Barbara’s reflections during the last week in Nigeria

We are leaving Nigeria in tomorrow, and I’ve told you a lot about what I’ve been doing, but it’s hard to express how I’ve been impacted by things here. I myself can’t even really make sense of all my experiences, or understand fully what God is trying to teach me, but I am grateful for them all. Today, I was asked what my positive and negative experiences have been here. I’ve loved my time here. I never expected to love Nigeria. When I first came, everything was so different, it all seemed so dirty and disorganized and I didn’t think I could ever get used to it. But the human spirit is so adaptable, and now things I once thought were so foreign seem commonplace. For a while, even treating HIV patients became ho-hum, and I began to be de-sensitized to it. Partly because I had to be, in order to continue working among them and not become depressed, but also partly because there are so many life-threatening problems here, HIV became just another one of them. But getting familiar with Nigeria allowed me to see what I’ve really loved here. I love their generous and loving spirit, their easy laughter. I loved that here, co-workers are friends too, and everyone values community and family over work. I’ve enjoyed the fact that I can stop by the residents’ homes without asking and know I am welcomed, and they in turn know that if they are sick, I’m going to stop by to visit them. I’ve loved my work in the hospital. Everyday, I ask God to help me to love my patients, and I am so grateful for the opportunities He’s given to me, to encourage and pray for my patients, to help them understand medical issues, to counsel them and help them to be healthier and safer. I’m thankful for the opportunities I had to go on village outreaches, to work with HIV patients, to help those on the streets. I came to Africa because I didn’t want to be one of those people who saw starving people on TV and said, “oh, how terrible”, and then promptly change the channel and forgot they existed. I wanted to come and face poverty face on and, even though I know I can do so little, I wanted to at least try. I am so grateful that I could do it. There were times, when I was faced with a dirty, smelly, starving villager, who had a nasty rash and nasty teeth and looked so sick, that I asked myself, “what are you doing here?” You don’t want to touch them, you don’t know what they’ve got, and how can you help them anyway? Maybe you can give them some short-term medications, but you’ll only help them for one week. Who’s going to help them for the next month, the next year? But thank God He gave me the compassion to want to touch them and help them anyway, because something is better than nothing, and they get so little love in their lives. Personally, I’ve loved that here, we have time. We have time to spend time with God, time to reflect on our everyday experiences, time to be refreshed and rejuvenated. And most importantly, I’ve loved living everyday, feeling as if the Lord was in everything I was doing.

There are, of course, things about Nigeria I will not miss, things I did not enjoy. I won’t miss the inefficiency, the corruption, the absolute waste of time and money. It is so sad to me that even at Evangel, which is a Christian mission hospital, there are workers who steal money, who give jobs to their family members who are completely unqualified for it, and who are lazy and irresponsible. And this happens all over Nigeria! I won’t miss the fact that accountability and consequences are often nonexistent here, that if you make a commitment and then break it without telling anyone, it’s not a big deal, and if you somehow “misplace” the money, nothing will be done to you. I won’t miss that everyone tries to convince us to help them get visas to the US, even some of our supposed “friends”, or tries to marry me to their son until they find out I’m already married. I won’t miss the unpredictable electricity, water, internet, phone service, etc. I will always be sad that the residents here are bitter because they took ten years to get through medical school, not because they failed but because of strikes and corruption, and it will always make them feel cheated.

It is hard to explain how God has changed us, yet I know He has. I will never be able to walk past poverty again without desperately wanting to do something about it. I will not be able to look at all the things we have in the US, all the wealth, without some sense of waste. Here, where death is an everyday, common occurrence, life is celebrated even more so, and joy is to be found wherever you can. I hope I will take that back to the US with me. I am afraid that in the US, the sense of living life intensely, as if every day mattered, will get lost in all the THINGS we do. In the US, we like to fill our time with “important” things---meetings, extra-curriculars, exercising, shopping, church, sports, music, etc---don’t get me wrong, they’re all good things, and we mean well, yet, we’re so busy, we lose track of the most important commandment ---to love God, and to love each other as God loves us. We just need to slow down!

Over these past few months, I’ve been so encouraged by all the comments you, my friends and family, have given to us. I don’t feel I’ve done anything brave, special, or exciting, yet it seems many people have felt encouraged and/or challenged by our experiences. I am so glad that our work here could be making some impact back home too. We have had so much support and love from you and are just so glad you could share this time with us. Please pray for us as we prepare to come home, and pray for a safe journey and a good reunion with you all. We will be home on May 5th, and will continue this blog until we run out of experiences we want to share.

AIDS Ministry

I wrote a little bit earlier about Spring of Life (SOL) and what they did, but I’d like to go into more details, as I came to Africa intending to focus on HIV ministry. Spring of Life for me embodies much of what my time in Nigeria has been like---both great joy and great frustration. Nigeria has roughly an 8-9% HIV positive rate, which on the surface seems very little compared to countries like Botswana at 30%, but it’s deceiving as Nigeria comprises about 20-25% the population of all of Africa. So many Africans who are HIV positive live in Nigeria. The stigma of HIV is not as great as it was, but is still quite a hindrance. We see many patients who don’t want anyone to know they are HIV positive, not even their spouses, because they are afraid of being abandoned, abused, or simply just can’t deal with the perceived shame of it all. We even see people who refuse to get tested themselves when their spouse dies of HIV because they just can’t bear knowing they have HIV. It’s ethically a hard decision for the SOL counselors, because we’re supposed to respect patient privacy and assure we won’t tell anyone, but at the same time, it is hard for us to see a husband with HIV, taking anti-retrovirals (ARV’s) (HIV medications), who is getting better on the meds, but refuses to tell his family, and as a consequence, the wife and children die of HIV without ever knowing they have it. It’s hard not to feel like the man has killed his family while preserving himself. Unfortunately, we see many cases like this and sometimes we tell them they can’t be treated unless they bring their family in to be treated, but sometimes this scares them off and they never come back again. Would it have been better to have been less forceful and just treated him and counseled him persistently but gently, hoping in time he would change his mind? We don’t know.

It’s also quite difficult because there are no guidelines to help handle difficult situations. Come to think of it, there are few guidelines at all. In December, PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, an American program working through the Nigerian government) came to Evangel and said they wanted to give us money to start free treatment for HIV patients. Which is great. However, they said they wanted us to start ASAP and have 500 patients enrolled by May and 1000 in a year. Now, that is a crazy expectation. But we had to agree or risk losing the funding. So in February, they started the PEPFAR program here with very little training and it has been a management nightmare. Since SOL has been the ECWA HIV ministry for a while, it seemed logical that SOL might handle the PEPFAR program, but Evangel decided it wanted to handle it themselves. The miscommunication has been terrible. At SOL, usually what happens is when a patient comes in, he/she get pre-test counseling, so the patient understands what testing means, how you get HIV, what the next steps are, etc. Then they are tested, and then they get post-test counseling. If they are positive, they are enrolled into PEPFAR, set up to go to clinic to get initial testing done to see if they need ARV’s, and if they need ARV’s, they are counseled on side effects, told they must take their medications everyday, etc, and someone follows up with them, even doing home visits to make sure they are ok and taking medications properly. However, if a patient doesn’t go to SOL, if they instead show up at clinic without going to SOL first or find out they are HIV positive during a hospital admission, well, then, all bets are off as to what happens to them. Some people get put on ARV’s and are never told what side effects to expect or are never told why they can’t miss even one day of medications (HIV becomes resistant to medications very, very fast if you miss doses). Depending on what doctor you see, you may take anywhere from 3 to 7 different lab tests before you start ARV’s. You might be asked to take an antibiotic for life, or you might be asked to take it only until you start ARV’s. You might be told you have to pay for all medications that aren’t ARV’s, or you might be told PEPFAR will pay for all your medications. You might be referred to SOL for follow up, but you might not. The point is, the doctors are told, “here you are, here’s some HIV patients, here’s the PEPFAR paperwork you must fill out, go to it!” and they have no idea what is allowed, what isn’t, what they need to do, etc. And SOL gets frustrated because patients who should be counseled don’t get counseled, no one tells them when their patients get admitted or discharged, etc., so patients often get suboptimal treatment when they very easily could have gotten great care. Training would really help, so each person involved in PEPFAR knows his role and what he needs to do, and guidelines would be great, too, so that each patient gets consistent and good quality care, no matter which doctor they see. But PEPFAR allows each hospital to do their own thing and expects them to do it NOW, and it really causes chaos. It really doesn’t help that patients can really be difficult too. You often talk to them and explain their disease and their medications till you’re blue in the face, and they will say, “yes, yes, yes”, but next week, it’s like you never had the conversation. Sometimes you give them medications and instead of taking them they sell them for ten times as much. Sometimes they stop taking their medications and you never know why. Some never come back for follow up. I have learned to never ask why, because there is never a good answer.

