Women's Health...stories of dancing, tears, nail polish, twinkle lights and beautiful humanity!

The last of our women’s health patients leave this week. Most of the ladies that are a part of the women’s health program have something called an “obstetric fistula.” This basically means that these women have a hole in their organs that is caused by prolonged and difficult childbirth, most often where the baby dies…so we’re looking at intensely long childbirth, then giving birth to a baby that is already dead, and then having damage in her body from the childbirth so that she constantly leaks urine, which results in being shunned by family and friends because she’s always seen as smelly and dirty. 

I can’t imagine. I don’t want to imagine. 

This is the everyday reality for these ladies, but when they come onboard they are not alone anymore. They are surrounded not only by doctors and nurses who want to help them, but even more significantly, they are surrounded by other women who understand. They know the loneliness and pain and isolation and stares…they are in the same boat…literally and figuratively. And for some of these ladies, it’s the first time that there’s someone who understands.

After these women have their surgery to close the hole, we hold a dress ceremony, which the crew looks forward to all year! It’s a spectacular celebration of healing! The crew traipses out to deck 7 to sit in the hot sun and catch a wisp of breeze. There’s a hum of excitement that you can literally feel zinging through the throng of people sitting in the folding chairs and many more standing (because there are no more chairs). The MC leads us in song and dance and praise while the ladies down in the wards are preparing for their big debut. They are putting on beautiful new dresses, head wraps, makeup, jewelry, taking photos, giving hugs as they begin to see themselves as they once were…before it all went wrong.

Lovely. Beautiful. Full of strength and dignity.

The singing and cacophony up top grows until we finally see the ladies coming through the door and we all stand and whoop and cheer! They dance in and then sit in their place of honor. 

Each woman has a chance to get up and tell her story. “I’ve had a fistula for…ten months…5 years…12 years…22 years…30 years.”

Going to this ceremony was one of the most memorable experiences from two years ago when I was here, but this time they did something I don’t remember them doing before. The MC asked any husbands who were there at the ceremony to come up and stand with their wives. This was a very significant moment because quite honestly, a lot of husbands leave their wives when they find out she has an obstetric fistula. We had a few ladies this year whose husbands came with them, so when the MC asked this, two men walked up to stand with their wives. One couple was 17 years old! The MC thanked these two men for being examples of what manhood should look like – for standing up for and sticking by their wives even in the hardest of times. I looked over at the ladies and all of them had tears streaming down their faces. I couldn’t understand everything that was being said in French and Susu and Pular…but those streaming tears spoke volumes. In the midst of the celebration, there was this moment to acknowledge the strength and support of the husbands who cared so well for their wives…and the lack of the other husbands standing there was so glaringly obvious and wrong. They were tears of immense gratitude and immense loneliness. It was a beautiful, hard, celebratory, heart-wrenching, human experience.

I got to have some special experiences with the ladies this year! My roommate works in the women’s health ward so I got to hear lots of stories about these strong ladies. I got to take part in manicure Mondays, which involved a few crew members volunteering to go down to the women’s health ward each Monday to massage hands and feet and paint nails! The night I went down, my roommate and I were the only ones who showed up for manicure Monday, but we couldn’t just massage a few of the ladies! It ended up taking over two hours, but we got around to each and every lady! It was an overwhelming moment…thinking about the difference between where these ladies have been and where they are now. A week before they were alone, in need of physical and emotional healing, and now they were surrounded by others who knew exactly what they were going through, getting hands massaged and nails painted while “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” played in the background!

I also got to be the photographer for the Easter party that the nurses put on for the ladies! While the patients were up on deck 7 on Easter afternoon, the nurses transformed the women’s health ward into a twinkly wonderland! I came down as the nurses were decorating and they were positively giddy! As the ladies came down to the hospital from deck 7, the nurses lined the hallway and escorted each woman into the newly transformed ward. They explained a little bit about Easter and that it’s a day when we celebrate God’s love for us. Then snacks and dancing ensued! Towards the end, the women (who are mostly Muslim) actually asked the nurses to pray for them! It was a glorious celebration!

Because of these special experiences I got to participate in, it was especially meaningful to me to get to attend the dress ceremony for many of these ladies this year. It is an incredible honor to be in the presence of these strong, persevering women.

