Musings

BAAAAHHHHHH!!!!! I know I haven’t written a blog in like a really long time, sorry about that. Life has been super crazy and every time I think about sitting down to write a blog there are about a million other things that come into my mind that I ought to be doing instead. I am sitting at the dining room table right now with a cup of coffee (yeah and it’s not even instant, I love my host parents!) I just finished my November GCP a little bit late (but still OK for the HNGR timeline) and I am about to go interview a pastor at my church (yeah probably should have done that 3 months ago). She is a really cool woman who unlike pretty much every other woman I have talked to here is opposed to the Buganda tradition of kneeling. She also was a bit disappointed when she found out that though I kind of want to study theology I am going to med school and hope to be an “armchair theologian.” Her response was, girl you have to join me and strive to wear purple. I was really confused at first racking my brain for why I would wear purple, I was never going to be a ruler or royalty of any sort, then I slowly came to the hierarchy of the church but still I was a bit confused as only men in funny gowns of different colors came into my head. There I realized was the rub, I could only imagine men wearing purple and red, putting on those funny hats and stolls (note: I really love the stolls). There are no female bishops (OK I should probably fact check this but with no readily accessible internet just check for yourself) in the Anglican church. Yes, we will ordain women, but we will not put them in leadership much above that and in some churches that I have been attending women are relegated to the sidelines rarely preaching and more given the role of pastoral care than anything.

I want to fight that battle right along side this beautiful Ugandan woman, but I think God has other plans for my life. Isn’t specialization just so difficult? I hate that my life is narrowing right now by going to medical school next year. I wonder if I will be able to pursue my interest in theology and the social sciences. I wonder what good being an armchair theologian will do. But, then I look at the examples of my mother and grandmother working in our conservative church where women can’t even be Sunday school leaders. I believe they have done loads of good in that church and been a voice for the marginalized (read: women) in our church. I see my mom reaching out to my friends who are women going into fields of study primarily dominated by men. I see my mom reaching out to women who are hurting and have been very hurt by our church, she is being an armchair theologian making a huge impact. Yes, I want to wear purple, I want to be the one who overturns so many of the stereotypes, but this is not where my gifts lie. I get to rely on others in the Body of Christ to use their gifts and talents to take on this role. I can’t care about every single thing and I can act on even less things, this is the beauty of the Church that we get to rely on one another to fulfill our collective mission in the world. Right now my calling isn’t to pursue the purple but you can be assured that I will be working right alongside those women who are pursuing purple. Praying for them and trying to change the perception of them in my own little ways. Leadership in the church may not seem like a really big deal, but by denying us leadership we continue to live in the perception (slight as it may be) that there is a hierarchy among people. I see this hierarchy enacted all too much here in Uganda. The group that is most at risk for HIV/AIDS is married women, married women!! Women who cannot tell their husbands to use a condom without the risk of domestic violence or being told to leave thereby cutting themselves off from financial support. Women who have to show respect to men by kneeling when they speak to them or greet them. Women who see their children suffering with little to eat, no money for school or medicine but cannot use family planning for fear that their husbands will see them as promiscuous. Perhaps these issues seem unrelated, but I seem them as integrally related. When we refuse to give women the dignity of using their gifts in the Church in areas of leadership we identify them as less than ideal as people who just can’t quite make it. This has ramifications for all aspects of our community, here they are just magnified by a culture that in many ways has not been marked by the feminist movement.

OK I wasn’t planning on posting all these thoughts here, but this is just one small thing that I am wrestling with/have been wrestling with. I look forward to seeing many of you soon and talking about the many other experiences I have had here, the people I have met and the things I have been thinking about. Right now I need to go prepare for that interview and I think I just spent about 20 minutes writing this when I really should have been doing that… oops! Going back to school is gonna be rough! I thank you all very much for sharing this journey with me. Please be praying for me as I go about the hard task of goodbyes in these next few weeks. I will dearly miss my family and the everyday routine of life that I have experienced during my time here. I will miss the look of the streets here, the tropical birds that wake me every morning and beauty of green imposed upon the red dirt that filters into everything here. I need to be writing more about the richness of life here about the beauty of everything, but I just have too much to do!!! Pray that I would just savor the everyday moments as I say goodbye to this beautiful place that I have come to call home and these beautiful people who have become family.

Routine?

Did she know? I sat there having just learned that doctors can at times test for HIV without the consent of a patient. You just write R.C.T. on the paper (Routine Counseling and Testing) if you suspect HIV and then bam, you know before a patient even suspects what’s going on that they are positive. I sat there knowing the news before this woman and as I studied her face and the way she was still able to laugh at the jokes of the doctor I felt sure she didn’t know. I drifted to a different place remembering my tasks and things to do, pulling out my phone I began to text Sarah to remind her to get pictures from Jean. When I looked up again the woman was tearing up. She hadn’t known. It felt so insensitive, so rude that I was texting while she found out news of a disease that will dramatically alter the rest of her life. Then I really began to observe how the doctor handled this. Routine would be the best description. At that moment she was just another patient with another problem to be dealt with. Sure, he spent more time with her explaining things to her than usual, but as usual there was no compassion.

