Last Call

This will be my last entry from the country of Sudan. I decided several weeks ago to shorten my stay here to two months so that I would have a chance to work for a couple months in Jax and earn some money for this summer and my move to North Carolina. However, with my recent illness and extended weight loss, I decided to shorten my trip even more. I became concerned that I would not be able to get adequate treatment for whatever is ailing me and was worried that due to my inability to eat, the weight loss would continue to a point that could cause serious problems. There are still some things that I would have liked to do that I did not get to accomplish while I was here, but I am thankful that I had time to complete the major projects that I was asked to work on. I am also thankful for the people who donated supplies and gifts for the kids that we were able to bring w/ us and am hopeful that even more people will now feel led to support the children’s home and perhaps even come to Nimule to give of their time and unique talents.

I thought that I would tell you a little about one of my favorite kids in Nimule. Awilo has been at the children’s home almost since its beginning. Both of his parents had died, and his aunt was not able to take care of him. He is a little guy, probably about the age of a first grader in the States, but he speaks English better than a lot of the older kids. He is a ball of energy all of the time, and a sweet kid most of the time (a lot more of the time than you would expect from a young boy his age). Awilo loves Spiderman and Ironman, loves to color and have me read him Bible stories from the books in the office. He likes to ask me for all kinds of random things from my tukul. I have to ration out my empty water bottles b/c he and the other kids all want them. I tease him that his name is “you give for me” b/c he says it to me all the time. Although his circumstances may be different, Awilo is really not that different from a young boy growing up in America. He loves life, has lots of friends that he plays w/ each day, and here at the children’s home, has adult leaders who he knows love him and want what’s best for him in life.

I will fly from Nimule on a small puddle-jumper to Entebbe and then will fly out of Entebbe on Wednesday night to Amsterdam, fly from there to Detroit, and then fly from Detroit to Jacksonville, where we are scheduled to land Thursday afternoon. I am looking forward to getting back to friends and family in the States, and perhaps most importantly, food, having already planned out the first several meals. My prayers will be w/ Ross Kelly and the other staff members here who continue on in the work day in and day out w/ little earthly reward, but a treasure in heaven that will be great, most especially the many children who will come to know the saving grace of our Lord and Savior b/c of the work that they do here in Nimule, caring for the kids' spiritual and physical needs.

Saleem!

Relapse

I woke up early Tuesday morning w/ an intense, throbbing headache. The staff members thought that I probably had malaria, despite my earlier negative test b/c sometimes if you’re already on malaria-prevention medication it can cause a false negative (and thus told me that I may have gotten my money’s worth out of socialized medicine – happy, A?). So I started on a malaria treatment regimen and spent the entirety of Tuesday in bed. Later that day, after having sweated through another set of sheets, shirt, and shorts, I seemed to have gotten over my illness. For the past week or so, it seems the success of the day has been determined by a very simple rubric: whether I spent more time that day in bed or out of it. It seems to be a cycle of get sick, not be able to eat, get over sickness, be weak due to lack of eating, repeat. Basically, the moral of the story is that for the last week or so I've been about as useless as tits on a boar hog.

I have been thinking about what to do for Bible study w/ the kids. Last week I had a short amount of time to put together anything, so I took one of my favorite sermons of Louie Giglio’s and adapted it into more of a Bible study. By the end of our time, the few left awake had a very glazed look in their eyes. Mind you, this was from a sermon that I had listened to literally dozens of times and loved. I wasn’t quite sure why I wasn’t getting through. A few nights later during study time, one of the older kids, who seems to be one of the smarter kids, asked me to explain something to him that he was reading. He wasn’t sure what it meant. The sentence said something along the lines of, “Jacob loved his son Joseph very much.” Oh. So maybe I overestimated the level of English comprehension among the group. I was to them like some pre-Vatican II priest babbling incoherently some foreign language. I needed to find a better way to connect.

I thought about using something that Christians have used for hundreds of years to teach foundational beliefs when they were resource-strapped: creeds such as the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed. Now this may seem like an obvious solution to many Christians, but it is not a means of first resort for someone raised in the Restoration Movement, which holds as a central tenet, “No creed but Christ, no book but the Bible, no name but the Divine.” However, after doing some initial research, I felt that the creeds did not get into the types of issues that I wanted to tackle in the Bible studies, and I also began to see why our movement’s founders decried their use. They are as divisive and their variations about as numerous as denominations themselves are.