A good example of all these problems is an HIV positive patient of mine named Monday, who came in a few days ago from another hospital. He had been admitted there because he had been (and still is) very sick from HIV, with very severe anemia. He had a huge open ulcer on his back that the other hospital finally felt they couldn’t deal with so they sent him to us after he had been there almost a month. When I read the admission notes, I was under the impression that he was on ARV’s already and we were giving it to him. After a few days, though, I realized something was wrong. Every medication we give a patient must have a prescription written and it must be documented on his drug chart, and I had not seen any ARV’s on his drug list. He’s too sick to come to clinic, so clearly he wasn’t getting ARV’s there. He had never been seen by anyone at SOL, so no one there was helping him get the ARV’s. There were no labs reflecting routine investigations to follow his disease, no signs we were doing anything to treat him for HIV. A later note indicated that we were going to look into starting him on ARV’s, contradicting the idea that he was already on ARV’s. I went to speak with him, and it turns out that I was the first person to ever really sit down and find out what his situation was! Monday was from a town 1.5 hours away from Jos and had been started on ARV’s in January. There is no PEPFAR there, so he was paying himself. He couldn’t afford the medications anymore so he stopped taking ARV’s in March. Someone told him to come to Jos to get free medications, but they didn’t know which hospital. He ended up at a hospital that didn’t have PEPFAR. When they admitted him, they asked him if he had taken ARV’s. He said yes. They never bothered to find out if he still was taking it, if he had some left, etc. They just assumed he did and never looked into it. And he is partially to blame, because he never told them more about it. He never said, “yes, I took them but now I’m not, I came here to get free medications”. He only answered what they asked and that was it. It’s a common occurrence here.

So he went at least a month without ARV’s. When he was admitted to Evangel, the same thing happened. They read the note from the other hospital that said he was on ARV’s, they asked him if this was true, he said yes, and that was that. The doctors here have been too busy to look into it, and didn’t think to refer the patients to SOL because, well, are they supposed to? Who knows. It’s tragic because he probably has drug resistant HIV now, and who knows what he was taking? Not him. What should we give him now? Who knows. The doctors will of course do the best they can, but his options are limited. He said that he had people who were treating him, but he felt as if many people had deaf ears and never listened to what he had to say, and didn’t explain much to him. He often felt helpless and hopeless and didn’t know what to do. And, good old stigma, he never told his wife. She became suspicious when he kept getting sick and hospitalized so this week she went to get tested, and sure enough, she’s HIV positive and needs treatment. So I prayed with him and went to SOL and spoke with them about him. I hope he never gets lost to treatment again, and always has someone who will listen to him through SOL.

Monday has such a sad story, as many of our patients do, and the complexity of culture, poverty, poor management, etc, can seem overwhelming. How can we help when so many things need to change and don’t seem like they ever will? Yet, for every Monday that we have, we also have those patients who do well, who we help, and they get better. We have two little boys named Shama and Shaibu who were the sickest babies you’ll ever see, they looked like tiny shriveled old men when I first met them. Both were from poor families where everyone was starving and sick. I thought they would die. Yet, SOL stepped in, helped them with hospital bills, gave them money for food, taught them good nutrition, went every week to visit them at home, and it has been a miracle. They both put on weight and have cheeks now!!! They look around curiously with bright eyes, like normal babies, and smile. When we see patients like that, we think, “thank God, we could help at least one person, and that makes this all worth it,”, and to see the smile on their mothers’ faces as we make a big deal over how good their babies look--it’s beautiful. It reminds me that despite the problems, Africa has many happy stories too.

Edo-Delta Camp – The Rest of Camp

Here's a picture of a camper doing his Morning Watch. For many of the campers, it's the first time they've ever had a concept of setting aside time to read the bible on their own each day.

Saturday started where Friday left off, with no running water. The generator that had been too powerful for the dining hall lights proved too weak to pump water in the water tank, and the main generator was still broken. With no water, the cooks couldn’t make breakfast, so we went about our morning schedule and skipped breakfast. I felt like the campers were starting to accept the camp schedule and flow of life at division call and morning watch, and I also felt like they got flag raising more than the day before. During Bible Ex, bread came, so we gave out bread and campers paid 5 Naira for 50 cl water sachets at breakfast. During the success talk, an extra generator was brought and pumped enough water to get it flowing in the pipes again, but it wasn’t enough for cooking lunch and bathing. After the talk, campers immediately went to bathe, and there wasn’t enough water left to make lunch, so lunch was delayed as a result. After lunch, enough water had been pumped to get a shower, and I was quite grateful.

Campers were much more interested in Carnival time, and it went well. Activity two was short and the group really wanted to do Human Knot again, so we just did that. As we headed to sports, the sky got very dark and overcast. In the middle of our game of amoeba tag, the sky opened up and poured rain as I hadn’t seen in all my time in Nigeria. Since it was Easter weekend, the evening program was to be a showing of pieces of the Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson’s), and I was to help set up the meeting hall with some white paper for a screen. As a result, I missed dinner and just had some bread and water, but given the chaos of the previous night, I must say it didn’t bother me all that much.

Easter Sunday we had running water all day and that was really nice. Camp wasn’t really any different except that at Division Call and Flag Raising we talked about Easter and the resurrection of Christ. The success talk encouraged campers to “Make a Difference”, “Be Effective”, and “Be Someone, Somewhere”, and the campers seemed genuinely interested in the message. A big theme of the talk was about making something out of their lives for a positive impact on the people around them. In the afternoon, I taught the bowline and taut line hitch in my knot-tying class, and we also did a human knot that resulted in two smaller circles of 4 people each, much to the delight of the group.

The evening program was a bonfire with time for campers to give testimonies about what God had done in their lives during camp. We started it off with about an hour of singing and dancing around the fire, and I got laughed at as I danced around the fire with the campers. I’m not a very good dancer and my sense of rhythm was severely lacking compared to theirs. On top of that, I still hadn’t been able to learn all of the songs that were sung, but I think the campers enjoyed having me along. I was curious what the campers would say during the testimonies since the camp had been so short and they’d been so slow to warm up to the camp program, but there were some interesting things said. Two in particular stood out to me. One camper mentioned that he had never understood what it was to have a quiet time alone with God before, and he’d learned to do that. Another camper stood up and declared, “My 1000 Naira was not a waste!” This was encouraging in the sense that I really wondered on Friday how many of the campers were really happy that they’d decided to come.

After the evening program, we had time for campers to come and say their memory verses to us, and if they did, they would get a certificate the next morning. I was especially touched by one camper who wanted to say them but hadn’t learned them yet. He couldn’t read, so his hut leader and him stayed up trying to teach him the verses. Although we were there till 2 am, he didn’t have them down by the time we closed up shop for the night. I was really frustrated that he hadn’t been able to do it in that amount of time, but also very impressed by the dedication that both he and his hut leader showed.

Monday morning we again were out of running water and wouldn’t have it again before we left. We had the campers help us move the benches back into the classrooms and after breakfast, had what we called a Goodbye Circle. Claudia and Uncle Victor handed out the memory verse certificates, and she also asked about decisions that people had made during camp. The hands that were raised indicated the camp had a much stronger impact on the campers’ lives than I was expecting, and I felt really good about that. Campers left rather quickly after that, and I spent the afternoon helping clean up and organize so we could travel back to Jos the next day. In the evening I was able to call Barbara in Jos, and it was good to speak to her although she was under the impression I was to be coming home Monday instead of Tuesday.

The ride home on Tuesday was rather uneventful, although we got a later start than we were hoping since we still had many things to attend to before we left. We bought pineapples at a price of about 40 cents each and also stopped to get the truck serviced in Abuja. For dinner, I ate pounded yam and egussi in a tiny shanty restaurant next to the Toyota dealer. Everyone stared at me as I ate with my hand and Akim told me it looked like I’d been doing it for years. Considering there were hotels across the street with nice restaurants, he also said that the patrons there had probably never seen a white man eating in a place like that, and certainly not with his hand. It was really good to get back to Jos, even though I got home after 10 pm. The shower was one of the most pleasant I’ve had.

In all, the camp turned out to be quite a success, with many of the campers going home happy that they had come. Considering my frustrations of Friday night, I really felt good about how the camp had gone. I was very glad to have had the opportunity to go and be a part of it, and getting to know many of the campers was really a blessing.

Edo-Delta Camp – Camp Arrives!

Here's some folks playing volleyball at the Jos campground. The camp encourages sports where everyone can play. For example, we may play Crazy Soccer, where the men have to play with their hands clasped behind their back, the women can pick up the ball a la rugby, and as many as 4 balls are in play at once. It keeps the game lively and active, and while many campers don't like the idea at first, the soon realize how fun it is once they start to play.

Thursday morning we woke up with the anticipation of campers coming between 2 and 5 pm. We finished up some training in the morning and also finished moving the classroom benches into the dining hall so campers would have tables to eat at (they were awfully heavy!). We got registration organized and then had to wait. Although we had 2 campers by noon, no one else showed up till after 5 pm, and they didn’t finish coming till after 10 pm. By the end of the day, we had about 55 campers. That was far fewer than the 130 we were told to expect, but Claudia mentioned that for a DCC’s first camp, 50-60 is a pretty good turn out. In the same way that staff had come over several days, campers would continue to come during camp and we finished with a total of 92 campers, 20 of which didn’t come till Saturday or Sunday.