Does treating it as another routine diagnosis make the blow any softer for the patient? Is it merely self preserving? As I tried to put myself in this woman’s place I felt like screaming. I would feel like saying doesn’t anyone understand, my whole life has changed in this moment and you’re texting on your damn phone. Won’t someone scream with me? Does anyone else feel this pain, this regret, this overwhelming suffocating fear? Instead I sat there following the routine. Doctor asked me to take her blood pressure and I was surprised as I wrapped the cuff around her arm, the cuff was much too big for her small arm. I always wonder how this affects the reading. I am happy to touch her, I am happy to be the first one to touch her after finding this out. I only wish I had control of the situation and I could be the one delivering the news, or do I? The BP was not routine though I thought I must be doing something wrong, I heard nothing up to 100, then suddenly there it was coming fast as if breaking through a dam. 95/55, why is it so low? The bad news has sent her into hypotension the doctor explains, a result of the bad news. Everything has an explanation. As I observe her more closely with the clinical eye I have begun to develop I notice the tassles on her scarf shaking ever so slightly. The scarf reminds me of Courtney, what would I do if this were Courtney? This poor woman, she has a child I gather, was it 3 or 5 years I can’t read the doctor’s handwriting. Does the child also have HIV. I think of the infant we saw just on Monday, scrawny with lots of skin lesions. Will the child live to 25? This woman will be lucky if she lives past 60, but she lives in Kosovo so probably even less time as diseases thrive in the flood waters that so often wreak havoc on that village. She is so small. Which partner gave her HIV. Was it her husband or someone else? Was it of her own will or forced upon her? Which faces flashed in her head as she found out she was positive? Did she ever imagine that her diarrhea was the result of HIV as she walked down that familiar road from Kosovo? And then it is over as soon as it began, she walks past the curtains, a face I will never see again and another patient walks in. Routine, is there ever a place for compassion in the routine?

The other pictures

The rest of the pictures

bunyoni 1

chw gift exchange 7

imgp0761

monkey on a boda 2

muduuma foliage 24 sept 7

An attempt at being more open

So I was just inspired by reading Christine Kirschner’s blog. I think my blog thus far has largely been something that I hope is funny, entertaining and an enjoyable read. I try to keep it mostly light just updating you about the “stuff” going on in my life without going really deep. Christine is really open in her blog and it is an openness that I really respect but deeply fear to be myself. I have been discovering that I am really self-protective. The people I have really opened up to in my life haven’t been very many and the hurts of opening up to people then having to leave or having them leave or whatever the case may be has really made me hesitant to be open. I realize that there is a level of protectiveness that is healthy, but I think sometimes where I’m at isn’t the healthy kind.

I was talking with my friend Kate here (I’m actually writing this from the Food for the Hungry compound where I’m spending the night with her and enjoying wireless internet and space and time to reflect) and she had some great words of wisdom. She talked about this cross cultural training she had been a part of before coming over here. One piece of advice they talked about in regards to goodbyes is that by not saying goodbyes to people you devalue them and communicate that they aren’t worth your emotional energy to say goodbye. The thing that really stuck out to me though was when she added that bad goodbyes will hinder future hellos. I think this is something I am really struggling with. I closed out my time at Mary Baldwin College badly and I don’t keep in touch with anyone from that point in my life. Similarly, when I left my high school I didn’t want to even tell anyone that I was leaving. These habits of just breaking off ties without finding closure or seeking true goodbyes has made me a person hesitant to settle down and really settle in with people I perceive won’t be my “friends for life.” This has applied to how I attend church at Wheaton (I went to Rez all 4 years yet never got involved with anything there), how I interact with people here, or even how I interact with boys (because you know girls and boys can’t be “friends” J). I always say that I would like to dig deeper into relationships, but I continually keep up these invisible boundaries letting people in only so far. God has just been showing me a lot about how I care way too much about what other people think of me. I think I can tend to give off this persona of a “who cares” attitude but inside I am concerned even what ya’ll are thinking as you read this. I think that is a huge part of my self protectiveness just wanting to keep others from seeing the “real me,” the person behind the red head who likes to make people laugh (though that is integral to my identity). Definitely there are people who know me deeper than that, but as I have been stripped of my humor here and been stripped of the “specialness” of having red hair (sorry I know it sounds vain… there I go again caring what ya’ll are thinking) I have been having a bit of an indentity crisis. What am I to people here? Do people like me? How can I know?

