Getting up to speed

I'm back. 

Short version: We're moving to Malawi to volunteer at a mission hospital. Matthew will work on electrical and general hospital maintenence. I will work on quality improvement measures with local midwives and possibly a cervical cancer prevention project. 

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Longer version:

I'm back. Things took me longer than I was expecting, but that's life for you. I was 29 when I left Mozambique, with the intent to become a nurse-midwife, and now I am 45 and I am a nurse-midwife. This brings me so much pleasure and pride. It feels like I've lived a lifetime in those intervening 16 years, but really it was just... life. How to bring you up to speed?

I went home from Mozambique in spring 2009 and started prerequisites for nursing school. I lived in my friend's sister's spare room and was very, very poor for a long while. 

In May 2010 I got tired of Biology 201 and found a summer job as a cook and canoe guide at a Mennonite wilderness camp in the Boundary Waters. One day I stuck my head out the kitchen door and there was Matthew, coming up the stairs to introduce himself. We fell in love picking berries in the early misty morning (no really). We got married in October 2011. 

We became deeply involved with a small church called Third Way and have remained there ever since; they are like family to us. I graduated from nursing school in 2013. We bought a house. 

We had a baby in June 2015. We named her Thea, after a Dutch doctor I had known of who worked in Zambia. It means "goddess" but we use the meaning of Dorothea, which is "gift of God", which she is. Now she is 10.

In March 2017 we had another baby, Lev, named after an author we admire (Tolstoy). It means "lion" in Russian and "heart" in Hebrew: our lionheart. He is 8.

Shortly after, we moved to Bolivia where we worked for 1 1/2 years. The job there was not a good fit for us in many ways, and it was a very hard time for me personally. (Could this happen again? YUP. "Life: not for the faint of heart.") I ended up being really sick for about 6 months (an underrecognized way to lose 25 lbs), and the whole experience was confusing; but it did spur us both in new directions. When we moved back home I started midwifery school and Matthew left science education to start apprenticing as an electrician.  

Life moves slow when you can't skip steps. I first needed experience as an L&D nurse, and to work my way through midwifery school while still being a mom to little kids, and to do a clinical placement, and to pass a big exam, and get a first job and a couple of years of experience as a midwife at a high-risk hospital. At every step we thought we might have to move away to make it happen, and we steeled ourselves for that, but we never had to. Things progressed, ploddingly. School took me 4 years instead of 2. Apprenticing took Matthew 5 years instead of 4. 

I had to trust again and again, and not skip steps, which is really hard for me. Here is the poem my dear friend Karna sent me, at just the right time:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.

We should like to skip the intermediate stages.

We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress

that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—

and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;

your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,

let them shape themselves, without undue haste.

Don’t try to force them on,

as though you could be today what time

(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)

will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit

gradually forming within you will be.

Give Our Lord the benefit of believing

that his hand is leading you,

and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself

in suspense and incomplete.

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

That poem was a gift, and very much my experience. I've returned to it more times than I can count. 

So, I'm still surprised to find us now here. We've been praying and discerning for a long time. We've been carried along by the "slow work of God", by parents who provided tons of free childcare, by friends who've known us in our weaknesses but rooted for us anyway, by many doors that closed and others that opened - and even by our kids who have evolved into fun, intrepid travelers.

After more twists and turns than I can recount, the final door opened and we are leaving in late January to work at MMH in rural southern Malawi. They are glad to have Matthew's electrical and maintenance skills, because it is not common to find trade folks wanting to serve in this way, and they recently installed a big solar array. It also has a busy maternal & child health program (fun video with good soundtrack for reading the rest of this post), and a midwifery training school nearby. I hope to work with both. There are two Dutch families working as doctors there, and they pay a teacher to homeschool their five kids ranging from age 3-8. Our kids will join them, but Matthew and I will likely split the task of adding on some schooling, too. All the other staff are Malawian.

Where is it?

Here.

Do they pay you a salary to do this? 

No, it's volunteer. We're using our savings and hopefully income from renting our house out, but anything more that people give will help us to stay longer and do more/better in our respective jobs.

What kinds of expenses will you have? 

For airfare, for health and evacuation insurance, for food, for homeschooling, for occasional breaks away from the daily grind of a African mission hospital. For midwifery trainings I am planning to lead (example), and for essential midwifery gear I need to bring/donate. Similarly for Matthew. Possibly for a vehicle, though we're going to see if it's feasible to go without one. 