Friday was the first real day of camp, and we began with our regular schedule. I had been up till 3 AM the night before, sorting out camper activity preferences with Akim, Ema, and Claudia, so I’d gotten less than 4 hours sleep and was not in a good mood. It didn’t help that the campers didn’t come to division call when the whistle was blown. We sent them off to do their morning watch, and then went on to flag raising. It seemed as though they found the whole formality of it all tedious and strange. They laughed at the way the color guard marched in the colors, but the did pay attention when Claudia spoke about the need for prayer over the nation. I was going to teach drama during the activity one hour, but other hut leaders had volunteered to do that so I offered to do an improve comedy class a la Comedy Sportz. I wasn’t too surprised that no one signed up since I wasn’t sure they would understand what it was, and I was glad to have the hour free. I hoped to use the time to catch up on sleep from the night before, but with new campers arriving I helped with their registration instead. At lunch, we had bean curry but didn’t have enough spoons for everyone, so some campers and the staff had to wait for others to finish. Meal time was a bit unruly as campers didn’t understand why we wanted them to stay at their tables with their hut-mates instead of getting up to talk to friends in other huts. They also wanted to leave the dining hall as soon as they were done eating, which was also not part of how we wanted their meal time experience. They also wanted to socialize and wash up right after lunch, and because of all this, most didn’t get to rest hour until it was half over.

Campers were very slow in coming to Carnival time, and when Akim asked for volunteers, no one wanted to come up front. We practically begged for a few, and finally got some. Akim got four teams of two people and blindfolded them, then gave them each a bag of ground nuts (peanuts), and the first to feed each other all their nuts would be the winner. Campers erupted in laughter as groundnuts were fed to people’s eyes, throats, and noses instead of their mouths, and the apathy and apprehension surrounding Carnival were starting to fade. We also gave 6 campers each a 35 cl bottle of Fanta and a straw, then had a contest to see who could drink it the fastest. The whole camp was shocked to see a girl win, and she became an instant celebrity.

The second activity hour I had volunteered to teach knot-tying. I didn’t really know what people would make of it, but figured I had learned enough knots in Boy Scouts that I could teach some basic ones. Campers were again slow in coming to the activities, and it was clear that they were getting tired of being shuttled around from one thing to the next. I had 8 campers come to my knot tying class, and I asked them their names and why they had come. All but 2 of them said they didn’t know what knot tying would be so they figured it would be something new and interesting. Now, I didn’t actually have any rope, so the next thing I did with them was a human knot, where everyone stands in a circle, grabs hands with someone else, and then we try to undo the knot. None of the campers had ever done anything like it before, and when they saw the initial tangle of arms they looked at me for guidance in how to undo themselves. I told them I wasn’t going to help and that they needed to figure it out themselves, at which point they told me they didn’t think it could be done. I told them I’d seen it done over and over again, and eventually Chimdindu took charge and suggested a few maneuvers that began to help. Slowly, people started to believe it could be done and when we finished with a full circle again, they were truly excited. I learned the next day that several had gone back to their huts and taught their friends the same game, which I thought was really neat. Like I said, I didn’t have any rope, so I untied my shoes and as we passed around my shoelaces, people learned the square knot and the slip knot before it was time for games. Most people in Nigeria were leather sandals, so mine were the only shoelaces we had to go around, but they worked fine, and people seemed genuinely interested in learning the knots.

After Activity Two was Sports/Games, and when the whistle blew and I went out to the field, Ema was trying to get everyone together. The hut leaders were not getting their campers to the field, and the campers were all just wandering around camp chatting. It was very frustrating. Some of the male campers went to the field expecting to play football, and then left when they learned we wouldn’t be doing that. The female campers didn’t come in the first place because they also expected the men would be playing football. Ema left in frustration, and when I saw him I told him I’d try to help get the campers together and that he should come out again. I went off and found campers starting to congregate on the field, and a minute or two later Ema came out and we managed to get most of the campers ready for sports. Ema started us off with some warm-up exercises, much to the groans of the campers, but they participated, and found them very funny in a way I didn’t fully understand. Ema then got the campers into two teams and we did a relay race where each team had to pass a ball to the person behind them through their legs. They really found this entertaining, too, and Claudia later told me that they don’t really have Physical Education in schools here the way we do in the U.S., so these types of games are totally new to them. Accusations of cheating on the other team were rampant and there was much rejoicing when one team finally won.

When we went to wash up after the games, the running water at camp had stopped. We’d used up the water in the water tank and campers were not excited. The school generator had broken and there was no way to pump water up into the tank. Dinner proved to be chaotic. The dining hall wasn’t connected to the standard generator so a spare had been brought in, but this one was too powerful for the fluorescent lights and burnt out the bulbs, resulting in darkness in the dining hall until we managed to get enough candles so each table could have one (the rest of our dinners would be by candlelight). Meals at camp were served buffet style and huts were called to come get food in order, but as soon as some campers had finished their meals they would come up for seconds before others had gotten anything at all. It seemed as if everyone was talking very loudly in the echo-y room and no one was staying at their table. Claudia was not happy, and at this point I had gotten so frustrated with the constant battle to get campers to behave according to the camp rules that I wondered if they’d ever get anything out of camp at all. It was probably the low point of the camp for me and I was very frustrated.

After dinner, we went to the main hall for the evening program which was to be the Oprah Winfrey show. One of the female hut leaders was Oprah, and she was to have four guests. When I got to the hall, I found out that I was one of the guests! The show was to be questions about relationships to give campers a godly perspective on dating, and Yusuf was supposed to be the married man on the panel but he’d left with the truck to try to get the generator fixed so we would have water the next morning. So I became the married man on the panel. I answered some questions about what my relationship with Barbara was like during the dating and courtship phases, but it was also awkward in that no one laughed at the parts of the story I thought were funny. After the show, Uncle Victor (all the staff were referred to as Uncle or Auntie), who is the Edo-Delta DCC chairmen spoke to the campers about their behavior during the day. He talked about how the camp was not a conference and how the campers needed to do better to follow the schedule and the requests we made for appropriate camp behavior. It was very awkward to me, and I felt a little embarrassed that I had come down from Jos, from the U.S. even, and was imposing a completely different set of behavioral rules on these people than they were used to. At the same time, I knew that the rules were there to help them learn lessons in ways they wouldn’t otherwise. I went to bed frustrated and tired, hoping Saturday would be better.

Edo-Delta Camp – Staff Training

Again, since I don't have pictures from the Edo-Delta Camp yet, here's a picture from last year's Jos 2005 camp. Knitting was also one of the activities we had at the Edo-Delta camp. Teaching people to knit gives them the potential to create something with their hands they can later go sell. It gives them economic potential to better their own lives when the going gets rough. I've also seen people here wear jackets and wool caps in the mornings in Jos when it gets below 85 degrees, so people here have a very different sense of what makes cold weather.

Ok, back to the Edo-Delta Camp. At this point, it probably makes sense to explain a little about the camp structure and what happens at camp. Campers will be placed into huts (cabins) of 8 campers. Each hut has a hut leader (counselor). Each division (Senior Boys, Junior Boys, Senior Girls, Junior Girls) has a hut chief or division leader. The hut chiefs are responsible for the whole division, which means getting the hut leaders to do their jobs. The also report to the senior staff, which is the camp director and assistant director. Coming from Jos, we provided the senior staff and the hut chiefs, while the Edo-Delta DCC would provide the hut leaders. It was these folks that we were planning to spend a little more than 3 days training.

One important thing to realize is that the concept of a youth camp is a foreign idea to Nigeria. They’re very familiar with conferences, where people come and hear a variety of speakers speak, but that’s very much a student-teacher type of relationship. Youth camps are more a series of organized activities with some direct teaching, but most of the learning is interactive and experiential. Our challenge with staff training was to teach the hut leaders how to provide the interactive and experiential experience to their campers, so we did that by putting them through a few days of what camp would be like. We spent a lot of time reminding the hut leaders that this was a camp, and not a conference, so they were going to have to think about things differently than they were used to. For the staff that was there through most of the training, I think they did a good job understanding.

As I said previously, the camp staff was supposed to come for training on Sunday evening. We’d been told by the DCC to expect about 130 campers and 25 staff, and that would be very good numbers for a DCC having their first ever camp. When no one had arrived by 5pm on Sunday, we went into Benin City to get some ice cream. When we got back, there were about 6 people waiting for us, not all of whom were camp staff. There was just one female hut leader and a couple of male hut leaders, so that evening we gave them an introduction to what the camp would be like and told them that the next morning, we would start running through the camp schedule so they could experience what the campers would experience. Staff would slowly trickle in over the next few days, giving us 10-12 staff by the time campers started arriving on Thursday. We had two more show up with the campers, so they got the 20-minute staff orientation and were sent off to work.