Many of these reflections came to a climax last week when I really began to feel like no one at work liked me. There are a few dynamics that have changed during my time here and while at first “everything was cool” and I felt generally accepted by people at work, I have come to realize that there is at least one girl who really doesn’t like me (or at least that’s what I think… cross cultural people reading is SO difficult). It seems everyone else has gotten on that don’t like Emily train (OK probably not everyone and I am definitely blowing this up in my head… but that is part of the problem). I just care too much about other people’s opinions of me and I have too high of expectations about what my friendships with co-workers will look like. I haven’t really made good friends here and I don’t feel known and loved at work, but I have been heartily and graciously accepted by a family here and for that I’m thankful. But to get back to my train of thought, I care way too much about what others think and I had to be stripped of my typical identity in group situations (the funny one) to begin to realize that. My mom gave me this book When People are Big and God is Small talking about the “fear of man.” It has been good to think through and let go of some of my feelings as I begin to try and instead fear God and be concerned with his view of me instead of others. So in summary I’m working on it and I hope that this blog post is a small beginning of letting other people in past the false boundaries that I so often erect keeping myself from really being “known” by others.

Thanks to all of you who have had some great comments on my previous blogs. I wish I could respond to each of you personally thanking you for your wise words (I love the Indy small group adults, my moms and dads back at home). Please partner with me in prayer as I figure out how to say goodbyes in a good way here. Pray that I would connect with people in meaningful ways in this last month and have the emotional energy and stamina to sustain these relationships through goodbyes and to whatever beyond God may or may not have for these relationships. Also pray for me as I work to complete my independent study and put together some materials about family planning for Luke to use after I leave in rural villages. I am feeling really unmotivated most of the time to work on it but I really need to get my act together. Thanks for being people of prayer and wanting to know me better… I hope this helps a bit to know me during this part of my journey.

So the captions of the pics that I am posting with this post… I think you can probably match them up correctly

A picture of me and my co-worker Mrs. Sempala after a gift exchange where I gave her a big blanket… so much fun

All you other interns be jealous… this is an especially large harvest (normally get about 10) of what grows in my mom’s garden here

The really awesome stoll of a priest at All Saints… can you guess which women of the Bible each woman represents?

Guys come on I’m ready to go would you hurry up I don’t have all day

Where I went for HNGR vacation with my advisor (Kara Robinson), Sarah Komline and Breanne Wroughton… so beautiful

Eating lunch in Muduuma (the rural villages where we do outreach clinics) notice the hands eating… it takes a while to get used to handling super hot food!

One of my group interview groups talking about family planning

Pretty but difficult to access the door J

My cousin who is now in the UK… but this was taken just after we went to a wedding in August together (sorry to post it a little late )

stoll

strawberries 2

survey group

walukunyu 21 oct 10

walukunyu 21 oct 16

So I plated my hair! (brown hair braided in with my red hair

I hope it doesn’t all fall out when I get it out again. One of these pics also has the new dress I just got made here. It was fun we had a gift exchange at work and I was given the fabric so I got this dress made out of it. Just thought you all would enjoy seeing some pics. I also just got back from Rwanda which was super fun. I got to visit Breanne and Kendall there and it was just a beautiful drive!