Africa is more expensive than you would think, but that's the reality of the work. Recent cuts to global funding (USAID) have only increased the need in places like this.

How long are you going to be gone?

We're going to take it a year at a time.

What language is spoken?

Anyone with schooling speaks English (for example, all our coworkers at the hospital). Some very rural patients may only speak Chichewa. We want to be able to greet folks politely, so we're going to study it for a few weeks when we first arrive. One cool thing is that a third of the patients are Mozambican, because the hospital is so close to the border, so here's hoping I can pull some Portuguese back out of the musty recesses of my brain!

Why are you doing this?

Because we're still young enough to want to do it, and our kids are still willing, and our parents are still healthy, and - at the heart of it - because it's a way to live out our Christian faith. God has given me the desire for this kind of service from my earliest years, a desire that never faded. Matthew also caught the vision, and now the kids have too. 

There are so many ways to be light in this world, but this is something we feel able to do, especially now that we've each gained some useful practical skills. To be clear: there is still a BIG need in most parts of Africa for "building local capacity", especially in healthcare. At Mulanje specifically, they want and have invited us to come to join in with their efforts to care for people in that part of Malawi.

Malawi has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in southern Africa, even worse than Mozambique (nearly 3x worse! - which surprised me, given what I know of life there). It also has one of the highest rates of cervical cancer in the world. I've been trying to prepare myself for this all with recent trainings about: managing maternal/infant emergencies in low-resource settings, vaginal breech birth, and OB/gyn ultrasound. 

Working there as a midwife, alongside local midwives, I can say, is literally a dream come true for me. (For proof, see this post from 2009.)

Our friend Craig is doing similar work at a rural hospital in Burundi, as Matthew will be doing in Malawi. Craig and his wife Vanessa recently wrote: 

Last Tuesday Vanessa listened to wrenching stories of how at a hospital about an hour away staff were watching patients die in their waiting rooms and sick beds because of a days-long power outage. Without power they couldn’t do X-rays, run lab tests, sterilize equipment, provide oxygen or anesthesia,… Craig’s greatest fear. And too heartbreaking to imagine.

Then on Thursday, Craig had visitors from the Ministry of Health come to view our oxygen concentrators (the machines that supplies oxygen to patients). They were thrilled to find them in good working order, and surprised to hear that Craig and the maintenance team were doing the necessary regular maintenance. During their conversation Craig learned just how few other hospitals in the country have an operational oxygen concentrator either because they have fallen into disrepair or there is no electricity nor fuel for the generator to run them.

Though things at our hospital are far from perfect, it struck us this past week how grateful we are for the small island of hope that our hospital can be. We wish we could fix all the deep-seated problems facing this country and offer high-level medical care to every Burundian and every refugee taking shelter in Burundi. But our job is to be here, in this tiny town of Kibuye, doing what we can to serve those that find their way to this hospital. And today we are taking heart that there is power humming, fuel tanks are full, our equipment is working, there is clean water flowing, and that the Lord is using this place to heal, both in body and spirit. Rejoice with us in these small, huge victories! 

(Shared with permission) 

In short, a big part of why we are going is because we don't believe that where you live, the consistency of your electrical grid, or the size of your bank account, should determine whether your life expectancy is 62 (Malawi), 64 (Burundi), or 84 (Japan); or whether you get good healthcare; or any healthcare. Jesus made it clear: "The first shall be last, and the last shall be first" - also, "to whom much is given, much is required". This sounds ominous, but I believe it's a gift. We get the gift of giving from our abundance, not hoarding our good fortune. 

If you think this type of Christian interdependence is worth supporting, you can give toward it, supporting Matthew, me, and the kids directly: here. 

We are so grateful to be sent and carried yet further by all of you, and genuinely hope that - at least a little bit, as much as we can - that we will reflect "the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living" (Ps 27).

 

Example of a typical maternity ward in the region.

There's a lot to do to prepare, but my overwhelming emotion is simply this: my cup runneth over. I think we're ready, at last. 

So to all my old blog readers, if you're there: hey-o! I'm back. 

We're back. 

Cooling off in Mozambique, 2023. (Thea being silly.) 

This overwrought, totally joyful Shakira song is our family theme song. Bring it on!