The Edo-Delta camp schedule was a little different from the Jos camp schedule, but here’s what it would look like:
6:00 am – All Staff Devotions
6:30 am – Capers (campers clean up their huts and an assigned area of the camp grounds)
7:00 am – Bath and dress
7:45 am – Divisional Call (the Hut Chiefs lead a brief song and devotion before Morning Watch)
8:00 am – Morning Watch (this is what we call quiet time alone with God at camp – we used the booklets I had helped write during my first few weeks in Jos)
8:40 am – Flag Raising (a time to pray for the nation of Nigeria and its leaders)
8:50 am – Breakfast
9:30 am – Bible Exploration (bible study led by hut leaders with their huts – aka Bible Ex)
10:30 am – Canteen (Campers can buy snacks and drinks)
11:00 am – Success Talk (speaker)
12:00 pm – Activity One (each hut leader and staff would teach an activity such as Football, Drama, Singing, Cooking, etc.)
1:15 pm – Lunch
2:00 pm – Rest Hour
2:45 pm – Canteen
3:00 pm – Carnival (jokes, riddles, and silly games/contests)
3:50 pm – Activity Two
5:00 pm – Sports/Games
6:15 pm – Hut Break (time for campers to wash up for dinner)
6:30 pm – Dinner
7:30 pm – Evening Program
9:00 pm – Hut Devotions
10:00 pm – Lights Out

A quick additional comments about flag raising: Nigeria is a collection of many different tribes collected together in a nation formed by their European conquerors years ago. People don’t always think of themselves as having loyalty to their country the way Americans display patriotism because it was a bit of a false construct imposed upon them. Flag raising helps encourage people to pray for their country and those in leadership. It’s a good way to encourage people to pray about what the leaders are doing rather than simply complain, which happens a lot here. I think we in the US can learn from this too, at times. Akim and Ema are both former campers who now help out as camp staff, and they both indicated that the flag raising portion of the camp helped them think of themselves as Nigerians, and give them a stronger heart for seeing the nation succeed as a whole.

Anyway, that’s the idealized camp schedule as it was supposed to run, but as you might imagine from many of the other posts we’ve put on this Blog, things here often don’t go as planned. I can’t think of a single day I was down in Benin City that we followed the schedule exactly, but I’m getting ahead of myself a little, as I’m supposed to be talking about the staff training.

The staff were supposed to be trained from Sunday night through Thursday morning, with Monday through Wednesday following the regular camp schedule as closely as made sense. Since we only had a few staff arrive on Sunday, we really got started Monday morning with the folks we had. Everything went according to schedule most of the morning. For Bible Ex, we taught the bible studies that the hut leaders would have to teach during camp with the theme of the camp being Psalm 23:1 – “The Lord is my shepherd.” Instead of the success talk and evening programs, Claudia and the other staff would teach the hut leaders about what camp was to be like.

One of the challenges we dealt with throughout the staff training was that the camp cooks weren’t going to arrive till camp started, so all our meals were being prepared by women of the local church and then brought to the camp. That meant that we never knew exactly when we would eat our meals, even though we’d provided them with a schedule of our meal times. For example, our lunch on Monday didn’t arrive till about 5 pm, which in turn meant that our dinner arrived at about 9:30 pm. Often it was late simply because they were waiting for transportation to bring it to us, and we were always grateful when it arrived, but we often spent time just waiting around because we were expecting it soon.

For sports on Monday and Wednesday, we played football (soccer!) and everyone was eager to see how the bature (white man) would fare. I had told them I wasn’t very good, having played very little football over the years. The only time I used to play regularly was in elementary school, to give you an idea of my experience, although I did play a lot while we were in Honduras with Blackhawk Church two years ago, but that was only a week long trip. I figured I would play hard and that would make up for whatever lack of skill was present. I did my best to pass and played what I considered pretty good defense, including a pretty good slide tackle to prevent a goal once. I also played some goalie and managed to have some saves, including one where I stopped Ema one-on-one. I thought he went easy on me, but still was surprised he hadn’t scored, as he had me on the ground. Akim paid me a big compliment when he told me I was much better than advertised and that I “didn’t play like an American.” I later found out that this means I dribbled and passed instead of just booting the ball up-field.

Despite the low staff turnout, it seemed as though the staff really was getting the idea. Claudia had spoken about how the camp was really a construction site, and we were building campers. We talked about what we wanted to build into each camper, and what the tools we were going to use to do that. One of the biggest was the idea that at camp, each hut leader would be a role model and mentor to their campers. Akim spoke about how each camper was similar and different to a lump of clay. It was an interesting analogy that got the staff thinking about what youths are like and how we can influence them both for better and for worse. We also spoke about things that our parents or elders did when we were growing up that we found helpful in our lives and things they didn’t do that we wished they had done. All of this were things that we ought to try to do for our campers. As we shared our responses, the staff also began to realize that everyone is a little different in what they need and what they find useful.

By the time staff training was done, we were eager for the campers to arrive, but we were also wary about the limited staff we had. We only had 2 female hut leaders by the time we went to bed on Wednesday, which meant that Joyce would have to take on that role, too. I felt like the staff training hadn’t gone very quickly because of all the sessions of talks and also the fact that we spent a lot of time waiting around for our meals. Camp, I hoped, would be move much smoother.

Edo-Delta Camp – First Impressions

Since I was gone for 10 days for the Edo-Delta Camp, I’m going to try to consolidate this to a few different posts. Also, I wasn't able to bring my camera with me, and I don't yet have a copy of the video we took while there, so I'm going to post some other fun pictures that we haven't let everyone see yet. This picture is of the cooks at the Jos camp from last year. They're preparing some meat, and in the background you can see the pots on the fires.

On April 8, Claudia came and picked me up at 7:30 am so we could head down to the the Edo-Delta DCC for the first ECWA Camp Youth Alive in the south! ECWA divides it’s churches into District Church Councils, and the Edo-Delta one broke off of Lagos two years ago. Camp was to be held just outside of Benin City, a 10 hour drive south of Jos, where we’re staying while here in Nigeria. I was a little nervous about the trip as I’d been told that the weather would be really hot and humid (Jos is hot, but very dry). I was also expecting to eat a lot of Nigerian food and didn’t know if I’d like it or if my stomach would be able to handle it all. Also, we’d been told that the youth in and near Benin City are somewhat hostile, and would prove to be difficult campers. However, this is exactly why I came to Nigeria: to help out with the camp ministry, so I was very excited to be going, too.

Along for the trip were Claudia (camp director), Akim (assistant director/activities), Yusuf (crafts/music/hut chief), Ema (sports/hut chief), and Joyce (hut chief). The drive down gave me an opportunity to experience many things I hadn’t experienced in Jos. First, we stopped for breakfast in what can best be described as a shanty market. I had some bread and a fried egg from a “restaurant” that consisted of two rickety wooden benches and a single proprietor who cooked over a small fire. I had been warned by SIM personnel that the food in these types of places isn’t always safe to eat, but on a trip like this I was to experience a lot of things, and since everyone else was eating there, I wasn’t too worried about it. The drive was long and rather uneventful, and we started to approach Benin City late in the afternoon. We also noticed, as we went further south, that the buildings were older. Most roofs here are made of corrugated metal, and while many in Jos still shine silver, the roofs further south were brown with rust. The terrain had also changed from something that resembled a woodland savannah to jungle. We passed a huge palm tree orchard as the sun was setting, and it was very beautiful. Camp was to be held at a school, and we pulled in to the gate a little after dark, which was around 6:30 pm.

I noticed two things as I got out of the truck: I was very stiff and sore from squeezing 4 in the backseat of the truck for the past 10 hours, and it was DANG HUMID! I started sweating right away. After a dinner of rice at one of the pastor’s houses, we went back to the school and found bunk beds in one of the staff buildings. As I slept that first night, I continued to wake up repeatedly throughout the night with sweat running down my face from the humidity. Almost the whole time I was down there, I’ve never experienced so much heat and humidity in combination to make me sweat as much as I did, and it didn’t let up at night, making it hard for me to sleep well while I was there.

The next day was Palm Sunday, and the staff would be arriving in the evening to begin their training. We went around to the different parts of the camp and prayed for the different buildings and the field, that they would be places where the campers would be safe, have fun, and learn what God wanted them to learn during camp. Having little idea of what schools were like in Nigeria (I’d only seen missionary or village schools to this point), I was surprised at how extensive the school compound was. The school is just off them main road into Benin City, and after entering the gate there is a large football (soccer for you Americans) field on the right. To the left is a large hall where we would have our all-camp gatherings. Directly in front were school offices and along the length of the field was a long building with 6 classrooms in it. There were 3 identical buildings parallel and behind this building. At the far end of the classroom buildings was a two story building with a large room on each floor that would become our dining hall. We prayed for each of these buildings and the field.

We would stay in staff quarters located behind the gathering hall. The school did not have a connection to NEPA (Nigerian electric company), so a generator was used in the evening to provide power for our building. It also provided power for the water pump which would pump water into a holding tank located at the far end of the football field. If the tank ran dry, we would no longer have running water. The staff quarters I stayed in did have a toilet (bucket flushed) and sink, and there was also a shower which was really just a pipe with water coming out. There was no hot water, but with the heat there, that was never a problem as I never wanted it!

One other thing worth mentioning in this post is the food I ate while away. The whole time I was at camp, both during the staff training and the actual camp, our food was cooked by a group of Nigerian cooks. I did my best to eat all that was provided for me. Breakfast was almost always plain white bread with tea, and I was dumbfounded by how much plain white bread my Nigerian friends could eat! I was served curried beans regularly. Sometimes with fried plantains, other times with boiled yams, and occasionally just by themselves. The beans became my favorite dish there, which given how little I enjoy beans at home surprised me greatly, but it was nice because we had this almost every day for lunch! I also ate semovita with a variety of sauces. Semovita is a dough-like substance made from the inside of corn kernels. You eat it by ripping off a piece and dipping it in egussi or vegetable sauce. Gari, made from cassava, was eaten in two ways. When prepared in epa form, it’s eaten like semovita. It’s also served in a powder/flake form, in which case you mix it with water and you can then either drink it or eat it with a spoon. Gari in this form soaks up water and expands quite a bit, so people joked that the gari was a 24-hour meal while the semovita was a 12-hour meal because of how much gari expands in your stomach. I liked the epa form of gari, but not the powdery one. Semovita wasn’t one of my favorites either. We were also occasionally served rice with some sauce on it. Absolutely everything was very spicy, so if for some reason I had cooled enough to the point where the humidity was not making me sweat, the food would. I was glad that I had learned to eat spicy food growing up, because it really was quit hot. The Nigerians told me that you can tell if someone is healthy by whether or not they sweat while eating the food. I will say that the one value of sweating this much is that even a warm breeze feels a little cooler when you’re soaking wet. Despite the fact that I ate all sorts of new and unusual foods to my taste, I never had a problem with anything I ate.

