Things I love......

I have felt very convicted by an email my Grandma sent me the other day saying “I hope to see a blog soon with “Things I love…..”. It got me thinking and wondering if the way I’ve been writing may seem as thought I’m constant complaining and infact hating Nigeria, which is as far from the truth as possible! So, I’ve decided to include a little tribute to things I LOVE about this country, the people, my work and living in the third world.

I love that every day is different, every day is an adventure, every day I’m discovering new things, every day I feel increadibly challenged (mostly in my patience levels!), everyday I laugh and am made to reflect.

I love the crazyness and that nothing makes sense, I love the heat (altho this may change come hot season!), I love the noise, I love the way you are greeted by everyone just walking down the road.

I love the kids, their smiles, their energy and excitement, I love when they fight to hold my hand, I love when the write me letter saying they love me and want to be my ‘bestest friend’, I love how they appreciate the smallest things (like having their nails painted or having their hands and feet massaged with moisturiser).

I love doing clinics, I love feeling like my skills and knowledge is valued and that God is using it to heal physically and teach people how to live healthier lives to better glorify Him. I love how the smallest piece of advice can make huge changes in someones life.

I love the friends I’ve made so far. I love the social nature of life, living in a connected way and doing things in groups and being so involved in people’s lives.

I love the food. I love pineapple, watermelon, mango, papaya, banana and strawberries for breakfast in the morning. I love trying new foods I’ve never eaten before, new textures and flavors.

I love the culture, I love the inclusive and communal lifestyles of the Nigerian people, the fact that as a cultrue they don’t live to purely better their own situation but they pool resources and when one is in need, all contribute to help. I love the friendly accepting way people welcome you.

I love the church, I love the faith I see, the courgae amidst persecution, and I love the joy and thankfulness I see expressed despite the apparent lack of material blessings.  

I love Nigeria!

So now on to what has been happening lately. I started my first Hausa class the other night. George (who has lived in Nigeria 23 years and has fluent Hausa) offered to teach a group of us some essential conversational basics. It’s going really well and we’re aiming to learn about 20 new words per week. I’ve been practising hard with the guards at the gate and the women who sells frut and vegetables on the corner. It’s a really fun language to learn, lots of words said with different accents mean different things and can be used in many different occasions eg amazement, discipline, sadness and happiness. But I’ve found the key is speed and animation, I’m still working on being able to greet back and forth faster but as long as you use an animated voice they know ‘you are trying’ (a common encouragement here).

A group of us went to a pool after church last Sunday called HPC. It was beautifully cold and surprisingly clean but the absolute lack of pool saftey made me laugh. It would have been an occupational health nightmare in the West. They had interspaced slippery tiles with paved rock along the sides of the pool and the one railing over the end of pool was loose and wiggling as we climbed over it to jump from a height. I also couldn’t see the logic in putting the beach chair recliners on gravel….but hey it was cold water and fun company!

We took a trip out to a village an hour out of Jos last Tuesday to visit a missionary dentist who works out there at a retreat center. I went as moral support to a friend from Challenge who got his front tooth knocked out at basketball. Miango was a perfect example of a normal little African village, dusty dirt roads and wooden concrete shacks….we found a ‘restaurant’ on the road (recognisable by a woman cooking outside on a fire and a lace curtain covering her door), walked into the entrance to find plastic tables and chairs spread out. Usually places to eat on the side of the road can be recognised by a sign saying ‘Food is Ready’. Thankfully we had George with us who could asertain what was on the menu that day and knew how to order.  We had various combinations of Tuwo shinkafa (a dense ball of starch, can be either pounded yam, some maize porriage but that day we had a rice ball) with Draw soup (okra or melon seeds cooked until they thicken) or as the missionaries call is ‘snot soup’. It was delcious but ha the most bizzare consistency I’ve ever tasted in my life, the texture was actaully accuratly discribes when compared to runny snot! One of the guys had boiled yam and red stew (very popular and delicious) and it all has to be eaten with plenty of pepe (a hot red pepper based sprinkle on seasoning). My favourite Nigerian food so far are Masa, hard to explain but is made from permented rice and fried (as is most of the Nigerian cuisine, and usually eaten with Suya- a meat kebab coated in ground peanuts and chilli pepper babrbequed on a stick) and groundnut soup (peanut soup).

