Paul and Becca

Last Thursday, I said good-bye to my family at the airport in Addis Ababa. Praise God, they had a safe journey back to Texas. It was an awfully quiet night afterward. The next day, I got busy taking care of hospital business in the capital. It was good to keep moving. That evening I took a taxi to eat dinner at an Indian restaurant at the top of one of the hotels. Afterward I rode the elevator down until it unexpectedly stopped between the first and second floors. As all the button lights started flickering randomly, I hit the alarm buzzer and pounded on the door until I heard voices from the lobby below me. After a while it became evident that, though there were voices and some kind of activity, no one seemed to be doing anything tangible. Unless I wanted to spend the night in the elevator, I figured I had better help myself. I pried the doors open and found myself looking at the wall of the elevator shaft. The floor of the second story was at my chest height. As I started pulling on the doors to the floor, someone finally saw me and flipped the lock so that it would open. As I shimmied out, I couldn’t help wondering if the elevator would suddenly resume its journey to the lobby and chop me in half. Thankfully, my legs are still attached.

As dawn broke the next day, I was jammed into a very full Ethiopian bus headed for Soddo. The hospital van was staying in Addis to pick up the next visitor so I was trying out the local bus system. After a long journey it was good to be back home. Everything went fine, though my appreciation for comfortable transportation has gone up exponentially. Apparently many local people believe they will get sick if wind blows on them so no one would open a window. Well, I can check one experience off the list.

It wasn’t until I was back in the quiet of our house that I felt the full effect of everyone leaving. It’s just so empty. The tears finally came when I saw a note Becca had written to our house helper and Nathan’s chair attached to the table. I’ve written it many times before and I’ll write it again. God has blessed me immensely with my wife and family. This separation makes me wonder when the transformation took place. I remember being a single guy living quite contentedly on my own. Since getting married and now, since having a child, we have worked hard and prayed hard on uniting our hearts and lives together. When did God complete that fusion so effectively that now, when they’re gone, it feels like a chunk of my body is missing? I don’t know, but I thank Him for it. This is a good pain to have.

When I went to medical school, I was amazed at how steep the learning curve became compared to my prior schooling. In a sense, I feel like I’m now in a spiritual graduate education. God is teaching me so much here and, though it can be unpleasant at times, I’m thankful and excited to see the progress. I believe firmly that all things are from God’s hands, both pleasant and painful. This too is from Him and I believe He has good things to teach Becca and me.

In the mean time, the hospital shenanigans have resumed (instantly) and I’m pleased to say I won’t have time to sit around and flog myself. For now, though, I’m feeling sappy and mushy and have decided to inflict it on all of you as well as my family. I have three messages in song that I want to deliver to my family.

Dear Becca,

Hey, Hon, just play these songs from i-Tunes on your computer and pretend I’m singing them to you.

To you: Diamond Rio, I Know How the River Feels

To Nathan: Donavon Frankenreiter, Call Me Papa

To our family, in light of the hope we have in Jesus: Newsboys, Something Beautiful

Love, Paul

If the rest of you want to know what the songs say, look ‘em up.

From across the pond,

Paul

This is Becca. Nathan and I made it back to Houston last night. We are safe and sound and my parents were a huge help through the travels. Nathan is getting better and better at enduring the long flights, of course his favorite word on the second half from Amsterdam to Houston was “Go? Go? Go?” He said it over and over with a questioning tone. Luckily a trip around the airplane with Granpa was good enough for Nathan.

So, now after finally settling in to our first house in Soddo, Ethiopia just a month earlier, I feel slightly homeless again. My mom keeps saying things about when I get home or “at home” and I can’t figure out which home she is referring to. For now, Nathan and I are living with my parents. But my physical home is where Paul is…in our big (hopefully not too lonely) house that most of the time has electricity and water, in Soddo.

In seminary, I always read about how kids who grew up on the mission field never knew what to say when people asked, “so where are you from?” On the flip side, I bet they have a lot larger sense of a home and identity in Christ instead of an identity connected to a culture.  I am beginning to have a glimpse of how they feel.  This American culture can be pretty shocking after being away.  I am still digesting a lot of what is going on in my head.

For now, I am very thankful for my family who has opened up their home to Nathan and I. I am also grateful to be close to a NICU and medical resources in this last trimester. I go to the OB on Tuesday, I will have an update shortly after…so last chance to vote for a boy or a girl. However, I found out it was my dad who voted 20 times for a boy…he said he had two sisters and two daughters and now it was time for him to have two grandsons.

To end the post…here is a smile for daddy. 

We miss you! And Nathan thinks of you a lot…as evidenced by the amount of times he has wandered around the house saying, “Dada? Dada? Dada?” or looks at a man with glasses and says, “Dada? Dada? Dada?”