Church and fellowship

Many people have asked how church and fellowship have been here, so I’d thought I’d answer that here. Church and fellowship here in Nigeria has been great, so much more rewarding than I was expecting. There are a great number of churches here, percentage wise much more than the US, I think, but how many of them as truly Christian as we think of it and how many of them are just culturally Christian, I don’t know. We go to JETS (Jos ECWA theological seminary) church, which is a mostly Nigerian church whose senior pastor, pastor Maigadi, is none other than our beloved Kauna’s (you know Kauna, the wonderful Nigerian who is in charge of us STA’s and teaches us how to shop in the market!) father. Her family is just the greatest. Pastor Maigadi went to seminary in the US and is now a professor at JETS as well. One of her brothers is on the worship team and is a great singer.

So JETS church is a neat place for us for many reasons. Some of the Nigerian doctors go there, who we know, as do some of the missionaries. A family that our church in Madison supports also goes to JETS church. So we feel that we already know quite a few people there. The service is so lovely. The music there is wonderful. Nigerians are so musical. The worship there is loud, boisterous, joyful, and beautiful. It’s a combination of English, Hausa, and other tribal languages. The pastor gives messages which are always thought-provoking and interesting. It’s neat going to a seminary church because there are often times where there is a Q & A session before or after the sermon, and since there are theology students, the discussion can be quite lively. Everyone wants to ask questions and give answers. The church also has a fun tradition to greet new people. Visitors stand up and tell their names and where they’re from. Then, they all go to the front of the church. The worship team sings a song, and everyone from the church then files down, singing and dancing, to shake your hand and welcome you to their church. It’s really quite the experience!

After service, they have a room set aside where they herd visitors to have snacks and drinks and meet with some people from the church. It’s also fun just to look around at church, because Nigerians wear beautiful outfits, mostly tailor-made, and it’s always colorful. It’s so much more expressive than American clothes, because everyone chooses their own fabric and style. Also, in church, every woman has to have her hair covered. Some women have the most elaborate hair coverings---tall, looped every which way, with multiple layers and knots, you just can’t believe they can tie one piece of cloth like that. The younger girls have what look almost like headbands, so that their hairstyles can be seen. Here it’s very improper for a man and a woman to show affection in public, even married couples, so you never see opposite sexes holding hands but you do often see two people of the same sex holding hands. It’s common between good friends. We see it a lot at church and I never get used to it!

Incidentally, Easter at JETS was one of the best services I’ve ever been to. In a place where death is always so close, life is celebrated even more joyfully, so the resurrection of Christ is a great cause for celebration here. They also celebrated Pastor and Mrs. Maigadi’s 25th wedding anniversary, which was so fun. Their 4 children composed and sang a song for them (in 4 part harmony), there was cake and a hilarious slide show of what they looked like in the early 80’s and a lot of laughter. Nigerians never miss a chance to greet and hug someone, so at some point the music was started up and everyone got into a line and sang and danced their way to the Maigadis to hug them and congratulate them. What love!

We’ve also had great fellowship with the doctors here. The residents here work much harder and accept much less pay than their classmates to work at a missions hospital. They get really good experience here, but at the same time, I admire the fact that many of them really do have a heart for God and want to love their patients. The doctors have a Bible study once a month, which Marion, Becca, and I attended, and it was wonderful. People here are so much less shy than in the US. They like to think, to share their opinions, to have opinions! It makes for very good discussion and learning. They love to sing and like I said, everyone can sing well here so it’s beautiful music. They also always offer way too many yummy snacks! It’s just amazing to me, that no matter where I am in the world, there are people who know the same songs, worship the same God, and are part of the same family of Christ. I never even knew these people existed 5 weeks ago, yet, here I am, sharing deep thoughts with them, eating with them, singing with them.

EMS

Last week, Marion, Becca, and I went to EMS school, which is an ECWA school where Nigerian missionaries can send one child to school for free. It must be such a tough choice, because they have to somehow pick, either the smartest one or the oldest or what, I don’t know, but only one, and the other children often won’t get any education, since there’s no money. These kids are often quite neglected medically. Since they are missionary kids, many people think, “oh, we don’t have to give money to take care of them, they’re not as bad as the street orphans”, but yet, there isn’t any money to give them decent medical care. So we went to do physical exams on them. White doctors try to do it once a year, roughly. Dr. Anthis sent us and told us she thought we’d be able to get through them in 1.5 hours. We set up shop in one of the classrooms and each of us had a bench and an interpreter, and off we went. We quickly realized we were NOT going to be done in 1.5 hours, as there were 110-120 of them, and we had to take their histories, treat them, counsel them, and pray for them. Even if we spent a minute a person, that would still be longer than 1.5 hours!!!! Plus, we’re medical students, and we’re new at it, so it probably took us twice as long as it would have taken Dr. Anthis.

We were there for 3 hours and saw about 66 kids. We saw the usual big mix of things. Most were healthy, but there were a lot of coughs, fever, stomach aches, fungal infections, malaria, ear infections, etc. I also counseled many of the older girls about sex and being careful and saving themselves for marriage, which was an interesting experience for me, having not really done it before. They were quite shy about it, but after seeing all the HIV I’ve seen here in Africa, believe me, I was quite motivated to do it, shy or not shy! They all got de-worming medications. They were mostly so well behaved, and I was surprised that most of them really enjoyed being prayed for, as most kids aren’t like that in the US! We decided to quit when it got dark and returned the next morning to finish the other 60-70 kids. We didn’t have interpreters this time, so we just pulled out our little Hausa book, learned some critical words, which got us through, and finished much quicker than the day before.

We had a tour of the school, which includes the girls and boys hostels, kitchen (VERY small), classrooms, main building, and playground. Each child does all his/her own cleaning, laundry, etc., and they all participate in chores around the school. These kids are so amazing. They all love God and their families so much, even the youngest ones. They are dirty, have so few clothes, do tough chores, are so far from their families, don’t eat nutritious food, and endure many other hardships, yet they have time to laugh, smile, enjoy themselves. They loved having us and followed us everywhere. They were so cute and bright and so social. I don’t understand what it is about these kids---they’re all so much less bratty than US kids, yet, once they grow up, they often forget the good teaching they have. Many youths here don’t work, they sleep around, they lie and cheat, they don’t want to work hard—sadly enough, I think it’s so many years of a hard life at a young age that changes them. It robs them of their native decency and trust and honesty. They endure suffering without complaining as a child, but at some point, it just proves to be too much and they break. It’s very tragic. Of course it’s not everyone, many Nigerians are decent and wonderful and all are joyful and strong, but in general, in Nigeria, you jut aren’t trustworthy until you prove yourself so.