Speaking of food, I made sushi for the compund the other night! I was having a moan about missing my favourite foods the other day and George casually said he had seaweed wraps, wassabi  and salmon(which he’s picked up on holiday in the UK a few months back)…..he didn’t need to tell me twice! I must admit, the sushi rice wasn’t exactly authentic (I had to make my own rice vingegar) but all in all it was a good effort if I do say so myself!

I attended a seminar the other day about ‘Living in High Stress Environment’. It was a really interesting lecture, they discussed the physiology and manifestations of long term stress on the body (all very depressing really…I’m aging faster than all you back home!) and recognising burn out leading to depression. Even though I feel I already have effective stress relief techniques (I wouldn’t have lasted very long in my last job in ED without them!), it was helpful to hear perspectives from long term missionaries and see the link between stress and your theology.

I also attended a Community Health Evangelism course last week which was really encouraging. It aims to train people to be able to go into villages, negotiate with the people there about what their health needs are, where the gaps in education and health prevention may be, and how a programme can be developed to pass on knowledge and dispell wrong and unhealthy cultural and spiritual beliefs, particularly around maternal and infant health.

We had a formal dinner out at the nicest restaurant in Jos (by Western satndards) with the Challenge Compound crew last Saturday which was great fun. The idea to dress up came from a comment made about how fun it would be to buy one of the outrageously coloured and textured, puffy sleeved, ruffled dresses we see everywhere in Nigerian shops, so Fiona and I went down to a shop run by three sisters who hang their wares in a tree! I must admit it was mainly so I could say I’d ‘bought a dress out of a tree’! The guys made us corsages of roses and we felt like real pricesses for the night. I think that’s about all to report this week. Hope you are all well.

What I hate about crisis

What I hate about crisis :

I hate thinking about the innocent people whose lives are disrupted due to crisis: ordinary, innocent people trying to earn their daily bread who have to flee because of violence.

I hate trying to help a patient when suddenly my mind is sidetracked by the sound of rapid gunfire.

I hate thinking of all of the children who are being robbed of the joy of their childhood because they are being forced to grow up in this atmosphere of violence.

I hate not knowing what to pray for, or even how to pray.

I hate the feeling of hopelessness, that I can’t do anything to stop the rapidly rotating cycle of hatred, killing, revenge, hatred, killing, revenge, hatred, killing…

I hate thinking of the youth who are being ruined on the inside because of the pressure to participate in violence from their peers and, heaven help us, even their family and religious leaders.

I hate jumping at every little sound, wondering if it is indeed more gunfire, or just a mango falling onto a tin roof.

I hate tensing my ears whenever a new person comes into the compound in case it's news of happenings in town, or feeling my heart race when I receive a text message, incase it is an alert of unrest.

I hate that only a few wayward individuals with guns or bombs can ruin the peacebuilding efforts of many.

I hate that only a few wayward individuals can ruin the integrity of their entire religion.

I hate canceling clinics due to the threat of violence, then wondering if it was really necessary to cancel or if I am too fearful of only a small threat.

I hate thinking of the children whose education is being disrupted due to violence. How can we expect children to become intelligent, productive citizens if they can’t even attend school?

I hate thinking of the precious people I know who live in “border areas,” wondering if they are safe.

I hate looking out over the beauty of creation – the hills, the rocks, the trees, the flowers – and then realizing how much we are desecrating God’s wonderful creation by spilling human blood.

I hate thinking about the newly-created widows and newly-created orphans, and how their lives are being forever changed by a very short moment of senseless hatred.