kaheru fam function 18

new hairdo 16

Lets try this again

First off I need to address a very important issue. HAPPY belated BIRTHDAY ADA JUNE and Happy Anniversary to Luke and Liesel! I was thinking about all of you on your special days and Liesel I loved getting to skype you a little bit on your anniversary!
I am currently sitting under my mosquito (here the qu is pronounced like how you pronounce the qu in squeeze) net as I write. I cherish the times under my mosquito net at the end of the day it is a time to unwind, read, write and just reflect on the day. Sometimes these times are more difficult and require more discipline than others to get through my reading for the day and it feels like more of a check list than really connecting with God, other days it feels like my life source. I am learning though how to follow Christ more closely even in the every day. We can so often long for those times where we feel his presence so tangibly, for me this was so true of the beginning of my internship and as I was applying to medical school, but the true test of our faith I think comes in the everydayness of it. I have been trying just throughout the day to be in more connection with God, praying through the little things and learning to thank God for the smile on another’s face even when I can’t understand the words they are saying. Occasionally this gets funny looks from other people or people falsely thinking I understand the Luganda they’re saying, but all the same I enjoy finding joy in these small things and returning the thankfulness to God. And really it feels like a fullness sometimes, inexplicable times of just a fullness and a deep sense that this everydayness is where true life is. OK, so like I said I’m under my mosquito net so bear with me as this is part blogging part journaling and unwinding from the day.
As I was brushing my teeth thinking about this blog I intended it to just be a what I’ve been up to blog, so I will get down to the business of telling all you wonderful people what I’ve been up to an ocean away (for most of you ☺). Life has been so much busier since my advisor came. I suppose part of that is that I am now well past the half way mark of my internship and all those things that at the beginning I said I would do I now have to really start getting down to the business of doing. One such thing will take about 5 hours tomorrow beginning at 7:30 AM. I kept telling the girls at work that I would get my hair plated (your natural hair is braided/twisted with synthetic hair), so this is the weekend. As I was looking at my calendar I realized that I don’t have that many free weekends left with traveling to go visit my brother in Nairobi, the girls in Rwanda and perhaps Jason/Megan in Tanzania, so this was the weekend for plating. I will use what they call princess hair the color of coffee brown (like the color of black coffee basically) and get my hair in the style twist. Basically my red hair will be intermingled with a dark brown color for about the span of 3 weeks depending on how fast my hair grows and how quickly my mzungu hair makes the synthetic hair slip out. I am excited because I have always wondered what I would look like with different color hair and this is a chance to kind of see it without dying my hair (I’m pretty sure my mom would kill me if I dyed my hair, not to mention the countless fans of redheads ☺). SO that should be fun/painful/interesting.
Another thing I have kept saying I will do but have failed to follow through is meet Julie Buster’s friends who have been doing missions here in Kampala. Now as I have passed the 2 months left mark I figured I should make this happen, so I will meet Loring and Dan Morris with their 3 sons tomorrow for lunch. This should be fun to just connect with a family, but I know that it will also make me miss my own sister with her 2 kids and my nephew who I have yet to meet. I am excited to hang out with some kids who aren’t afraid of my white skin. Though, recently I was able to hold this little girl (about 7 months) for like 20 mins and she only cried when I began to sit down. Because there aren’t diapers here though I was definitely peed on (here it’s called sou sou… kinda cute don’t you think). But it was so fun to connect with this little baby girl, but I hated having to hold her during the immunization as the nurse at first tried to stick her with an empty needle, so we had to do it twice. Then I was elected to hold her older sister for a measles immunization. That girl was bigger and therefore had a bigger bladder and therefore I had an even bigger pee circle on my apron. Apparently if a kid pees on you here they say you will have that gender kid, so I guess I’m in for twin girls though I always imagined myself as the mother of a bunch of boys… only time will tell I guess.
At work I have settled into the much slower pace and I take the free time to read books written by Ugandan and Kenyan authors (some great and fairly inexpensive novels) or talk about culture with my co-workers. I have started my independent study and I really need to be doing more work on that during my down times at work, but it is just hard to get motivated at times.
I’ve had a good amount of Wheaton students come through my house and stay. Recently Breanne Wroughton came through after a retreat we had with my advisor in southwestern Uganda (though I think I already wrote about this). About a week, maybe 2 later Meghan Quigg and Deanna Shippe came through my house as well. They are currently studying just outside of Kampala at the Uganda Christian University in Mukono. It was so interesting to compare our experiences (they are living in a dorm) with friendships and families, etc… We stayed up until about 1:30 just talking and it was a blast to get to talk about our shared experiences at Wheaton and now our experiences here in Uganda. I was a bit more excited about going back to Wheaton after our time together, but mostly I’m still a bit freaked out. One of the things that freak me out is the weather. I am so hot all the time here and to switch to having to wear hats, scarves and gloves seems like a shock to my system every time I even think about it. I also wonder what social dynamics will look like as so many of my roommates from last year have graduated. I know that I still have a lot of friends at Wheaton, and probably even more new ones to make, it will just be different and sometimes different is scary. Another huge fear is the whole timeliness thing. I am about 15 minutes late to work every day and I have just gotten used to the rhythm of not having to be so on time with life and waiting for thigns more. Having to be on time to class and just generally having a more structured schedule will be a huge switch. I have really appreciated adapting to things here some and I know that Wheaton is just a whole different world. Then beyond that I have med school to start thinking about and it’s all just a bit crazy!
I would appreciate your prayers as many of these things can overwhelm my mind. Pray that I would continue to be present here and just cherish every moment instead of letting my mind fill with worries about my future next semester, in the next 5 years and even beyond that. So many of the things I’m learning I feel like need to become rules in my life that I follow for the rest of my life. For example as I think about how to live incarnationally and the downsides of living on a compound to really achieve this I want to make rules for myself like never live on a compound if I live overseas in the future, or think about not hiring house help or just a bunch of stuff like that. I don’t think that God works like this, I think that lifestyles depend on so many things and he doesn’t condemn those who are living on compounds or those who have house help. It’s just that I can get really wrapped up in what my future may look like that I then think baaaaahhhhh how am I going to live out this faith. This is definitely a question we need to wrestle with, but we also just need to live in the present and take one day at a time, living reflectively in the moment and intentionally as we move towards the future. God did not make us to worry about the future or regret the past, but rather to live in the moment as all of creation is being reconciled to him in the here and now. There is an already and a not yet aspect of the Kingdom of God, but these are simultaneously being worked out in the right now of life. So please pray that I could let go of some of these big questions and leave them for another day years down the road where they belong, and instead live intentionally in the here and now just cherishing every day and moment reflecting on what God is trying to teach me today.
OK again, I have digressed to topics more deep and reflective than this was intended to be, but I’m telling you it’s the mosquito net (and probably that cup of coffee that I had about 5:30 today in town… oops). So next Wednesday I head to Rwanda on a bus to visit Kendall and Breanne. I anticipate that we will also visit a genocide memorial which I have heard can be very intense. Please pray that I will be affected by what I see and that I will better connect with their experiences by visiting them. I will have about 3 weeks here in Kampala before heading out again to go visit my brother in Nairobi and perhaps the interns in Tanzania. Then I have another 3 weeks or so before I again board a bus to Nairobi, but this time I won’t be coming back to Kampala but headed to the states. This is a really hard thing to think about as I feel like I haven’t been here that long, but I also know that God has other things in store for me in the States. I am looking forward to seeing people there, it is just with great sadness that I leave my community here. So that’s my life of late in a nutshell. I hope to post pics of my new hairstyle on facebook soon.