Gidan Bege and Blindtown

Hello! Here’s another fun and exciting experience we’ve been able to have here in Nigeria. It’s called Gidan Bege clinic! Gidan Bege, if you remember, is the ministry which took us to the village outreach. Dr. Cindy Anthis, one of the missionary doctors, runs a free clinic mostly for women and children at Gidan Bege every Wednesday. Marion, Becca, and I have been taking turns going there, sometimes all three of us, sometimes only two of us. It consists of us, Dr. Anthis, a Nigerian medical student, and anywhere from 3-6 health care workers all crammed in a small room, all on two long benches, seeing anywhere from what feels like 50-150 patients in about two hours. It’s loud all the time. We do the best physical exams we can in this setting, but often, you just have to rely on the history of the illness and treat whatever the top three diagnoses might be. We end up being very liberal with handing out medications, because you never know if they’re going to come back, and you want to make sure you cover for the most dangerous illnesses that they might have. We see a lot of cough, fever, rash, eye problems, hypertension, diarrhea, malnutrition, etc. Dr. Anthis is pretty amazing and for the sicker ones, who really need hospital care but can’t afford it, she often pays for their care.
Gidan Bege is a pretty amazing place---we get a chance to talk with the boys (formerly living on the streets) who live there, and visit the jewelry shop, sewing shops, prostheses shop, etc---people, many widows and ex-homeless people, are trained to do these things to support themselves and I am incredibly impressed at their successes.
Then we go to Blind Town, which is quite an experience. This is a section that the government put aside for people who are blind, and it is very, very poor. Many of them can’t travel to see a doctor, being without money or sight. Mostly Muslims live here. Apparently, Muslims inflicted by bad diseases are often turned out of their homes to beg, because one of the pillars of Islam is to give alms to the poor, so those with bad diseases are made to beg as a way to support this important pillar. At least, this is what I am told. Apparently the Christians take care of their own, so there are few here. It is frightfully dirty, crowded, dusty, and smelly. There are animals everywhere. It is a warren of alleys with tiny hovels, one against the other. We went down each alley way, and people crowded everywhere around us. Though Dr. Anthis and Gidan Bege have been coming for a while, apparently they never lose their fascination with bature (white people). All the kids wanted to touch the bature and grabbed Marion, Becca, and I all over. Multiple kids grabbed our hands at the same time and it’s hard to get them to let go. Dr Anthis is an amazing teacher and is good about letting us do things. She lets us do BP’s, exams, etc. Anything that needs to be done, it’s done, right there on the streets. I’ve never done such down and dirty medicine before. Two of the health care workers hauled around a big medicine bag and we handed them out as we could. We saw similar things to Gidan Bege, such as astronomical hypertension, worms, infections of all sorts, coughs, heart failure, and just complications from many chronic diseases that we hardly see in the US because we control it before it damages our bodies. Dr. Anthis also spent time trying to convince women to do family planning. Muslim men often have many wives and don’t believe in birth control. One lady we saw needed to have birth control, she had heart failure from pregnancy and almost died with the last one but her husband refuses to let her. He’d rather see her die than try to help her not have another baby, which is hard for us to understand, yet, Dr. Anthis is just patient and is slowly trying to win the husband over. She has more grace than I do!
All in all, Blindtown was a great experience but overwhelming. It’s hard to explain how suffocating it can be to have thirty kids circling you at any given time, clutching you. It’s hard to explain how frustrating it is to see the suffering, the poverty, around every corner. It feels like there is no end to the people who need help, that we could give out medications and see people till we dropped and still, there would be more people that needed help. It makes you feel quite down, sometimes. At the same time, if we didn’t come, there wouldn’t have any help. They wouldn’t have anyone to care for them, no one to share the love of Christ with them. And something is better than nothing. Sometimes, you just want to run away from the ugliness of it all, but I’m trying to remind myself that it was for this very reason God brought us to Africa. He wants us to give love in places where there is little love, and He wants me to be in a place where I’m not totally comfortable, so I can stretch myself and learn to rely on Him completely.

ViIlage Outreach

This is a long one! I’d like to share about the village outreach I went on this weekend, as I’ve learned more from this than anything else I’ve done here in Nigeria. Gidan Bege, which means “house of hope”, is an urban ministry of ECWA/SIM. They have a building in town which is a clinic, vocational school, transitional housing for street kids, and a place where the sports ministry is run. It is really an all-purpose place. Gidan Bege every few months or so goes on a village outreach. Someone working at Gidan Bege has a connection in a village somewhere, and they decide that we should go out and minister to that village. They usually go from Friday to Sunday and take their outreach team, which consists of many Gidan Bege workers, volunteers, and senior boys. The street kids, who are orphans literally found living in the streets, grow up in different Gidan Bege ministries, and when they are old enough, they begin to participate themselves in Gidan Bege ministries. It’s absolutely amazing. Some of these boys have the worst stories. They have no families, and often have been abused, were starving and physically pathetic when they were found. They usually have had little, if any education. Gidan Bege takes them in and gives them a life back. To see them now part of an outreach team, reaching out to others who are as needy as they were, boys who are now healthy, studious, happy, and love God---it’s one of the great miracles God has done here. They really were a joy to work with and treated us like we were their long-lost relatives.

It was a very, very typical Nigerian adventure, for sure! It certainly started out in typical Nigerian fashion. First of all, we arrive at 9AM at Gidan Bege with our van packed full of sleeping bags, tents, sound equipment, food and water in a cooler, and our own stuff (very little), expecting to leave soon after we got there. As we pull up, there are about 30 Nigerians standing around outside, near a white van. Many young men between 18-24 years of age, were milling about, many carrying guitars and drums and other random instruments. We get out and greet everyone in the usual long but joyful fashion. There was a team of about 13 Americans who were on a short-term missions trip who were supposed to join us but weren’t there yet. We wait about half an hour, then it turns out that someone thinks we were supposed to go pick them up instead. No one knows what to do, so we try to call the person in charge of the Americans, but we don’t reach them. So we wait another half an hour, then someone decides we should go get them. Our van only has Becca, Marion, and I (Frank is away at a camp), the driver Mark, and Jummai, a health care worker at Gidan Bege. Jummai and Mark decide we should go to the bakery on our way. Then, Jummai remembers we’re supposed to go pick something up from a pastor at Gidan Bege. Well, that something turns out to be two women traveling to a village “near” the one we’re going to and three sacks of some sort of grain! So off we go, about half an hour behind the other vans by now, and 1.5 hours behind total.

We drive for about 2 hours and drop off one lady, then another. It is soon apparent to me that their villages aren’t exactly “close” to our intended village---we backtrack for about half an hour, so now we’re 1 hour behind the other vans. At some corner, we meet the pastor of the ECWA church which is the nearest ECWA church to the village we are going to. He was waiting for us. However, it’s not like there are any directional signs in Nigeria, and this village we’re going to is in the bush somewhere, on a dirt path off the main road. He’s not sure which dirt road they took. So, for about an hour, every couple of small villages, the pastor would pull over, and ask some villagers if they saw two white vans full of white people and Nigerians drive past. We kept going till we found a village where they said the vans turned off onto a dirt road. We picked up two people there who I guess directed us to the village, but we might have been just giving them a ride. We drive for another 20 minutes through what looks like a scarcely inhabited savannah bush area, and how our driver knew which dirt roads to take, I don’t know. But we finally arrive at a decent size village, and all the villagers are standing there, staring at the Americans. They’ve mostly never seen a white person before and hardly anyone speaks English. Though the other two vans have been there for about an hour, they haven’t done anything but greet people. We go to a small hut to eat lunch, and soon, every window and doorway is filled with the villagers staring at us. At least 100 people watched us eat in solemn silence. It’s INCREDIBLY disconcerting to find that everything you do, every word you speak, every move you make, no matter how trivial, is being watched by just about EVERY person in the village. It gives me so much sympathy for the lions in a zoo!

We then set up shop outside of a Catholic church in the middle of town and get to business. The Gidan Bege boys start playing music and entertaining the children. The Americans pair up with other Gidan Bege people and sit in the church to counsel, pray with, and share the gospel with the villagers. Becca, Marion, and I have an interpreter and our own medical stations. Emmanuel, a Nigerian medical student, and two health care workers, Jummai and Mercy, are there as well, for a total of 6 medical stations. The villagers line up outside the church and give their names and requests, and we all start seeing them.

I’m told we saw 240 people that first afternoon. They just kept coming. It’s hard to explain what it was like. Many people have never seen a doctor before, certainly not a white one. The nearest hospital is who knows where, and I didn’t see more than three vehicles in the village. They are all dirty, somewhat or very malnourished, have terrible teeth, and worms. There is one water source not very close, and it is used for bathing themselves, their cars, their clothes, drinking, etc. We didn’t see water the whole time we were there except the drinking water we brought with us. Almost everyone has stomach complaints, a lot because of the worms, and everyone has back aches and headaches. It’s no wonder. They are farmers who work hard, and all Nigerians carry many, many pounds on their heads. We saw many things we could treat, such as ear infections, malaria, rashes, fungal infections, bladder infections, worms, etc, but we also saw many things we couldn’t help. Cataracts, broken bones healed wrong, very, very sick babies, women who had just given birth and were still bleeding and in pain, large livers and spleens, even one cleft lip and palate. Those, we tried to counsel and convince they needed to go to a hospital, but it’s so hard. They don’t have money or transport. But surely some of the ones I saw would die otherwise. Some of those sickly babies looked like they had HIV and I wished I had some HIV test kits with me. In one way, it's so discouraging, to know people might die of things that could so easily be treated if they had the resources. On the other hand, being a medical worker in Nigerian teaches you something you hardly learn in the US: That we are limited beings. We can't save everyone. We aren't meant to. We are meant to heal the best we can, and the rest is up to God. We don't have power over life and death, and if our patient dies, well, we didn't cause him to die. So we learn humbleness, and just be happy with the victories we do have in healing people.

What I actually found most trying was the cultural differences. There were two main problems: the villagers communicate symptoms and dates differently than we do, and sometimes, they tell half-truths or lies to get what they want. For instance, the first few patients I saw, I asked, “what is the problem?” I was told stomach ache. I’d ask my usual set of questions: “where is it, do you have diarrhea, do you have vomiting, do you see blood in either?” The answers I’d get are: “the pain is all over, I have diarrhea, I have vomiting, I sometimes see blood.” I soon learned that I very specifically had to ask, “when was the last time you had blood in your diarrhea?” because the answer was often, “last year”. Or, I learned to ask, “when do you vomit? What do you vomit? How much?” because I’d often get, “I vomit only a little bit of whitish stuff after I ate”, which isn’t really vomit. Sometimes I would ask if they had blood in their urine, and at first they’d say yes, then when I started asking more detailed questions, I’d get, “well, no, I don’t really have blood in my urine”. I don’t know if they didn’t understand my interpreter or if I was asking the question incorrectly, or if they were lying or what. So it became this game of trying to find the right question to ask to get the right answer. Sometimes, they just didn’t know how to answer. They’d tell me they had body pain, but they didn’t know where. I’d ask, “is it your head, or your throat, or your legs, your mouth….”etc, etc, etc, and they’d say no to everything, but still insist they had pain. I would just tell them I can’t treat them if I don’t know what I am treating, but I always gave everyone a course of multivitamins and de-worming pills anyway.
Jummai and Mercy told me that many Nigerians simply don’t know how to answer the question, as in, for some reason, villagers can’t answer straight, and they also said that many of the villagers had nothing wrong. It’s just that most hardly ever see a doctor, and if their neighbor got a pill, well, they want a pill too! They want whatever free thing they can get their hands on, and you can’t convince them they don’t need a cough syrup if they don’t have a cough! If their son gets a cough syrup, then by God, they should get a cough syrup too.

