Hickory Dickory Dock
The Zambian mouse ran up the clock.
The clock struck one
The mouse started running down... but then he stopped to talk
to his neighbor for a while and three hours later he reached the bottom without
feeling at all late…
Hickory Dickory Dock.
There, I fixed it.
One element of Zambian life that I’ve imperfectly chosen to
embrace is that of time. Zam-time is enough to make even the super-relaxed
white girl crazy. I mean really. I knew white people were uptight about time
but I didn’t realize how clock-centered I am until Zambia beat every last
bit of sensible time-orientation out of me. For years I showed up to church at
9:00 because every week, they announced that church would start at 9:00, and
every week, I sat there by myself for over an hour until the church secretary (who
the week before had said the words, “come at 9:00”) rolled in at 10:30 and asked
me why I was there so early. I learned that my pace of “casual stroll” was
basically a dead sprint as the people walking with me started wheezing while we
walked together. And after a few dozen scheduling debacles, I accepted that
when someone said they’d stop by for a minute, that the rest of my afternoon
was shot as we would indeed be enjoying that minute for a few hours.
White privilege means that my clock-orientaiton is honored in most parts of the world but in rural Zambia I simply unclench my fists and
accept a more fluid concept, which is, in many ways, a true gift.
This gift of time has come into focus for me in the past
several months as I feel like I have less of it now than ever before while also
finding myself busied with some of the most time-consuming activities possible.
I don’t know exactly how it started, but for quite some time,
I’ve basically been running a burn and wound clinic out of my house. We’ve
long known that the clinic doesn’t really do burns or wound care. They will tend to you once, swabbing you down with bleach and
wrapping you with gauze but Lord help you if that wound needs more than a day
to heal because “once and done” is all you’re getting at the rural health
center.
Some time back, a patient came to me with a massive wound
that was getting no better and after begging for help, I agreed to care for it.
This particular woman’s story found its way into village twitter and it became
known that I possessed ointments and bandages and skills that actually prevented
scaring and gave people their bodies back. The clinic knows this and lets me be,
accepting that they can’t complain about my lack of official licensure when they
aren’t willing to take over for me. And the patients keep coming. Recently, it
has felt like as soon as one person gets better, someone else is wounded and we’re
just blowing through sterile gauze and antiseptic ointment and literally hours
of my day – every day – are now gone.
 |
| honest emotions as I wished for everyone to stop getting hurt |
With a school to run, funds to raise, my own children to
tend to... I still feel guilty saying that I don’t have hours to spend on this
task; I hate that: that by virtue of my clock-centered complaining I somehow make
light of what some of these people are enduring. By and large, these are not
minor boo boos that need a band aid and a prayer. The majority of people who
end up at my front door are there because they need intensive care and the government
medical system has utterly failed them. If they were in a first-world country, many
would be in burn units and ICUs. My house is, for at least some of them,
a last stop before amputation.
 |
| its not pretty underneath |
I have had to excuse myself from tending to a patient so
that I can go and sob on Jeremy’s shoulder over the injustice and the medical
malpractice that makes our front room better than the hospital. This should not
be, and yet, sometimes it is. The time that this particular outreach takes up feels like
it should be of no consideration to me, and yet, with everything else on my
plate, it is.
The pain and the injustice and the guilt take their toll and
so it meant something that at a particularly low point, a mom of a boy I had
treated came back to me to say, J has
been asking about you. He told me, “Mommy, Bethany really loves me.” This is
the boy that screamed bloody murder every day for six weeks while the burns on
his arm healed at a snails pace. He can now hold a pencil, and the grace in his
words healed something in me.
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| this boy - he has spent more than his fair share of sick time with me, but the smile is how I know he's better. |
Later, the mother of a child that scowled at me and pushed
my hands away as I wiped weeks of dirt out of the filleted skin on his foot
came back and said, “Every time we walk past your house, C looks up and smiles
and when I ask him why he’s smiling he just says, that lady who loves me lives
there.” And as if two rounds of Hallmark quality lovey comments weren’t enough,
God gave me the gift of a third and then a fourth who said that word LOVE and I wondered if there
wasn’t something to this.