Wrote this a few days ago

23 Oct blog.doc

Hopelessness?

So I’ve been wrestling with a certain lack of emotions during my time here in Uganda. Maybe this is extended culture shock, maybe it is an unwillingness to process what I’m experiencing here, maybe it is a coping mechanism. I’m not exactly sure what it is, but as I was reading our assignment for this month, Liberating Jonah by Miguel De la Torre, I think I discovered perhaps one possible root of my lack of emotions. De la Torre wrote this book about the marginalization experienced by persons of color, especially within the United States, because of the very nature of power structures that favor a privileged minority. He traced the historical and social roots of these problems bringing up facts of history that either I was never taught or I conveniently forgot. He talked a lot about what reconciliation is and what it should look like, not the cheap grace of insincere apologies or useless guilt or forced forgiveness, but a tearing down of the structures and empire that privileges the few. It requires that we in the privileged few identify with the marginalized by forsaking our privilege. I have realized the privileges that have been afforded me largely because of my white skin especially during my time here. In the US we so often try to be “color blind” which basically means letting things remain as they are privileging white people. Being called mzungu all the time has made me realize all the baggage associated with my skin, and how much of this baggage is not just perceived, but real. OK I know this is probably offensive to some people and I’m sorry if I’m using race or color in wrong ways or if I should be using ethnicity instead, my wording is probably off, but just hear me out. Because I’m here with an American university if there is ever political unrest or a medical emergency, I have my ticket out of here paid by a company the school signed me up for. I can go to coffee shops whenever I want to study and get out of the house. These privileges go beyond just my experiences here, but extend to life in the States, though I’m less sure of how this looks in the states as my skin color is noticed by others more while here and therefore makes me more aware of my white privilege. I do know that the neighborhood I live in and the church I go to is primarily white and there is definitely a privilege in that. It is a good book and I would encourage you to read it (note: it is kind of anti the American empire so you may not agree with some parts). But he basically ends the book on a note of hopelessness.

I have never considered hopelessness as a possibly legitimate response to the wealth disparity and death and disease attributed to poverty surrounding us in this temporal world, but as a writer from the marginalized group he challenged the hope we in the privileged group always feel compelled to end so many of our discussions with. Yes, there are people who live in slums with abundant hope, but many live in a state of hopelessness about this temporal world. Very few have aspirations to achieve anything close to the affluence they see on billboards or television. As I read letters from other interns talking about the Rwandan genocide or the horrible acts of violence against women that are occurring at what seems an ever increasing rate, I don’t hope in the people or structures to bring us through this mess, in fact I see these structures as causing many of the problems. Why do we of the privileged group feel the need to constantly end on notes of hope? Is it to make us feel somehow better about the injustices we indirectly commit everyday? Is it to help us cope with the privileges we still stand on whose foundations began to be built during the times of early colonization and slavery? Is it to help abate our guilt a little bit and encourage those dying in poverty to hold on just a bit longer because there is a light at the end of the tunnel while we ourselves are reveling in the privileges afforded us by the raging fire at the end of the tunnel?

Living and interacting with those who are of Uganda’s elite class gives me little hope that the gap between the rich and the poor is decreasing. Though I have interacted with some extremely generous people here, it doesn’t mean they are looking to fully sacrifice their privileges to live in true solidarity with the global poor. Seeing sprawling pastors compounds give me little hope, and why should we expect them to have anything but large compounds, they learned this lifestyle from the missionaries who brought the Gospel to Africa in the beginning. Living on the gated compound where I am protected from those who would want to do evil, but at the same time cut off from possible interactions with those who don’t have the nice cars or clothes that admit them entry onto the compound. Going back to the States gives me little hope that the gap is closing. Seeing the mega malls here contrasted with the wetland homes people build that flood when the rains come gives me little hope. I doubt the people living in those homes have hope they will find homes elsewhere or that they will ever be able to shop in these mega malls full of ex-pats and Uganda’s elite. There is hopelessness just seeing that the world is so unreconciled. We aren’t reconciled to each other or to God. Saying much of this is difficult for me because I realize that it is privilege that has afforded me the opportunity to go to Wheaton, privilege that enables me to take out educational loans for medical school, privilege that enables me to be who I am. I am beginning to ask how much this identity has defined me over and above my baptismal identity, how do I begin to go about making my baptismal identity supersede the identities the world recognizes in my skin color and passport?