I also learned a few things about myself. After what must have been the 50th stomach ache, headache, backache, and fever I saw in a row, I began to be very skeptical, and very tired of seeing the same thing. I began to suspect that each person had told their neighbor to tell the stupid white person that they had a stomach ache and she’d give you a pill, and they’d all decided to play the same trick. It’s hard to show grace when you’re tired, frustrated, and can’t get a straight answer from anyone. Jummai and Mercy were quite skeptical and often sent patients away after scolding them for coming with false complaints. Since I was sitting by them, I found my skepticism boosted by theirs. Becca and Marion, who were sitting on the other side of the room, were much better at being compassionate and believing the patient. I suspect that the truth again lay somewhere between us---Becca and Marion being a bit too gullible and Mercy, Jummai, and I being too skeptical. At the end of the clinic, I reminded myself that loving my patients was my priority, and resolved to do better the next day and look to the spiritual as well as the physical suffering.

Clinic ended around dinner time, except, there was no dinner! The pastor who sent us to this village hadn’t told the village we were coming, because in the past some villages had been told we were coming and they were all excited and prepared meals and a celebration, and then we had to cancel for some reason, and it was a huge disappointment. So this time, we just showed up without prior notice. So, no one had dinner except Marion, Becca, and I—we ate the same thing we had for lunch, bread with jam, and oranges. During the evening, they set up a screen and had a movie and other visual arts presentations and a man who spoke to the village and prayed for them. He asked how many people were moved by everything they saw and experienced today, and over 200 decided to dedicate their lives to Christ. It is hard to know how many were genuine or were just caught up in the moment, but if even half were sincere, then it was an amazing thing. The ECWA pastor arranges for follow-up, and everyone got together and prayed in little groups with these people. We finished the evening with singing. Nigerians love to sing and sing in wonderful harmony, so it was great.

We slept in tents that had been put up in the middle of town. As we made our way to the tents, the villagers all stood in a circle around the tents and stared solemnly at us again. Becca, Marion, and I tried to find a place to sneak off to in order to go to the bathroom without anyone seeing us (no, there was no toilet or any sort, just the bush and the toilet paper and hand sanitizer we brought) and we ended up having to go far out into the bush and turning off our flashlights so no one could see us. The tents weren’t in great shape so there were holes and I was dreading the mosquitoes coming in. Sure enough, there were mosquitoes all night long in our tent. I decided I’d rather be bitten than put a sheet over me because it was SO hot. We didn’t sleep well---someone was playing the guitar for hours into the night, there was a loud radio somewhere in the village, the dogs were barking, the mosquitoes were buzzing in our ears, and someone in the next tent was snoring VERY loudly, but it was what I expected.

By 6AM the next morning, the villagers were back, standing outside our tents, waiting for us to come out. I can’t describe to you how grubby we felt in the morning---we couldn’t even wash our hands with water, and we had layers of dust, dirt, sweat, sunscreen, insect repellent, and hand sanitizer on. We had a quick prayer/worship time, another trip to the bush, and by 8AM, we were back at our clinic stations. It was much the same as the day before. I was able to be more patient that day. We ran out of many medications by noon, so we quit. The Nigerians were staying another dy, but the American team and the three of us were going home that day. And as usual, we got delayed going home. We meant to leave soon after clinic ended, but one of the American little boys on the team had run off with the village boys to find the water hole to chase around monkeys and was nowhere in sight. Our driver Amos and some Gidan Bege and village kids went to find him. We sat roasting in the car for almost 45 minutes while the villagers stood and stared at us. The kid came back on someone's shoulders, in a throng of Nigerian villagers and Gidan Bege kids like a returning champion. Amos went missing for another 30 minutes until we sent some boys to find him, and finally he came back. So we left, 1.5 hours late in true Nigerian fashion. And of course, we get a flat tire about 1 hour out. We pull over, thankfully near an intersection with a town and not in the middle of the bush somewhere. Most of the men go off to roll the tires to get pumped (the spare was flat too). The rest of us try to stand in the shade, which is still hot, and avoid bugs. After half an hour later they're back, get the tire back on, and off we go. We get home with no more mishaps and thank God for showers that work!

Traditional Healer

Hello! Marion, Becca, and I had a very busy week last week, all of which I'd like to share, but it would be way too long in one posting, so I'll just do a bunch of postings in a row (if my connection is good enough!). I'd like to start with the traditional healer we went to see at Miango. Paul, the man who takes care of the dogs and guards and generally the whole compound, took us, as it is his home town. It is about 30 minutes-1 hr away, and it is a lovely small town in the country, surrounded by big rocks. We were expecting that they would be old men who had been taught the art of herbs as a family tradition, but they were not that at all. The healers were two or three men, in their late 30-s to early-40s, who believed God gave them a gift of learning healing herbs. They didn’t have a teacher, it seems, they taught themselves. They told us they gathered their own herbs, which mostly seemed to be from common trees and plants around. They took their children to help and teach them about the herbs. They are farmers for a living, and they charge patients if they can pay and don’t charge if the patients can’t pay. They see it as their calling from God, their way of service. They have a house that acts as an inpatient ward of sorts, when needed. They see themselves as healers as much as doctors are, except that know there are some conditions they can’t treat and then they send them on to the hospital. They have absolutely no quarrel with the hospital or Western medicine. They just wished their practice was accepted by Western-style doctors with the same equanimity. They showed us many of their herbs. They had herbs for everything from colds to cirrhosis to anemia to giving energy. They even had a combination of herbs that they say cures early stage HIV infection. They say they had four patients who were tested for HIV and were positive but were still healthy and unaffected, and after taking the herbs, they were re-tested and were HIV negative. Of course, we were somewhat skeptical, but I encouraged them to keep very careful track of their research and bring it to the attention of the hospital, because if it really can cure early stage HIV, well, it’s a priceless thing. I believe in herbal medicines; after all, many drugs we have now are simply chemicals distilled from plants and herbs. But still, they need to have good strong evidence before anyone will believe them. It’s not good to get your hopes up with HIV treatment, as nothing has panned out yet!

They asked for prayers, that they find money to have a real inpatient ward and that people might believe in what they do. In Nigeria, traditional healers are often the occult, also witch doctors of a sort. Herbal medications often come along with charms and belief in the spirits and things like that. It’s not that I don’t believe in evil spirits or spiritual warfare, but when you start believing you can manipulative spirits or nature through charms and incantations, well, that’s witchcraft. So being a Christian herbal healer is a very rare thing. We prayed for them, and they prayed for us, and then we went to the market. Apparently, each small town had a market day, where sellers from many different towns and villages would all come, and they’d have a very big market. It seemed you could buy just about anything from credit for a cell phone to pots to fish in this market. Becca took a picture of the market and managed to offend the ladies we were trying to buy cose from. Apparently, many Nigerians don’t like having their pictures taken. Some, because they feel you shouldn’t take a picture of them unless they are in their best outfits. Others, because they think you’re trapping their spirits in a picture and won’t be able to get them back. And still others think you might be trying to scam them and steal the patterns of their goods, so they don’t want any pictures taken of what they are selling. Anyway, we were trying to buy cose, which is a generic term for some sort of dough-like substance deep fried in palm oil, which is a very fatty, red oil. The dough can be a bean paste, or pounded cassava or yam (both are starchy roots like potatoes but taste different, more starchy and bland). I love the bean cose. They have a big pot of boiling oil at the market, and they cook them right there in front of you and you can get a big handful for next to nothing. Paul finally sweet-talked them into selling some to us and we burned out tongues eating them right out of the pot!

On the way home, Paul had to stop and greet every person we came upon. Since it was his village, he knew everyone, and in Nigeria it is so impolite not to stop and have a long greeting with people you know. It was remarkable; even 15 minutes from the village, at a military checkpoint, he ran into someone he knew. Apparently, the army men at the checkpoint, Paul, and two men on a motor bike all played together as children. Somehow, the two men on the bike insulted one of the army men when they were asked to stop for a routine search, so the army man took the keys to the bike and refused to give them back until the bike men apologized (or gave money, I suspect). Paul got out and spoke to the army men at length, reminding them that no matter who insulted who, God asks us to forgive and give grace to those who insult us, and so on. The army men were finally swayed and gave the keys back. We go back on the road (most roads in Nigeria are either run-down potholed sort-of paved roads or bumpy dirt roads but neither are particularly comfortable and none have any traffic rules of any sort) and finally arrived home tired, hot, and hungry (this is a common way we arrive home from anywhere). Wow!

Yankari

Saturday morning, we woke up early (although not too bright) and gathered our things for a trip to Yankari National Park. Barbara and I grabbed our cooled water from the fridge, our food, and our bags, and met Becca and Marion at the van. We’d rented one of the SIM/ECWA vans and Michael from the SIM office had offered to be our driver for the weekend. Yankari is a 3-4 hour drive from Jos, and is located northeast of Jos in Bauchi province.