The adults are less cheesy, but I’ve seen a similar affect.
When the bandage changes are done and they want to sit and talk a while. When
our kids start calling them grandma and missing them when they aren’t there.
Every visit hurts, physically, but there’s a deeper healing at work too and all
present can sense it.
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| daily snuggles with grandma, before and after dressing changes are good for both of them. |
Despite the fact that I continue to pray through every
bandaging and treatment session, “Lord, heal them quickly – for their sake and
mine” the un-asked for bi-product of the daily care and the daily concern is that
it communicates love in ways that a once-and-done
couldn’t have.
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| to make you feel extra cared for, the babies will put bandaids on your perfectly healthy skin too. |
I’ve spent the last 12 years trying my best to love people. That’s
our mission statement in a nutshell. And if I really assess our work properly,
our best programs and projects are the ones that afford us the opportunity to
spend concerted amounts of time with people. When an area of
our work puts us in front of the same people day after day, there is a love
language being spoken and clearly heard.
Twenty six years ago, Gary Chapman taught us all that there
are different love languages and that if you really want someone to feel loved,
you have to speak their language. After the six hundredth super-long chat
around someone’s fire or even just standing in the bush path, Jeremy and I
started joking that it felt like all Zambians possessed the love language
“quality time.” And after logging hundreds more hours spending time with people
in the burn and wound arena, I’d say that yeah, it probably is. There is nothing
efficient about loving someone through the time it takes for a third degree
burn over ten percent of the body to heal, but in terms of communicating love, the relational investment
trumps my productivity every single day.
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| waiting for pain meds to kick in with the distraction of America's Got Talent (we've watched all of the Zambian gospel YouTube videos already.) |
The western world historically has “loved” poorer, third
world nations with money. It’s fast, its easy, and above all, super efficient.
Even amongst overseas workers, there still exists a mentality
of “present the gospel, move on” or in development-worker speak, “dump and run.”
We make up for in material gifts what we aren’t willing to give in time. And
suddenly, the mission field sounds really noisy.
First Corinthains 13 says that if you don’t have love, you
are a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. I think that if we, the west, take an
honest look at our programmatic efforts, even those that try to be gospel
centric, we’d have to admit that the love language of the recipient has not
been considered.
If spending quality time with people is the greatest act of
love in this context, then I wonder if 1 Corinthians 13 could stand an update:
If I speak an African tribal language, but am too busy to love
with my time, I am a clanging cymbal.
If I plant churches and build schools at all over but am too
busy to love with my time, I am nothing.
If I sacrifice my American comforts and move my family to
the bush but am too busy to love with my time, then I gain nothing.
Love is patient with those who want to be with us;
love does
not boast of how busy she is;
it is not arrogant or rude in needing to do “more
important” things;
it does not insist on getting back to work;
it is not
irritable when things take too long or resentful of lost hours;
it does not
make light of the hospitals shortcomings, but rejoices in best-practices;
love
bears tears and the blood;
believes that God is good;
hopes that healing will
come;
endures the pain when it all takes time.
Love never ends. As for development, it’ll fall apart; as
for workshops, they will cease; as for sermons they will pass away. … So now
faith, hope and love abide, but the great of these is love through time.
I still struggle with feeling inadequate – not accomplishing
what I need to and feeling like I’m coming up short in every area. And I still
hate that so much of my time is going to medical care that isn’t my field of
expertise nor really – in the grand scheme of things – my responsibility. But
for every person, to step into that space, and allow me to place hands on
tender spots for weeks on end in order to see them heal and enjoy their body
again – the process that takes so much
care and so much time – if that is what it means to love, then bless it.