I hate thinking about all of the homes and businesses that are being destroyed. I hate thinking about how the people who are affected will now have to take money from their children’s feeding and school fees to rebuild these structures.

I hate that every new crisis makes the wounds that much deeper and more difficult to heal.

We want peace. 

We pray for peace. 

But what are we willing to do to achieve peace? 

Peace will not just float down from heaven. 

We must work peace from within. 

Are we willing to turn away from the hatred and anger and instead demonstrate love to our enemies, even if our hearts are still hurting? 

Are we willing to counsel those who are angry, to try to convince them that hatred only leads to more violence? 

Are we willing to work with the other side to achieve peace? 

Are we willing to stop the cycle of violence by not meeting violence with more violence? 

Are we willing to forgive?

I hate crisis.

Driving, zip-lining and Wahala with the police!

I had my first driving lesson last weekend. You may be asking why I need driving lessons since I've been driving for over 13 years, but it truly is like almost starting again as a learner driver! Not only am I having to get used to driving on the right side of the road and driving with the gear stick on the right side of the car not left, but driving when you have archabas (motorbike taxi's) on all four sides of our vehicle, or a crazy big truck blowing black diesel exhaust in your face or random people pulling out, not sticking in their lanes and doing 'U' turns in the most inconvenient places with a) no warning and b) no indication, is a challenge to say the least! I didn't have any life and death experiences however and only managed to put my friend Sterling in a ditch on the side of the road twice, so I considered it an accomplishment. I can only improve from here. After a year if driving in Nigeria, you'll all be thinking twice before getting a car with me I'm sure :)

Speaking of driving, I was recounting some of the more insane things I've seen on the roads over the past month with a friend the other day and thought I'd share them with you all too. The best was a man on the back of a motorbike taxi carrying a 3m ladder over his head, not on his head, his head was between the rungs and it was sitting on his shoulders. I'm NOT kidding. If he had been struck by anything he would have been decapitated instantly! I've seen motorbikes carrying people holding massive 2mx2m mirrors or sheets of glass, families with a mum or dad and 3 kids wedged between and many of them carry babies on their backs (this particularly scares me when I think of how often they have accidents) or the worse is when they position a young child on the front of a motorbike! I've seen so many cars that I'm amazed are even running, let alone being considered road worthy by any standard in the West, but there are no WOF's here! (See pic below) I've seen cars so laden down with people or produce I swear they're scraping the ground. The funniest ones are the cars jam packed, floor to ceiling with big brown yams! There are some not so funny things though too, like the other day a huge 12 wheeler truck was doing a U turn, lost control and ran over a taxi full of 7 people. They all died instantly. The mob of people who saw went to kill the driver only to find it was a young boy! They spared his life but set fire to the truck. I passed the burning wreck an hour or two later and saw the taxi car too. Really horrific. Not all trucks have breaks you see, most use their gears to slow down so it's a bit disconcerting being in front of a truck, or behind for that matter!

Still driving on the road!!??

Getting petrol here is such a 'Wahala' (problem/drama). There are many petrol stations around town but they don't always have petrol! You know a station has petrol when there is a line of about 20+ cars leading away from the pumps. So you have to leave a few hours free if you're on a petrol mission and usually Sunday mornings is the best time to go, with the shortest lines. It's a pretty communal experience though, everyone gets out of their cars and chats while they wait. The petrol here at the moment in 97 niara a litre (75c NZ) but is more if you get it off the Black-market, so it's pretty cheap, but for the hassle of not having a constant supply available and the time it takes to get it almost cancel out the benefit of how economical it is!