So I stumbled upon another medium that Christians have used for centuries to teach believers w/o the luxury of books and study guides. No, not stained glass. Glass is in short supply here, and I’m not artistic enough to paint it. The other night I was in bed, getting ready to go to sleep and listening to my iPod. I happened to be listening to the song “Days of Elijah” when it hit me: I should teach the kids some new songs that are rich in scriptural references, and then we could spend some time reading the texts from which the words are taken. I thought, “I wonder if there’s a good song that talks about grace that I could use to really drive home the gospel of grace in the Bible. I’ll see if Chris Tomlin has anything along those lines. Oh, yeah. ‘Amazing Grace.’ Probably the most famous song in all of Christendom. Yeah, I think that should work okay.” The songs that I am planning to use for right now are “Days of Elijah,” “Amazing Grace,” “I Stand Amazed,” “Come Thou Fount,” and “In Christ Alone.” I thought that we could turn the verse lookups into competitions of who could find the scriptures first. To ensure the kids’ participation, I could give out alawa (candy) to the winners. I am not above bribery.

Revisions and Refinements

I thought that I should describe a little more in-depth one particular event that I found especially humorous at the hospital on Friday. Anyone visiting the hospital here must bring some sort of paper so that the hospital staff can write notes on the person’s medical condition. I purchased an exercise book like the ones that the children use for school from a vendor across the dirt road from the hospital for 200 shillings (approx. $.10). After “checking in” at the hospital, I sat down for less than a minute and then was sent to a room to meet w/ someone whom I think had the title “medical attendant,” seemingly skipping in line the other people who were waiting (apparently the medical community of Sudan is also fascinated by the opportunity to practice on a kawaaja). I went into a dimly lit room where the medical attendant was waiting for me. He either had a small beach ball under his shirt or the most perfectly round belly I had ever seen. I wanted to rub it but refrained, as he was a very serious man who probably would not have believed me if I told him it was a sign of good luck in America. I described for him my symptoms, and he wrote them down in my little book. He asked me if I was eating well, and I said that I had probably lost 5-7 kilos since arriving in Sudan a couple weeks earlier. He then diagnosed me w/ anorexia and jotted it down in my book. I started to laugh but refrained as, again, he was a very serious man.

I think that I have finally recovered from my non-malarial illness. After leaving the hospital on Friday, I felt better, but that night a worse fever returned along w/ the chills. I went to bed early again that night and woke up in the night w/ my shirt and sheets completely soaked, drenched w/ sweat from me sweating out my fever. Saturday morning my fever and chills were gone, but my stomach was questionable. I spent most of Saturday and Sunday being nauseas and unable to eat. I guess it’s good that I only had one or two symptoms at a time. Having them all at once would have been really miserable.

I thought that I should temper or at least better explain my comment in the last entry about “bad theology.” First, I should say that I hear less than ¼ of what the kids say in morning devotion. When the kids are speaking to a group, they are so soft-spoken, especially when speaking in English, that one would have to place one’s ear approximately a centimeter away from the speakers’ lips to be able to hear them. Combine that w/ the fact that I don’t have particularly good hearing (a hereditary trait), and I am often left in the dark as to what is going on. However, that being said, a theme that seems to pop up in a lot of these sessions is something akin to a salvation by works. I often hear things along the lines of “Do good things, and God will reward you; do bad things, and bad things will happen to you.” While this may be a useful lesson when trying to manage 50+ kids and also teach them a moral education, I think it can become dangerously close to bypassing the gospel of grace. I just want to make sure that the kids understand Ephesians 2:8-9, which says that we are saved by grace through faith, not by works, so that no one can boast.

I have been thinking about what my next major project will be for the children’s home and have potentially settled on agriculture. I would like to set aside a small plot of land in the compound for a garden that the kids could help maintain. As my very limited experience w/ crop agriculture is confined to the harvesting of tobacco and I doubt the children’s home staff would be interested in growing that cash crop, this is an area where I will first have to expand my knowledge. I have also thought about trying to plant some tress around the compound for shade and fruit as the compound seems to be singularly devoid of any trees. They have apparently tried planting trees in the past but had limited success partially due to animals eating or trampling the young trees. We will probably have to fence off the trees in some way to encourage their survival.

Some people gave me money before I left America for me to use for the children here to meet needs that I came across, and I was finally able to make my first purchase w/ these funds. As in most every country besides the United States, the kids here play soccer (very incorrectly called “football”) almost exclusively. Their current soccer ball was in sad shape, tattered and worn and able to be inflated only about half as much as it should be. When one of the staff members, Akera, went to Gulu, Uganda this week to take Emmanuel, one of the older kids, to be enrolled in high school there, I gave him some money to buy a couple new soccer balls for the kids because the ones sold in the Nimule market were apparently of insufficient quality. I wish I could find some “American” footballs to indoctrinate them on the superiority of “real” football.