Fall 2012 Manipur Clinic Week

Because it's been sitting in my "drafts" box for FOREVER.... I'll finish my travel tales.

Churachandpur:  A place that I could observe for months and barely have scratched the surface of being able to describe it as an entity (as with any foreign complexity). And no, I suppose you wouldn't be interested about that entity unless you, yourself, were walking down its dirt streets pondering all the history and reality that had happened there in only a couple generations' time before it became a reality to you.

Outside of the hospital complex for patients to line up.

Head hunters to civil wars to peaceful streets. Native American-esque? Asian? Indian? Jewish? The economy? Family dynamic? Culture? Languages? Good grief, it drove me crazy to not be able to learn for as long as I wanted to. 

Optometry waiting for a doctor

The hospital:
In the apparent lack of medicinal luxuries the stage was set to watch medical professionals systematically compute their unique station's resources and come alive as medical MacGyvers in their craft. This wasn't a situation that I'd feel pity for them, this was a situation I watched someone who was born for this kind of scenario come alive. I was so impressed. It was all I could do to simply offer myself as a MacGyver totee.  
 Every inch and space of the hospital was utilized to try and get as many people in as possible. Patients came and lined up before the sunrise and were moved and ushered through an ever changing flawed system with a look of confusion that could have matched mine. Every hour of those first couple days our system changed, effecting every station from triage to surgery each time. Yet, there were no complaints. No passive aggressive remarks. I never knew I could love a group of people so quickly than when I saw their humor, patience, and joy never run out. It was an accidental learning of the lesson that the more you give the more you receive, and it made all the difference in the world.

Electricity was run off of generators that often went out mid procedure/surgery (thank goodness for headlamps and flashlights). There are no lights in the small bathroom stalls so good luck aiming for the squatty-potty in the dark. Good luck finding any soap or hand sanitizer after you failed at the previous as well. Give up on escaping the smell of burning trash. And when feeling lost, take comfort in the fact that the patients are in the same boat as you. Maybe grow worried over this fact as well. Eat any chance you get even though this may mean you needing a bathroom shortly after. You will be laughed at. You will laugh at yourself. You'll be so happy you did.

The week's clinic we brought with us offered free cataract surgery, dental, medical, pediatric, OB, eye glasses, and optometry in hopes of attracting people to the prayer tent to receive healing, encouragement, and most importantly, Christ. 

Optometry team

I had the privilege of working in the optometrist station, basically trying to aid a system of function and care for the locals and volunteers that were putting in tireless hours of rapid adjustment to both chaos and efficiency. And ever the patients were accommodating in waiting for hours and being directed to wherever we ushered them, with most of the time, no explanation due to our lack of a translator or time in general. 

Optometry triage

Hours were filled with minutes of little favors for those I still barely knew the names of (which proved difficult when you needed to call them from across the room). But their faces, growing in familiarity, began to showcase their desire to do more than they already were. That look moved me to make up my mind to go to medical school, become a doctor, and not have to see that look without knowing I did everything I possibly could to alleviate it. Somehow you imagine you could actually do something about it, when in truth, the most desperate of pitifully attempted performances from us makes for such a heavy dependence on God.




However, the ethos questions still made a permanent residency in my culture shocked mind like a storm cloud, blocking my view of clear blue logical sky in the midst of my currently committed miniscule mistakes. Thank God for the rays of encouraging sun of His Truth, breaking through with blessings and beauty in a way I could never understand through imagination alone. That Truth was learned from the people that surrounded me who never paid any heed to their circumstances. It was a genius move to give up processing the reality of anything as there was only time to digest every case, conversation, meeting, mistake and smile as it came. Nothing more. Nothing less.


There is so much I regret, so much I'm proud of, so much I'm thankful for, and so much I wish I had more time to accomplish or correct in myself. Most of the time I was filtering and processing through guilt. Guilt for not being a doctor, for not speaking the language, for not staying long enough. In the end it was the nurses, doctors and volunteers that I worked with that I grew the most attached to. Their selflessness and tireless availability to the clinic taught me such a natural reactionary emotion; to be the most happy if I could do them any favor. So this is what fulfillment in servanthood felt like. Not what I already knew it was, but what I didn't know it felt like. After that first day I knew, I already knew, that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. 

It was hard not to hide when confused. It was complete anxiety forcing myself to relax and enjoy everyone around me to spite the over stimulation that was bombarding my introverted highly sensitive self.