*Please continue praying for all the women around the world who suffer from and obstetric fistula. Pray for their husbands and families to stick with them and protect them. Pray for the ladies this year who had unsuccessful surgeries. Pray that they would all know that God loves them and thinks they are valuable and lovely and His children. Pray for healing...physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Operation Christmas Child

Did you do Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes as a kid? I loved shopping for the gifts and then playing tetras with them to get everything I bought to actually fit into a shoebox. I especially loved packing boxes for babies (shocker, I know)! Then as a teacher, I got the chance to pack boxes with my classes. I remember bringing my packed shoebox as an example my first year teaching and unpacking each item in front of my class to show them the type of items that are good to put in the box. I remember one kindergartner sighing, “I wish I was poor!” Oh dear! I think he may have been missing the point! My kids would bring in more and more shoeboxes as December wore on until we finally made it to the collection day when we’d all lay our little hands on each and every box and everyone would get a chance to pray for each kid that would receive each of our boxes, before we excitedly carried them over to chapel to add them to the mountain of shoeboxes that the whole school had collected.

Well, today I got to be on the other side and it was such a surreal experiences! I got to get into a big wooden boat piled in the back with shoeboxes and ride out to a nearby island to deliver shoeboxes to the children waiting there for us! It was one of the coolest, loveliest, hardest, happiest, saddest, most wonderful and overwhelming experiences I’ve had. You’ll see why…

A group of our teachers sailed out to the island along with the national director for Guinea of Operation Christmas Child. Most of us had packed shoeboxes as kids and had done it with our classes as well and we were all so excited to see the boxes in the back of the boat! We prayed for the day and sang worship songs the whole way out to the island! When we landed, the boxes were offloaded and carried ahead of us. 

While we were still a ways away from the school where we were headed, we could start to hear the chatter and excitement coming through the trees. When we walked into the clearing by the school, there were two big groups of kids (all in uniform) all singing. As we approached, the singing turned into delighted squeals of “Fote, Fote!” (not sure how to spell that, but it’s pronounced, “foh-tay” and is the term that people say when referring to a white person here, but it’s not a derogatory term). We walked the line of kids, shaking hands and giving high-fives as tons of little hands reached out to touch us. All along the perimeter of the clearing were parents, people from the neighboring village who had come to see the “Fote,” and kids who weren’t wearing uniforms who didn’t go to the school. 

The national director and his translators (he’s Guinean and speaks French, but we had others there to translate into Susu and other local languages) used big picture posters to share the story of the gospel in Susu. The kids did an incredible job listening and participating and not crowding towards the boxes. After the story, they started calling out names one at a time and that child would come receive his or her shoebox while all the others looked on.

Once the shoeboxes started appearing, all of the school kids, the whole community of parents, and other village kids crowded in. Slowly the mass of people got closer and closer until it was almost like a mosh pit as we tried to help with the crowd control. I was so glad that they had a good system and plan worked out and that individual names were being called because otherwise it could have turned riotous! We had 72 boxes to deliver and there were so many more than 72 kids in that clearing. There were so many emotions flying as kids proudly held shoeboxes over their heads and at the same time, other kids realized they wouldn’t be getting a box. It was overwhelming and hard to know what to feel.

After all the shoeboxes had been distributed to their proper owners, the crowd dispersed quickly and we were left in the clearing with a few last adults and kids who just wanted to see what we’d do next. We circled up and the national director asked us all to pray in our own language at the same time for the islandsand it’s community. I bent down and touched the dusty ground as my voice attempted to join in with the beautiful cacophony of prayers going up in English, French, Dutch, Susu, Pular,  and other languages, but I honestly couldn’t get a whole lot of words out because there were tears streaming down my face both from not really knowing how to feel and from the presence of God that was so obviously present there in that circle. We prayed for God to reclaim that land and that the people there would know His love for each of them.

We then went up to the school to take a photo of the “delegation” as they kept calling us. My friend Lisa was standing a few feet away under a tree to take the picture and as she took the photo, not five feet from where she stood a machete fell out of the tree and landed on the ground! That’s not important to the shoebox story, but I swear, there is never a dull moment around here!

I’m just not sure what to do with this experience. It was such a once in a lifetime opportunity for me and we were all just so excited to be there and so were the kids and families who received shoeboxes. But…

-       What about the kids that didn’t get a shoebox?

-       What about the Guinean people who don’t get to have surgery while the ship is here this year?

-       What about all the people that Jesus didn’t heal while he was on earth because he was living within the constraints of a human body and timeframe?

I just don’t know the answer, except to say that God doesn’t expect me to fix everything. That’s why we have the body of Christ; why we all work together. I can’t help everyone, but I can help the one person in front of me and then the next after that, and the next after that.

“For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” -Eph. 2:10