I think much of my inability to emotionally process what I see and experience has to do with my hesitancy to really feel, experience and admit the hopelessness that I feel. By having a writer blatantly state that he has little hope that things will change in his lifetime or even his grandchildren’s lifetime allowed me to realize that I kind of feel similarly. I do recognize that we have eschatological hope that Christ is reconciling everything to himself, but that doesn’t change the plight of the child who can’t be more than 1 year old begging on the streets of Kampala. This doesn’t change the immediate plight of the man whose legs have been cut off, probably during the genocide in Rwanda or the conflict in northern Uganda who has to walk around Kampala on his hands begging from others. I just don’t know where to go.

My small contribution won’t even make a mark on the disparities and contradictions that surround me. The hope I have is that’s not what I’m in this battle for. I’m not called to make a difference, but live in obedience to Our Father. I do hold responsibility for the rights that are denied others while luxuries are afforded me. Hopelessness is not a reason to stop trying, it is just a realization that this problem will require much more than my generation or the next generation will offer. It is a realization that the power structures are SO ingrained that it will take more than the millennium development goals or our best intentions to change things. It is looking at the problem from the underside, from the perspective of those experiencing marginalization everyday. People not only need to be “brought up,” but we need to begin to forsake our privileges. I don’t know where to start and the ever-present option to return to the privilege offered me by my skin color is unavoidable. I do know that hope feels scarce in my life. Only by abiding in Christ will I learn how to really let go and begin attempting identification. I need to open myself up to the pain of the world and the love in the world. I am so self-protective that I won’t allow people and hurt in, but I need to realize that I am out of control and fall into the abiding arms of Christ to allow myself to really experience reality, the good and the bad. I need to realize that self-protection is just another aspect of the baggage afforded me by privilege.

For all you Wheaton students reading, I find myself able to resound with some of the more “depressing” HNGR chapels I’ve seen during my time at Wheaton. I can understand the chapel of the class of 2008 where they presented their experiences and didn’t end on such a hopeful note but rather a note of powerlessness. I can understand the necessity of the repeated mantra in last year’s chapel, Come Lord Jesus! That is our only hope and sometimes in the midst of this material world and through the sinfulness of humanity this truth is robbed its true hope as we oppress our brothers, sisters mothers, fathers and children. I hope like Ninevah we can put on sackcloth and ashes at the privileges afforded us due to oppression. May this not be an immobile guilt, but a sincere commitment to fight the power structures that go unquestioned and see things from the underside. I feel like a hypocrite saying really all of this, but it’s where I’m at and it’s a process of learning, I have NO idea how this ought to affect the rest of my life and the small decisions, but I hope you can prayerfully join me as I consider these questions. I fear even posting this because by sharing it with you I am more compelled to move these statements from the abstract, from the paper, to the lived out experiential and I just don’t know how to do that. Please forgive me, I’m in process but I really felt compelled to share this.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!!! and on a slightly less important note: Life Lately… esp. medical school

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOMMY!!!!! You are an amazing mom and you mean so much to me. Thank you for the incredible amount of work you have done for me while over here, helping me with my medical school application, buying a plane ticket home and just generally doing the dynamics of life abroad. You have always been a rock that I get to depend on and a dear friend. I have loved seeing our relationship blossom as I have grown older and you have taken me on as one of your best friends. Our family has been defined by the love and care you and dad have showed us kids and I am so thankful for the opportunity to get to be a Mindrebo. Thank you for the amazing legacy you have followed in of your mother’s as a strong woman of God. It is an example that I get to look to daily and base my life off of. Getting to share you with my friends has been such a joy and I love the wise words you continually offer to us in our unique situations. You are just amazing and I can’t wait to see you again!

Well I just got back from an amazing trip to Lake Bunyoni in southwestern Uganda near the Rwanda border. My visitor for HNGR came to check up on me and we decided to take a little time for retreat and reflection at the end of her stay. Kara Robinson came in lieu of her father Paul Robinson and though I won’t speak for her ability to replace him in any way, I really did enjoy having her here. She was a great person to talk to about my independent study (on family planning in rural villages), the different dynamics of my internship that I am struggling with and share with her the joys of being here in Uganda. It is funny when you have visitors how you realize that you have become less of a guest and take on more of the host position. This is really a joy to get to host people and something I have enjoyed so much at Wheaton (miss you all), so getting to do it here is just so fun.

So yeah, we went to Lake Buyoni and stayed on this beautiful island. It was cold (at 6000 feet) which was such a nice change from the sticky heat of Kampala. We stayed on an island and were fed like queens. One of the coolest things about going there was the fellowship we got to enjoy with a Peacecorps volunteer there, Sarah. She has been staying on this small island for 1 year and has another year left. It was crazy to run into her and just share so much in common in our faith. It was really encouraging to us to get to talk with her about all that God has been doing in her life and I really loved getting to encourage her in her faith. She doesn’t get too much fellowship on the island and though she goes to the village church there, the cross cultural dynamics are very different and their faith journeys look different, so just getting to fellowship with her was an amazing gift to all of us. I may get to do some traveling with her down the road which would be really fun.