I really grew to love the people the more I understood them though. They seemed extremely reserved and cautious (so unlike Delhi) and remained polite. In our guest room at the college was a motto to encourage the students to live to serve. This was probably the most backwards concept to my western culture and every morning and night it remained the most prevalent for me. If someone wanted to serve you, don't refuse them (which was just as much of a challenge to receive as to offer). They did our laundry even though we were there for only 5 days. Carried our suitcases, fed us, boiled water for our bucket showers, and at the end of the week, a cultural evening show with gifts for every single traveler. 

I wanted to go all over the world doing just this, just to meet more people that humbled and pushed me in becoming a servant for how humble a servant they were. I knew I'd need to keep this potent lesson for going home as well. The adjective of "easy" is so common when learning spiritual truths abroad, but is no excuse when it needs to be applied at home as well. If anyone needed this lesson it was me at home when my world was screaming ease and selfishness at me. But oh, how I wish I could refresh that calling more frequently on foreign shores than I'm able to do now. 

Manipur, India

Summarized first thoughts to the best of my ability.

I have no idea.

And I kind of like it that way. 

    There wasn't any land formation that proved to my vision that I was in a foreign place. Looked like grass, trees, mountains and dusk to me. All normal. Yet it couldn't be familiar, and there was no familiar in my life to link it to. It was an ancient letter, written in a foreign alphabet that had suddenly fallen from my book of every day life that I was so previously engrossed in. 

Isn't that letter's existence a mysterious thing? The timing of its appearance amongst the pages of life, the challenge it is to decode it after every word and the questioned necessity to decode it at all?

A person could go crazy obsessing over it for how much the meaning of life, in that moment, hinges on its story. 

"Keep this with you, carry it along, and the answers, translations and lessons will come in time. I'll make sense of it all, I'll be your Constant. But for now don't fight the inevitable, trust Me, and just enjoy the ride."

Simple 10 minute encouragements like this from Jesus have fed in me a growing obsession for setting myself up to be taken by delighted surprise over the unknown and to let my own non-self-coached emotions occur from the unexpected.

I call it, "Exploring (Pocahontas style): In Good Company".

Dear Delhi...

 ...you terrify me.. and you have me so uncomfortably hooked that I actually feel comfortable. You were the last place on my bucket list because I knew I would never be native enough to survive, and still God had you be the first. Even in my obvious foreign skin I wanted to stay. I shake my fist at the jet lag and puny human mind that kept me from feeling the full emotion of meeting you in person for the first time. I kept expecting to be overwhelmed. But even after losing our luggage I knew I wouldn't feel discouraged or under water. Melt downs happen when you carry the delusion that you own some control and come to find, either in the failure of the last straw or the end of a vain pursuit, that you aren't in the pilot seat at all. Never was I under the delusion that I had influence over your inevitable. You have that kind of raw unnerving quality that my person craves but lives in fear of. And here you were. Waking at dawn under the polluted clouds that separated you from the glimpse of clear sky and me, who was breathing, thinking, and asking God if this was really it.

I was going to land in India and dear God, I hoped this would not be the only time. I was going to land in Delhi and dear God, I hoped it wouldn't beat me. There was no song that would do, save one. And to its battle cry I sat thinking... trying to react. Not for sleep deprivation, not for the grasp of the concept of this magnitude, but by the grace of God for the acute awareness of who I wasn't, who God was, and what this meant... for me, for us, for dreams... yeah... I guess I cried a little.

 

So Delhi, what did I think? People keep asking me if India was everything I was expecting. I expected that that day of the 26th would be just like any regular day to you. I expected an airport, customs, no smooth sailing and the formality of a culture that does not need you to like them. You were you. And I liked you for it. But still you terrified me. Your smog blanketed air, the painless ability to stare directly into the sun, your formula or lack of formula for city function and above all the absolute impossibility to make heads or tails of any of it because of my lack of experience of learning from you was above all, the most maddening of your realities. From the minute we left that airport I knew that coming for so short a time to the country as a whole was already going to feel like a big mistake.

Photo credit: Jenny B

"What? Ha! I've, I've never admitted to a mistake!..... I've made a huge mistake."
-Gob Bluth

The Adventure Begins

In my freshman year of high school I began to fall in love with a culture who's music, colors and history was so complex that it fascinated me to no end. I picked up Indian friends for my avid love of all the answers they could give me and all the curry that they could feed me. I collected Bollywood, soundtracks, books, cookbooks, pictures, boxes, saris, punjabi clothes, bangles, spices, and... even Hindi Rosetta Stone. Rarely was the name of the country spoken from my mouth without a husbanded forlorn sigh for the fact that I, myself, had not set foot on its soil. Too much probably for that many years. But you know how love is.