The drive to Yankari was the first time any of the four of us had been off the plateau that Jos sits on since we first arrived. Although we were very sleepy, Michael seemed wide awake and drove us safely. The countryside didn’t seem too different from on the plateau, and for the first few hours of the trip, the roads were smooth and traffic wasn’t too bad. At least, that was the impression I got when I wasn’t trying to sleep off the early wake up time. I did my best to stay awake with Michael at first, and after fighting off the sleep for about half an hour I succumbed to the weight of my eyelids and dozed most of the rest of the way. I did wake up when we drove through Bauchi, which is the capitol of Bauchi province. Bauchi struck me as very similar to Jos although much less hilly. Michael said it was a bit smaller than Jos, but we didn’t really drive around enough there to be able to tell.

A little ways after Bauchi, we turned off the main road, and a little further down we came to the gates of Yankari. We had to stop there and pay the entrance fee, for which we had to get out of the van and sign a guest book. We also had to pay a fee for the van and for the use of our cameras in the park. Altogether it came to a little less than $20, more than a third of which was for the use of our digital camera. A regular old film camera is 10 times less to take into the park. As we were waiting for everyone to sign the book, two Nigerian policemen came up to me and we started chatting, and soon they asked if they could have a ride to their motorbike which had a flat tire about 20 km down the park road, so we invited them along and put their spare in the back and drove in. The park road was paved. Well, I should really say it was paved once, and now the pavement had gigantic pot holes in it, so we drove with at least 1 and often both sets of wheels on the shoulder. It wasn’t any less bumpy but at least the bumps were smoothed out, without jagged pavement edges to rip at our tires. The clay under the pavement is easily washed away in the rainy season. Regular signs were posted indicating that “Animals Have The Right Of Way”. I later learned that this didn’t apply to guinea fowl. We dropped the police at their bike, and a little while later were at our destination.

Arriving at the welcome center an hour after we entered the park, we checked into some huts. Accommodations come in varying sizes at the park, and Barbara and I stayed in a round hut with a large bedroom and a single bathroom. There was no running water, but there were buckets and giant stores of water spread throughout, so used that. There was a porch outside as well, and there were baboons and warthogs wandering around. I haven’t mentioned yet that the moment we got out of the air conditioned van, we were struck with sweltering heat the likes of which I don’t believe I’ve ever experienced before. It was a dry heat that felt like it was well over 100 degrees, and the breeze that blew felt like it was wafting air directly out of an oven into my face.

Fortunately, the compound is located right next to the Wikki Warm Springs, so we changed into our swim suits and headed down to the water for a swim. The spring bubbles up out of the base of a sandstone wall set in a ravine down from the hut area. The water comes out at 88 degrees all year round regardless of weather. I was surprised that it still felt warm to the touch when I got in, but it was much cooler than the surrounding air and was quite relaxing. There was a small current, and swam up and down the 300 meter length of spring, sometimes just sitting in the shallow areas for about 3 hours.

Being in the middle of a nature reserve, the spring wasn’t devoid of wildlife near the banks, although there weren’t any fish. There were small lizards everywhere, although that’s no different than Jos. They’re more common than squirrels in Nigeria. The primary thing the spring had in abundance was flies, including tsetse flies, which would fly around your head and occasionally bite you in the shoulder if you held it above water. Fortunately, I didn’t get bit, although Barbara got a bite on her hand which was not so pleasant. I also saw a light brown bat flying around and watched him settle in a tree about 3 feet from the water. At one point, I was watching him and he stretched out his wings and hung by just one claw and I soon realized that he was getting ready to move so I stayed and watched. After a few moments, he swooped down towards me, and as I ducked away he landed in the middle of the spring! He began flapping his wings in a swimming sort of motion and swam about 10 feet along the surface of the water while drinking before heading back onto the bank. It was one of the oddest things I’d seen. A short while later the baboons came down the hill from the hut area to join us. We watched from the water as 50-80 baboons descended the slope towards the water, ignoring the stairs completely. How rude! I was expecting to see them jump right in and join us, but instead, they either walked along the bank or stopped at the edge to have a drink. They drank in a position similar to a swimmer on the blocks at the start of a meet, and I really wanted to get behind one and shove him in the water, but I thought better of it. Barbara and the others cooed at the babies clinging to the backs or bellies of their mothers. I have to say they were awfully cute. Much cuter than human babies. ;)

After our swim we went up and had lunch and then took a quick nap, preparing for the 3:30 pm Safari truck. At about 3:15, Michael came by and told us he’d seen the truck leave at 3:00 with a full load of students, but when he asked about it was told they’d have another at 4, so we waited some more. When the truck came back, we watched it unload about 50 people, and although large, they were literally packed in there. We got the later tour and had about 15 people, which gave us just enough room for everyone to have a seat and we were VERY thankful that the first truck had taken most of the folks interested in going.

We were told that the animals are free to roam and were wild, so anything we saw would be based on the luck of the day, so we set out with hopes that we’d catch a glimpse of some animals along the rivers drinking.

We saw some water buck as well as some bush buck, which people in the US would know better as antelope. One of the things we quickly learned with both these animals was how well they were camouflaged for their habitat. Eyeing movement was the key t seeing them, and once you saw them, it was often hard to point them out to other people until they moved again. The terrain was referred to as the savannah woodland, with tall grasses and many small trees in the range of 10 to 15 feet tall. There were also much taller trees mixed in, and near the river the bush was thick with flora and the trees were much taller, too. We saw many birds including the red-throated bee-eater and the gray-headed kingfisher. The latter was a particularly beautiful bird, as the non-gray part was a brilliantly bright blue with black trim around the wings and tail. Most of the birds fled at the approach of the large truck, so we weren’t able to get any good pictures of them. We also saw quite a few tantalus monkeys in the forest, and they eyed us with curiosity as they jumped among the branches.

After driving for some time, the guide suddenly stopped the truck and commanded us to be quiet. He then pointed into the woods and as I looked, I saw trees and nothing else. Then I noticed movement about 200 yards from the vehicle as someone informed me that there were elephants. The guides led us out of the truck and into the forest to get a closer look, and soon we were 50-100 feet from a pack of about 50 elephants ranging in size from ones that were about 10 feet tall to enormous beasts that looked as big as the hut we were staying in. The sight of these elephants filing through the woods in a tight cluster looked like a pack of boulders on the move. Several of them turned to eye us warily as they passed, but since we didn’t get any closer, they soon decided we weren’t a threat and they moved on. The elephants were taking a path that led them around a rocky hill outcropping and as I watched, one of the Nigerians on the tour with us tapped me on the shoulder, pointed, and said, “There’s the king.” As I looked up, I could see what appeared to be the largest elephant in the pack standing atop an outcropping of rock, surveying his pack as it went by. It was breathtaking to see this parade of gigantic animals from so close, and humbling to see how their leader watched over them. Seeing one or two of them in a zoo in the US doesn’t compare in the least to the experience.

After the tour, we returned to our huts and then headed down to dinner at the restaurant. Since the power had gone out in the entire compound, we had a candlelight dinner of chicken and our choice of starch (I had spaghetti while Barbara had fries) covered in a red sauce that we’ve come to love here. It’s sort of a spicy meat sauce, and probably tastes so good in large part due to the amount of oil in it. After dinner, we stayed up and chatted a bit on the porch given that it seemed even hotter inside our huts, but we were so worn out by the heat that we went to bed not long after. With the fans not working because we had no power, we tried to get rest in the heat, but it was not easy. In the morning, shortly after we woke up we heard a banging on the door, and Barbara went to the door to ask who it was and got no response. She looked out the window and there was a rather large baboon. I went to one of the other windows, and remarked that there were three more just off of our porch. With that, one of the smaller ones jump up at the window right at me and clawed at the screen before rejoining his friends. Seems they were looking for some breakfast, too.

We had some breakfast in our hut with no more interruptions from the baboons, and then went on the morning tour. We saw many of the same animals, although we saw a rather impressive species of stork, several red monkeys, as well as a pregnant water buffalo. We saw another pack of elephants that we drove a little way off the road to see. As the last one passed, we soon realized there was one more bringing up the rear. It was a rather large elephant and was probably somewhat old, and it hobbled with a limp that prevented it from keeping pace with the rest. Our guide mentioned that it would either heal or eventually be left behind to die by the rest of the group. The same group of elephants crossed our road a little further down, and the lame one had caught up by this point.

We returned back to the camp and went for another swim being joined only briefly this time by the baboons. We had some lunch and then loaded up the van to head back to Jos. The drive was uneventful again, although after talking with Michael for a bit I was very glad he was able to drive us. His wife is pregnant with their third child and is due in May, so they’re saving up for the expensive C-Section she’ll have to undergo as well as the post-surgical care, which is a total of about 30,000 naira, quite a lot for his family. The driving trips pay him well, and it’s extra income he hasn’t planned for so he can put it directly towards those savings. I told him that I hoped he enjoyed the trip, too, and he seemed to really enjoy his time swimming with us. We were very glad to have him along, not just for his driving, but also for his ability to translate when needed (not too often), and just for the chance to get to know him better. He's an awfully kind person and we felt very much like he cared just as much about us having a good time as we did for him.