We went to Hillcrest school the other night for night time Zip-lining. One of the teachers at the international school (the one all the Missionary Kids go to) sets up a Zip-line (flying fox for all you New Zealanders) from a scaffold beside a huge gum tree each year for the Hillcrest Carnival. The Carnival was last weekend but he kept the zip-line set up for us to come and play on after hours. We got harnessed up and had the choice of sitting or going on our fronts 'superman style'. It was really fun, I think perhaps scarier in the daylight as you'd be able to see more clearly how high off the ground you were, but a real adrenaline rush all the same.

On our way home that evening we got pulled over at a check point and a police man on a total power trip asked to see Sterlings drivers license. He said he'd lost it as he'd had his wallet stolen in Lagos. The police man then demanded to see our 'papers' and Fiona politely handed him the registration for the car. He them took the whole file and walked away. He continued to come back to the window another 5 times demanding Sterling's license, even taking someone else's Nigerian license from another stopped car and shoving it in his face saying 'see, here, this license'. I was in the back seat alternating between trying to contain my histarical laughter and almost wanting to scream in this guys face “He's already told you he lost his license!!!!!”. Fiona and Sterling were completely relaxed and never raised their voices and just continued to explain over and over again the same story. In the end we begged forgiveness and he made us give him money before he would return the papers. I'm a little worried about how I'm going to keep my cool if a similar situation ever happens to me when I'm alone! Especially because the transport office responsible for issuing Nigerian drivers licenses has been so back logged from broken computer systems that they're not issuing foreigners licenses at the moment (I know people who have been trying to renew for over a year!). At least they don't make Buturi's (white people) frog jump down the street as a penalty/humiliation like they do to Nigerians. In my experience so far, the police have just tried to hit on me. That I can deal with.

I had my first taste of sugar cane the other day. We bought a huge stick that was 2m long for 200N ($1.50). It looked like thick bamboo and we had to wind down the windows in the car and stick it out to get it home. The street vendors usually sell it pre-cut and peeled, but sitting in water to keep it fresh, so Westerners can't eat it because of the risk of sickness from dirty water. We got the cane home and then cut and peeled it and I must admit, it was nice. You bite it off, chew it, suck the sugar out then spit out the bark or stringy husk stuff out. Hard to explain, but it's basically like sugary water, no flavor, just sweet and refreshing. Not in a hurry to buy it again but good to have another thing ticked off my list!

Well there was another bomb yesterday at a Catholic church in one of the districts out of town and reports of unrest in town today. We've been told to avoid these areas and everyone is a bit on edge. I still went and did a clinic with the youngest boys at Gidan Bege this morning and had a blast.....I love my job! So it's life as normal for now...will keep you posted. Please continue praying for peace in Jos.

Bombs at church!

As I'm sure most reading this have already heard, a bomb went off last Sunday morning about 7:20am at a big church headquarters down the road from my compound. It shook my windows and woke me up, with bits of ceiling dust falling on my face, but to be honest, having never heard a bomb before, I was unsure what it was. In my first week here, every tiny sound made me jump, every car backfiring, every mine blasting rock, even a police siren made me anxious, but as they days wore on I realised I couldn't live in this constant state of anxiety which was exhausting me, so I let it go and gave it to God. So on Sunday morning, I had my suspicions, but was a bit blazae about the whole thing. It wasn't until my phone started ringing and other people from other compounds started calling me to make sure I was OK that I started to become alarmed. I got up to ask my neighbour what it was and she confirmed it was a bomb blast. We then got an alert via our cells informing us of what had happened and our security director for the compund organised a meeting. We surveyed the damage to the compound and a few windows had shattered in the front apartment (closest to the bomb) but that was all. I was actually a lot calmer and more collected than I thought I may be in the situation. I think it would have been a different story if I'd been alone all day to worry in my room, but as it happened, since we were on lock-down and couldn't leave the compound, it turned into a really social day. I was so blessed to be surrounded by so many people who had been here for longer and had experienced many similar crisis situation, many lasting a lot longer than 1 day. We had lots of cups of tea and the day centered around our meals, everyone pooling resources. We played some Wii guitar hero, watched some movies, wrote some emails and even did exercise (another 'Ripped in 30' DVD!). The next morning I went for a walk into town for groceries with one of the guys from my compound and as we walked down the street we surveyed the damage that had been done to the Muslim shops in retaliation for the bombing. They were completely burnt out and it was sad seeing people ripping corrugated iron off burnt roofs and salvaging glass coke bottles that hadn't burnt. It seems so unfair that any Muslim is targeted when chances are they have no affiliation with the bombers and no allegiance to Boko Haram. But they're slowly rebuilding now and things are back to 'normal'. I must say I had moments of anxiety leading up to going to church this Sunday (1 week on) but things went off without event and people were greatly encouraged and strengthened in spirit by meeting together (and security had been increased with sand bags at the entrance meaning a car had to zig zag around and could not drive directly into the church grounds as they did with the car bomb last Sunday, semi reassuring!).