Here is daddy’s boy…

I realize my last several blog posts have read like a promo for Prozac so it seemed the time to mention something a little lighter. Sometimes the patients do fine and sometimes the story is actually kind of cool, in a typically boyish, gross sort of way.
Last week, one of the ICU nurses came to pound on our door one evening to tell me there was a boy with airway obstruction. That’s a big deal so I hustled up to the ICU immediately. The on-call resident was there and there was a ten year-old boy in one of the beds. Each time he inhaled, there was a noise from his throat called inspiratory stridor. He was actually comfortable and in no distress and had been experiencing this symptom for about six days. Apparently he had developed a slightly bloody cough a few days prior to the stridor.
Other than the stridor, we could find nothing else significant on exam and his x-ray’s were fine. As the resident and I scratched our heads, the father informed us that there were worms in the river water he had been drinking and that a worm was causing this. Poor uneducated soul, we thought. We figuratively patted him on the head and explained that it was likely an infection of his upper airway and started him on antibiotics and some steroids.
He did fine through the night but still had the same symptoms the next day. The father again informed us that the worms in the river water were causing this. Our head anesthetist was there and, after looking at the boy, informed me that she had seen leaches causing this. After nine months here, my ego is a shadow of what it used to be so we accepted the distinct probability of our ineptitude and took the boy to the OR for a look. As we were getting ready to put him to sleep, I polled the audience regarding what we were going to do if there actually was a leach in there. My ego further deflated as everyone in the room matter-of-factly explained to me the process as if it were the same as buttering toast. Apparently, if you just yank it out, it will bleed like stink so you just grab the thing with some forceps and wait. Eventually it will get mad at the thing grabbing it and it’ll let go of the tissue and attack the forceps. Then you just pull it out.
We put him to sleep and looked in with the laryngoscope (an instrument used to expose the vocal cords to place breathing tubes). At first, I didn’t see anything but then I noticed a bit of brown beneath the vocal cords that looked kind of like liver. Then an inch-and-a-half tail of a leach came slithering through the cords toward me. As I ‘ooohed’ and ‘aaaahed’ like a kid at a fireworks show, the resident grabbed the tail with some forceps and, about twenty seconds later, triumphantly displayed his catch. Totally cool. I ran to get Becca’s dad and he shot a bunch of pictures (his are way better than mine).
The moral of the story? If you’re going to drink river water, run it through a strainer first. The best news? The kid did fine. I always like a happy ending.

Yesterday I was consulted by the general practitioners about a young child with a swollen abdomen. One of the residents and I went over to see the patient. My heart broke. This was the worst case of starvation I’ve ever seen. It was like something out of a magazine. She was reportedly seven years old but was the size of a three year old. I could wrap my forefinger and thumb around her thigh, her face was composed of sharp edges of bone instead of pudgy cheeks.

Her abdomen was swollen severely and the work-up was looking like abdominal tuberculosis. She has already been started on medication so I ordered a high-protein diet and decided to get Becca involved.

This morning, Becca and I went up to see her and Becca shared my shock. Though the little girl looked so terrible, her eyes were bright and she had long eyelashes, a beautiful little girl. She had worsened over night and was now developing respiratory difficulties. She was on oxygen and was using extra muscles, like her neck and shoulders, to breathe. One thing I’ve learned from my experience here is that respiratory failure is the beginning of the end. My heart had little hope for her outcome.

It would be painful to watch for anyone, but being a father has increased my sensitivity to this many times over. When I see these little children suffering so much, I can’t stop thinking about Nathan. When I look at their little hands or their faces, it reminds me so much of my son. I just wanted to scoop her up and hug her and kiss her and love her and feed her. She is so young and has been dealt such a lousy hand in life. She should be running and laughing, not struggling to breathe.

We made a few orders and talked with one of the kitchen personnel to make a few changes and walked home. As I walked, in light of my own emotions, I wondered how God must see this. If I, with all my junk and all the ugliness God is pulling me out of, felt so heart-broken for this little girl, how would an infinite, loving God feel? If I wanted to scoop this girl up and care for her, how much more so does He? There are some who would use this example as evidence that an infinite, loving God does not exist. I’ve got intellectual arguments against this, and I think they’re compelling arguments, but intellectuality just doesn’t fit here. I suspect that’s why God, when He reached out to a broken and wrecked world, didn’t send a textbook. He sent Jesus. And Jesus walked among us amidst the pain and suffering resulting from our own evil and rebellion and He suffered supremely on the cross. The truth doesn’t come across real well in print so I admit the inadequacy of this story. As I think about this girl, the intellect feels cold but I find great comfort in knowing my Savior suffered with us and promised to set things straight some day. I believe my God is good and that, though things so often look bad, He sees it from a different perspective than I’m capable. I plant my hope firmly on the promise that things will be right some day. May Jesus come now, I pray.

A few hours after Becca and I saw the little girl, Becca walked back up to see if she was drinking any of the nutritional supplements. She came back in tears. The girl had died and they were wrapping the body to be taken home. I realize there are theological arguments regarding death and resurrection and when and who will be with God, but my solace and hope right now is that God scooped her up and is now tenderly loving her. I pray fervently that I will someday see that girl again when things have been made right. I pray I’ll see her whole, the way it was intended, and that we’ll worship Jesus together for who He is and what He did for us.

I went out with my parents yesterday into town and into market.  My dad took this picture.  It captures the market environment.  Basically there is an area about the size of 3 football fields in the middle of town off of the main road that has lots of people selling fruits and vegetables.  There are also some stands that sell all of the grains, beans and lentils.  This is also the part of Soddo that survived the fire back in January.  Most of the people are back in business.

Tomorrow we are headed to Addis Ababa, the capitol, to pick up my parents.  We are very excited about them visiting!  We have some fun and cultural things planned.  Including another trip to Lake Langano.  Here are a few pictures below of our trip there a few weekends ago…

This is us standing out at the lake.  This is the only lake in Ethiopia that you can swim in, you can actually wikipedia “Lake Langano, Ethiopia” and see the reason.  Nathan did not swim this time, but the big kids did.  We had our meals with a family that lives there who have 5 children, 3 boys between 9 and 13 and 2 younger girls.  Nathan loved all of the action and all of the children around.  I tried to get a few pictures of him having fun with the other kids, but of course all it looks like is a mangled group of arms and legs.

These are the monkeys that were at the camp we stayed in.  They stayed in the trees, but were very interesting.  Paul and I feel like our trip to Langano was the first real “African” expereince we have had.  We saw monkeys and baboons and some big birds!  And then walking along the lake with the acacia trees and the baboons running along the plain.  It was beautiful.