At 7:30 I heard a trio of water-carriers come in through the front door singing loudly as they worked so I decided to wait in bed a little longer before greeting the rest of the world. It’s always a little awkward having someone in your house you don’t know very well when you are in the first few minutes of the morning. Adrie let me know that she didn’t hear them come in and walked to the bathroom in her chonies to find a woman she didn’t know pouring water into our large bucket. (Thankfully the lady didn’t turn around in time to see Adrie dart back into her room!) They are so hospitable, even if they do come in at inconvenient times. I worked at home all morning again with my government book. It is getting abnormally tedious so I am doing my best to keep myself entertained--today’s remedy was Zach Braff soundtracks and trying to find people with birthdays close to mine.
A filling lunch was followed by an interesting conversation between Adrie, the Draskovic duo, and myself. We must have been feeling particularly candid today because we started to share some more delicate emotions about being here. All four of us have come to the point where the trip we are experiencing is very different than the trip we had imagined. We are all currently working on tasks which involve no interaction with patients and require almost no communication with other staff members and are starting to get a little, well, bored. We spoke up about how we realize that Faith Alive really doesn’t need outside help like we as middle-class white Americans would like to believe. With the talented staff and support of many in Jos they are functioning at a blessed and productive level. The Clinic would run just fine (if not better) without our presence. It sounds harsh, but it’s reality. Thankfully through what sounds like a meaningless mission trip is actually such a huge part of our personal adventures. God is continuously teaching us more about ourselves, about this culture we are living in, about how we need to see the world, and revealing more about his own desires for us as his children. We are continuing to move out of the mindset that we have something new to bring, something that the Clinic needs to have a revelation. We are learning that God sometimes brings you to things so that you can see and feel in order to think it through and take it back home. It’s a really beautiful and humbling place to be. So we went back and worked on our current jobs remembering that we can here to serve and experience. It made time go by at the correct speed.
Eventually dinner rolled around so we ate quickly in order to head back to the Clinic before it got dark. Every first Friday of the month all the churches in Nigeria (as is a tradition in many African nations) get together for prayer vigil, and tonight was our first experience. Kristen hasn’t been sleeping well so she decided it would be a good idea for her to stay home while the rest of us grabbed our laptops, water bottles, and pillows and headed to Faith Alive by 6:30. Prayer for our group started at midnight so to enjoy our few extra hours we did some necessary e-mailing, watched The Princess Bride, and ate popcorn. There is nothing to say about Nigerian popcorn except that most people here don’t know how to use a microwave so they don’t realize that their treat tastes exactly like Disneyland. Seriously, we all came to the same conclusion and scarfed it down respectively. After our movie I took an hour-long nap and woke up in time to get things started.
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