While we were at Lake Bunyoni I was expecting a call from my mom at any moment about my acceptance to IU medical school. It has been a really amazing process of applying and seeing the Lord be faithful through it all and I was just excited to see how things would turn out with my application. I was nervous in some ways but feeling confident that I would probably get in as my interview went really well. I was sitting on this beautiful porch looking out over the lake and a beautiful sunset when the call finally came on October 1. Mom was acting all somber on the phone not telling me the news straight away but asking how I was doing and what I was doing. Finally, she let the news break that she had checked the mailbox today and there had been a letter from IU, I had been accepted. The one problem she mentioned was that there was a mandatory ceremony on August 13 and 14. I couldn’t figure out the problem of this and questioned her further, “well will you be here” then she finally relented, “oh yeah that is August next year.” It was a funny little part of the conversation. She also told me that Ada June, my little niece had recently been injured as many 2 year olds do, but hers was special. She got a black eye from pulling a chair down, but the really funny part was Luke, her dad had been teaching her a few days before how to say “I’m pretty but I’m tough,” so now she chants the mantra with a big shiner on her eye. I love getting to hear little updates like this from home, they are just so real life experiences and I love getting to share in them.

So about medical school again. I have definitely felt led and called there, but in many ways I am so scared of medical school. It is something I have thought about doing nearly my whole life, but as I got the news I was like “aaaaahhhhhh the next 4 years of my life and then the whole ‘rest of my life.’” It is weird that even what people call me will change for the rest of my life. It was really good to have Breanne Wroughton’s reaction to my freak out be “well duh.” I guess it is a pretty legitimate response and by seeing it as a fine response to such news I have been able to recognize my fears and anxieties and choose to take one day at a time. I am excited for next year, I am excited to get to study about our amazing bodies, I am excited to get to settle into a new life in Indianapolis, but as far as being excited about “the rest of my life” I just feel like that is too big to handle. I am so thankful to all the people who have helped this happen, especially my mom. There were some great family members with great comments on my personal statement, Liesel, Luke, mom, dad and Uncle Daryl especially, thank you so much you helped me make my personal statement much more vivid and compelling! God has been so good in the whole process, I think I have shared some of that on this blog, but just getting to see his faithfulness in that I started the application a week, maybe a week and a half before it was due. I just can’t believe that it all worked out in acceptance. God clearly has this for me and in the midst of my anxiety about “the rest of my life” I can hold onto this history of faithfulness and I though I don’t know what the rest of my life looks like the one thing I know is he will remain faithful for the rest of my life. Thank you also for all of your prayers and partnering in this with me!

My friend Breanne Wroughton is visiting with me right now so I need to wrap this email up and go play hostess. It has been great to have her around and do the “girl talk” that I haven’t gotten to do in Uganda with all brothers here it is so interesting how different dynamics are. I just wanted to share a bit of life recently and especially about IU with all of you. I can’t believe that time is going so fast, in some ways I wish it weren’t as I am enjoying my time here so so much, but I suppose I get to see you all sooner so that is nice! Please pray as I finish out this internship that my mind will remain open and not judgmental and that I will live out my daily faith. Sometimes those mountaintop experiences can be so enticing and you can wish for a repeat of such experiences, but there is such sweetness in the everyday. I hope to continually relish this sweetness and grow closer with my Savior each day and encounter life in prayer and reflection. Peace and Grace be upon you each this day!

Cultural pluses and minuses

So this blog post is just going to be a little diddy about Ugandan culture as I have experienced it so far. I am going to write it as things I hope “stick” from Ugandan culture in my life and those things I would be willing to do without.

Things I hope stick:

1. The value on family is really significant here, at least as I have experienced it. Your best friends are your family. If they aren’t biologically related to you they are named as though they were. Aunties, uncles and cousins are those who fulfill the role your biological aunties, uncles and cousins fill of sources of wisdom and best friends. Similarly, the kids of my sisters and brother would be considered my own kids. I love the idea that Ada and Mack aren’t just Liesel’s kids, but my kids. I am called Auntie Em, but they aren’t really called my niece and nephew, but rather my own kids. Here people speak of our children in that we all share in the burden of bringing up the next generation. I hope that as my friends start having kids I can be Auntie Em to them, I hope that I can see their development and wellbeing as my own responsibility, not just the responsibility of their biological parents. I have loved the parallels this kind of thinking as to what we as the Body of Christ are supposed to be. I am to see the next generation as my own kids, I am to share the burden of raising them up. The older generation is full of aunties and uncles, mothers and fathers that have done the same for me. I look forward to the ways that my time here in Uganda has reshaped my imagination enabling me to better fulfill my different roles in the Church.
2. I LOVE the value placed on hospitality and visiting. Part of our work with the Luke Society is home visiting. I love being received into people’s home in order to just talk with people. When I asked especially what we talk to AIDS patients about when we visit them the response was pretty much anything. It is more the act of visiting and making people feel good psychologically by hosting people than really talking about things of great importance. Beyond just my work at the Luke Society I have experienced hospitality in the context of my greater community. Sunday is reserved for visiting and hosting. Anytime I see my extended family here (host family that is) is a Sunday. No one works and Kampala city pretty much shuts down as very few are out and about. If someone drops by at meal times they are served. In the states you have to plan a visit at least a few days in advance, but here you can just show up, I love this! Watch out friends I may be stopping by expecting food more often! No but really this is just something I want to encourage my friends to do with my house or wherever I am staying, I want to be the kind of person you can just drop by to visit without warning.
3. Greeting is also really important here. You can’t just walk into a room without greeting everyone, even strangers. This felt extremely weird for me at first, but I have come to love it. I love that we ask how people are doing even if we don’t know them. Often the answers are just the standard “fine,” but just to know that someone cares about you and is genuinely asking how you are doing is significant for me, especially on those not so good days. I appreciate that when I don’t see my auntie for a day she remembers and asks why I didn’t greet her yesterday. There is a focus on just being with people more than we have in the States. When I go to greet someone I can’t just greet and run, I have to sit with them a bit maybe ask them about their weekends, how people at home or how their day was. I hope that this value can be incorporated into how I do life.
4. Cleanliness is super important here. So you may think OK she is in Uganda, she gets to wear t-shirts and jeans every day. NOT TRUE. I look way better everyday here than I have at any other time in my life. I take way more showers and I am much more concerned about washing my clothes after just wearing them once. Rooms must be swept at least twice a week, we clean the Luke Society daily and people notice your physical appearance a lot. One day I didn’t shower because I woke up late and rolling into work with a kind of greasy face my friend asked if I had changed my Vaseline (what they use for lotion here) because I was looking a bit oily. I think all these things are really funny considering I am a girl who likes playing in mud puddles and getting kind of dirty, but it is something that I have come to appreciate. We’ll see if these qualities follow me back to the United States. Especially as I think about a profession as a doctor I am realizing how important it is to be “smart” to be respected. You also respect yourself more in some ways and take on a more “serious” attitude when you are dressed up.
5. Kids are important. I think this was covered somewhat in the family section, but people just love kids here. It doesn’t matter if the kid is yours or not, you care for the kid getting into trouble and make sure they are being taken care of at all times. You can pick up the kid of a stranger and its OK because overall people just assume that you are taking care of the kid. I got to witness this in a special way in Kenya where my niece was playing at a playground at this restaurant and one of the waitresses was helping her with the slide and just playing with her without thinking twice about helping “mother” her. While I don’t think I ought to start picking up random kids in the states, I do just want to be free to help out my friends and family with their kids without feeling like I’m overstepping my bounds in some way.
6. The people. I wish I could bring all of my friends and family back with me, I guess I’ll just have to come back J
7. Wow, one of the most important and I almost forgot it… the cooking! I am loving learning how to cook like a true Ugandan. We don’t have all the supplies in the states, but I’m learning how to make some substitutions so cooking delicious Ugandan food is possible. Seriously, I don’t think I have ever tasted beans that are so delicious! The other great thing is many of the most common dishes are fairly simple and cheap ingredients, perfect for my future as a med school student (hopefully… I find out by October 1 so be praying!).

Things I would be OK to leave in Uganda

1. Animal cruelty… I saw this guy pulling on this poor dog’s tail while he tried to get away whining the whole time and the guy was just laughing. When he let go he said sorry dog, but didn’t really seem to feel any remorse
2. Slow walking. I can’t quite believe how slow people walk. I had a really hard time adjusting at first as evidenced by the fact that a co-worker asked if I was injured cause I was walking so funny, I just had to explain that I’m used to walking really fast and I’m still adjusting.
3. BAD traffic habits. Really, people hardly seem to care about their well-being when driving and take the most ridiculous risks to get like a 2 car advantage. The traffic jams get so bad in the city that travel times can jump from a too long 1 hour to a ridiculous 2 hour. The only way to overcome the “jam” is by taking these scooter bikes that dart through cars and traffic to get you there in a timely fashion.
4. All the greasy and salty foods. It is really amazing how many foods use so much cooking oil. It makes them delicious, but I think I can do some of this cooking without the oil or at least with less oil. At tea, which it would be so strange to have without some kind of food, the only real options are all fried foods so each day at 10 I take either fried pancakes, donuts or samosas which are kind of like egg rolls in a triangle shape with meat, eggs or peas in the middle. I’ll be happy to get back to salads I don’t have to fear eating for the ever present threat of traveler’s diarrhea!

OK I think that’ll do for now. Maybe I’ll add to this later, but I hope you enjoyed this little window into Ugandan culture as I’ve experienced it. For all you at Wheaton you can look forward to some awesome times at my apartment/house/shack that I’ll be staying at next semester full of greetings, good food, new family names and more lessons about Ugandan culture. If I wanted to be a true Ugandan woman maybe I’ll even kneel as I serve you!