GIVINGTHANKS when it's tough

Yesterday was a tough day. I woke up early (not my thing) to find out that my guard had somehow locked me in the courtyard. I climbed the 9 foot wall over the steel-spiked gate to ride on the back of a motorcycle to a prayer meeting. The setting, beautiful: overlooking the river. The focus, tragic: after 90 years of ministry focus with an unreached people group, it seems our generation is still being asked to clear rocks out of the field-the seeds haven’t really been planted, much less harvested.

I got back to the house and took Hannah next door to a missionary nurse to have a look at a bump on her side that’s been giving her constant pain for over 4 days. It IS a bump and she DOES have cancer history on both sides of her family so I don’t feel like a hypochondriac. It’s about a 6 hour, $200 ride to a hospital with an MRI and it’s in a different country. The car we would need to take has been trying to overheat despite my very diligent radiator monitoring. Sidenote, the nurse didn’t have much to go on so we didn’t really get an answer. 

At 11:00 I rode my bike about 4 miles across town in my jeans to give said car a break. Plus the trip costs about $5 round trip. So I gratefully accepted the dry 90’s heat in place of the muggy 100’s that awaits us in March. I spent about an hour try to fix a printer problem (I’m far from a technician) but the blue and black ink refuse to flow consistently. 

The printer was bought on CraigsList and carried in a Hager box stuffed with boxers through 4 airports in 3 countries before it started the bumpy 6 hour ride to Kankan. So maybe it doesn’t owe me much, but it DID work perfectly the day BEFORE we announced the business was ready to go. 

Ready to re-enact a certain scene from “Office Space”, I rode home- away from the river, so uphill. I stopped and bought bread, and after dodging a (very small) rock a kid threw at the “toubabou” I got home for lunch: A tomato on bread, plus mayo. My 22nd loaf of bread this month. 

After lunch I decided not to set the Solar Shower bag in the sun- a cold shower later would feel nice, I’d be sweaty. I got back on the bike and rode around a nearby neighborhood for 40 minutes trying to find another nurse’s house. I’d only been there once before so I had to turn around a lot which drew extra stares. Like a circus monkey on a bike. Some days the stares and chants wear on me more than others. Today was one of those days. 

Finally found the right house and headed for home trying to remember how I got there. Topped off the radiator and a grimacing Hannah got in the passenger seat. After a prognosis of “maybe an inflamed nerve, try Ibuprofen”, I inched the car home wondering if anyone recognized me as the bike-monkey from earlier.

At home, I can get out of my shoes, socks, jeans and shirt in about 15 seconds and I do almost every time I close the door behind me. I decided to see if I could send and receive emails. 

Our internet wasn’t working last week, but I think I figured it out Sunday and bought 5 hours worth of time as a test. In the past 3 days, we had used 1:04.52 and it turns out that’s all my $6 was gonna be good for. So much for that money I saved riding across town.

Normally, this would be a run-of-the-mill inconvenience but through time zone and internet delay, I just found out my dad had a heart attack Sunday night. I was hoping for a little more info. The rest of my family will make it to Maine to spend Thanksgiving together, I’m just hoping for enough internet to find out what’s going on. 

Especially since we’ve been planning a family Christmas vacation (all four boys and the two “new” wives) to Cote d’Ivoire: Hannah’s never been there. And because of the civil war and second evacuation this would be the first time in 10 years my family would be all together in the place I most often call “home”. Looks like that might be on hold now too.

No internet, back on the bike to the Areeba store. I explain that my 30 hours of internet didn’t last 8 hours and my 5 hours barely made it 1. I am told that if I disconnect the internet thumb drive before clicking “Disconnect” it stays connected. “I choose to remain dubious” (-Ghost and the Darkness) but have no choice. 

Butt, meet bike seat. Oh, you’ve already met. Gotta buy phone credit now to try the new internet solution. The phone credit guys all tell me the same thing: “You gotta get rid of Areeba, they’re thieves. You need Orange.” “Good idea. Maybe I’ll try that”. I already know that Orange is not compatible with our Mac. I think we over-updated or something. They tell me the Areeba lady must be crazy because of course it doesn’t stay connected when you remove the thumb drive. Great. I buy another $5 of time and since it’s dusk, bike home. I arrive smelling like sweat, exhaust, and cooking fire smoke. I slowly realize what an awful day it’s been. 

Then...

I hear my neighbors. Pretty easy because people basically live outside here.

Most of them were up before me, even today and don’t have guards or gates. Most are sharing a home with extended family. Many of them are plugging faithfully away at a job with a barely sustainable future. And even MORE faithfully, they’re responding to the Muslim call to prayer and totally missing out on the grace and rescue Christ brought us. Tragic.

Most of my neighbors do not have cars. (Some do. Some are much wealthier than we are). Most of them might struggle to find a nurse. If they found one could they afford it? Family medical history? Good one.

The AVERAGE Guinean seems to own their own business. Not quite as lucrative as you may think, but there IS a lot of freedom in that. The constant battle to keep something going when it seems to fail inconveniently is just life. Also, CragisList- not real big here.

Eating a (meatless, cheeseless) sandwich for 3+ weeks straight? You eat what’s in season when it’s in season. When it’s out, you eat the other stuff in season. There ISN’T a stashed jar of homemade strawberry jam to satisfy a craving.

It would not be inconceivable for all of my neighbors to die never having had a hot shower. Hot bucket bath, sure, but not a single hot shower? It could happen. And I suppose I’ve been trained what to yell every time Neil Diamond sings, “Good times never seemed so good.....” so the chants are really just a product of culture.

One of the nurses we saw had told us that when they ask people if they’ve been taking medication for ailments they say “yeah, the red ones and the brown ones”- often Asian knock-offs or maybe even placebos. Sometimes the red ones are iron pills sometimes Sudafed. So I guess that 500ct bottle of Ibuprofen is a real luxury for this neighborhood.

I guess I’m even a lucky “displaced person”. I got out of that war pretty cleanly compared to most. Then I realized that even though my dad is in his fifties, he has exceeded my neighbors’ life expectancy significantly. Yikes. And I’m not even sure how many hospitals are within 6 hours of him right now.

Most of my neighbors have (multiple) cell phones and many of them are smart phones. But buying internet to check email or texts or Twitter? To blog for people thousands of miles away? People who support you and believe in you? People who will give you an American job, watch your dog while you’re gone, check your mail for you and try to send you concert clips to keep you connected? People who could bring you home with a few mouse clicks? People who miss you? People who pray for you? People who care about your neighbors enough to pay for you to come try help people show them something new? Probably not that kind of internet.

So you know what? I struggle most days over who’s doing it right. The lonely, spoiled, rich, educated, convenient, democratic Americans or the community fueled, optimistic, surviving, knowledge-thirsty, HARD-working Guineans in my neighborhood. At the river this morning I remember something that brought me my answer: 

Neither. The WHOLE world is broken. Ruined. Everyone is trying to get by because this isn’t how God wanted it. But He’s gonna fix it and it’s gonna be literally (that word is sacred to me) perfect. And I’m gonna be there to see it and I really, really want my neighbors to be there too. And that’s why this wasn’t such a bad day at all. Yeah, life is really hard here for us. We didn’t choose this as a vacation, we chose it because we feel God asked us to.

As I look around, I guess there are plenty of things I can be GIVINGTHANKS for...besides Fanta Cocktail (the truck came in).

Psalm 30:5 “Weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.”