On to lighter topics, I finally got up the courage to try out have my gas oven the other day and I must say, to my surprise, we started our relationship off on a good foot! I finally put my fear aside and made some peanut butter cookies for a pot luck dinner, yes I know, not the most adventurous, but considering my initial trepidation and imaginings of burnt edges and raw middles, they were a great success! So watch this space for more sweet offering as I get more adventurous and trusting of the new system. I've also tried my hand at making Hummus and homemade yoghurt too. They were not like the bought stuff, but eatable, I'm sure I'll get used to it!

Speaking of household things, I've had to get used to someone coming once a week to clean for me. Now Mum, I know you will be thinking something along the lines of 'I did that for you for the first 17 years!' and I love you for it, but it's another thing to be paying someone to sweep your floors etc. because it gives them a steady income. Mama Tabita (a widow with 5 children) is hired by all the missionaries at Challenge and once someone leaves, the next person takes up her employment. We pay her 400N (equivalent of $3 NZD) to clean our apartments each week and by Nigerian standards for someone with no qualifications, is actually a really good job for her. During the weeks I've been here I have LOVED her help, however it's frustrating that the floors get dusty again a few hours after she does her weekly sweep and mop because of the slat glass windows (which I always have wide open) which don't stop dust from getting in when closed.

Well I am well on my way of getting the basics down in Hausa. I'm starting to be more adventurous in my greeting vocabulary and have been very proactive in attempting to learn medical specific words and parts of the body. Last Wednesday Kelly made me try it out on the Muslin women (who don't understand English well/if at all) “Menene dam wanke?” Which means “What is wrong with you?”.....the women then preceded to reply back to me in ridiculously fast Hausa, none of which I understood! However, I'm getting better at recognising certain worlds within a sentence e.g. 'zazzabi', which means fever or 'ciwon kai' which is headache. Slowly slowly I guess or as they say in Hausa, 'Sannu, Sannu'.

I'm sure you all heard I was pretty sick the week before last. I've determined (self diagnosis) I had Giardia as the symptoms were similar to a colleague of mine who was sick at the same time and had had Giardia before. It was a miserable time of feeling like I had a pregnant belly from all the bloating and needing to stay close to the toilet, but the medication I finally took (too late in the picture in hindsight) cleared it up after a few doses. I will be keeping a healthy supply of that particular anti-parasitic on hand in future! My hope is that now my immune system is now that much stronger and I'll be less likely to be so susceptible to getting sick again.....please God!

Well I'm off out to Gyero care center today to assist with a prenatal exam on a 13yo girl we've just had come into the ministry 6 days ago. She came to us and had been complaining of abdominal pain for days. Someone then did a pregnancy test and it was positive. She is not talking at all, so is either in shock or has been traumatised and is now very hardened and just not able or not willing to show emotion. Please pray for her, that she will open up to us and start to deal with what is happening.

I also have to go and pick up 5 boys to have their teeth pulled! None of them have ever been to a dentist, so they're in for a bit of a shock...I'm just hoping the dentist uses anesthetic on them!