out of my cabin and into the midships lounge means that I'm going to find someone to hang out with at pretty much any hour of the day. But the reverse is also true; walking out of my cabin and into the midships lounge means that I'm not going to be alone. We live on this ship, five hundred feet of four, six, ten-berth cabins, and we are never alone. The only escape is to get off the ship, which plunges me into the whirling cacophony of Monrovia. It can hardly be considered alone time when every eye is fixed on me as I walk down the street with my equally-white companions to calls of White girl! You fine! Marry me! You guys are princesses! Give me your number! (Exclamation points being absolutely essential to this particular style of communication.) And we can never be alone; it's just not safe. So Mercy Shippers go out in droves. Landrovers packed to bursting with eager, pale people who just want to get away from the wireless internet and air conditioning, if only for a few hours.

This is all starting to get to me, especially since The Exodus has begun. No, we're not clawing our way out of Egypt, but it seems like everyone on the ship is packing up and boarding planes for home. Between the end of April and the middle of June, almost everyone who I was friends with when I first got here will have gone back to their lives in the real world (if such a thing even exists anymore). Goodbyes consist of long group hugs on the dock and huge packs of people going out to eat food; there is no such thing as solitude.

To that end, Liz and I went on a date yesterday. Just the two of us. In a taxi. Nary a Landrover in sight. We stopped at the end of Broad Street and made our way up the hill through the cool green shade of mango trees to the Ducor Hotel. We climbed the seven or so flights of stairs and then the ladder all the way to the roof. We sat on the edge, feet dangling over stories and stories of air, shared our hearts and felt like we owned the world. We played with monkeys and ate dinner on a balcony overlooking the ocean. It was refreshing in so many ways. Liz has become a close friend in less time than I had thought possible. Perhaps it's a function of living in such close quarters and seeing each other all the time, or maybe it's just true that we actually are sisters separated at birth, but it's going to be incredibly difficult to say goodbye to her on Sunday. She's the kind of person who will drop everything for a two-man dance party at any given moment, whether we're on the ward at two in the morning or on the remnants of a dance floor on top of a ruined hotel with no music anywhere in earshot. She's the one I can go to on a bad day and know that I'll get sympathy and a cup of tea. And she's become the one to encourage me in my walk, reminding me often that God has big plans for the both of us, but that His timing isn't necessarily what we might think and that it's okay for next year to be a wide-open question mark.

Meg (my PICU buddy from Philly) says that Mercy Ships should maybe advertise about The Third H. We talk all the time, eyes shining, about hope and healing; it's what we do here. But no one mentions the heartache. Whether it's a patient's story of years of sadness and pain or the constant leaving of new friends, this place is hard on the heart. Some say the only way to combat it is to find your group of long-term friends and huddle over by the windows in the dining room, staunchly refusing to meet new people because it just hurts. too. much. to say goodbye again when they inevitably leave. There's much to be said for that method. For crying out loud, at home I'm still friends with the same people I've known since grade one. Creature of habit extraordinaire.

But if I do that, if I refuse to check the new arrivals list and I sit behind the glass at lunch, I'll miss out on all-night talks on the beach and extra plates of popcorn and so much dancing. And that's just not an option. Because I like popcorn.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. (C. S. Lewis)

I was looking forward to posting the rest of Shidou's story for you. I couldn't wait to tell you all about how I went with him and they took off his bandages and we saw each other for the first time.

Instead, like so much else here, the story of Shidou is touched with sadness. I overslept yesterday and when I made it down to the ward, it was to find out that he had already been discharged. I ran out to the eye tent, hoping against hope that he would still be on the dock. Of course, this is Liberia, and nothing moves quickly; he was still very much there. Instead of the blue and white bug-like eye shields he had been sporting the night before, he now wore the coolest pair of silver sunglasses I've seen for a while. His mom recognized me right away as I slipped into the seat next to him. The exchange went something like this:

Shidou! How you feeling?
Fine. (As behind the glasses his eyes rolled, unfocused.)
You see me?
(His mom) Shidou, you see your best friend?

Nothing. Just a little body curled up against my side, fingers laced tight through mine.


Because sometimes the optic nerve doesn't form when the cataracts start so early. Sometimes it takes a while for the child to get accustomed to seeing when he's spent so long in darkness. And sometimes the surgery simply doesn't work.

So I don't know what the outcome will be for Shidou. Just like I don't know what the outcome will be for Liberia.

But I do know that this country has a heart deeper than I anticipated. Like the woman who paid for an almost hour-long taxi ride for a friend and I yesterday, refusing our offer of money as she thanked us for helping her rebuild her country.

Or Victoria, the mother of one of our smallest patients. 'Kumassah's Mom' (as she is more commonly known) rarely stops smiling, and she never hesitates to lend a hand around the ward. She translates for me, laughing with her head thrown back at my floundering attempts at Kpelle, as I try to explain things to my 84-year old friend. (No such thing as HIPAA in Liberia.) We call on her all the time, and she has not once uttered a grudging word.



Liberia stands on shoulders like these.

And she smiles through the faces of little boys like Abraham.

Late afternoon is my favourite time of day here. The world opens up when the heat from the day starts to dissipate. Tonight I packed my dinner and headed outside to eat on the dock. I sat there, my feet hanging off the end, idly watching a crane unload a container ship across the harbour. A slight movement at the top of its mast caught my eye, and I saw the red, white and blue of the flag flying there. For possibly the first time in my life, I felt the needle of homesickness (not so much sharp as it was a dull ache, low in my throat).

There is no America here on the Africa Mercy. There is no Canada and no Germany and no Nigeria. We are an amalgam of humanity wrenched from homes and families around the world by God's unnerving call. We must find a way to live and work together in the face of thirty cultures and almost as many languages. We misunderstand each other on a daily basis, and the real work has yet to begin. Gulfs to span as wide as the ocean in front of me.

When I looked back at the flag, I realized that there was only one star against the blue. Liberia, not America. My old home and this new one, blurred together by sudden tears.


So I did what any self-respecting ex-pat would have done. I finished watching the sunset and then went for a run. My sister would be proud.