It was October the 24th, 2012 and it had come down to only a matter of hours before boarding the plane that would start me on the long journey to get my India stamp on my passport. Only a matter of hours till one of my most treasured dreams would be coming true. My suitcase was actually being packed, my clothes finally being set out for travel... and my face was literally in the toilet. All I could do was cry and puke and puke and cry. How it had come to this and how I was ever going to pull myself together long enough to make it to that plane was rapidly becoming an impossibility.
I was a mess. An anxious puking mess.
Thank God for my parents. Thank. God.

My mother gave me a medicinal concoction and I simply obeyed their instructions of either laying down, getting up or just responding. My dad packed my bag and I incoherently replied to his questions, all just 15 minutes before leaving. Fervent were their prayers and pathetic were my tears as off we drove to the airport with me still on the verge of needing that toilet. I was highly doubting I'd make it.

I hobbled through the airport as a suspicious character looking like I was carrying the ebola virus, but they let me through anyways. My travel companion looked at me with concern. "No, no Charlotte I'm fine. You just might have to make sure I get off the plane and onto the next one, that's all." Poor girl. We barely knew each other and already I was at my worst.

Well it was all a blur after security. After the medicinal concoction peaked I only remember feeling extremely relaxed and completely unconcerned if I puked on the floor or my own belongings. Didn't much matter. What matters was that I slept. Got off that plane. Onto the next one. And slept again. The entire way to Munich.

"To the end of his days Bilbo could never remember how he found himself outside, without a hat, a walking-stick or any money, or anything that he usually took when he went out; leaving his second breakfast half-finished and quite unwashed up, pushing his keys into Gandalf's hands, and running as fast as his furry feet could carry him down the lane, past the great Mill, across The Water, and then on for a mile or more.

Very puffed he was, when he got to Bywater just on the stroke of eleven, and found he had come without a pocket handkerchief!"

Like waking into a dream.

With a 12 hour layover in familiar Munich, we strolled along the streets that often haunted my nostalgic dreams of bible school in search of palaces, churches, beer houses and donner kebabs.

Each road, each church and each sound and smell began a confusion that all time travelers must feel. There, in the past, I realized that in order to travel into the future I must relish the present. Letting go of the expectation of ever grasping the reality of any place we'd be, we simply were. And we were simply being.


Traveling the road, following the map. Embracing the vagabond status.

                                                                              

How God can be so equally familiar in the state of feeling so anxiously sick and then so euphorically in a dream is a human paradox that it seems you can only grasp when turning off mortal logic. Unfortunately I don't know the balance and I turned off all regular thought pattern together. Letting our raft simply coast down the rapids and calm, releasing any and all control, and our adventure, friendship and the feeding of an old dream began.

"They had not been riding very long, when up came Gandalf very splendid on a white horse. He had brought a lot of pocket-handkerchiefs, and Bilbo's pipe and tobacco. So after that the party went along very merrily, and they told stories or sang songs as they rode forward all day, except of course when they stopped for meals. These didn't come quite as often as Bilbo would have liked them, but still he began to feel that adventures were not so bad after all."

Fate Awaits 2013

So much is ahead to learn, fail and overcome. I'm ready. I'm terrified. And ever God is impressing the truth of abiding in Him for survival.
Survival of what? What is to come?
In the midst of such anxious questions He calls to mind some memories, sweet memories of secret meetings with Him and also the hell of certain years that have proven feeble when meeting with His promises. He reminds us of Heaven. He reminds us of the glory that is more precious than the dreaming day to day life and sleepless nights here on earth. To Awake, and to taste true Reality is tempting me to sacrifice even more in the little months ahead of puny 2013 than my best year of servanthood.
Tomorrow is no different than the chance I had today. And yet ever tomorrow is more bright and prophetic than the mistakes I have made in the past 24hrs :) What do I think of the exhausted topic of the new year? It's too irregular for me to predict its appearance or ambiance. But I suppose then you could see it as a world between worlds. The continued journey on a road that has no standstills. The deep breath is over and now it is the plunge. It is not the journey's end, nor its beginning, but it is a surprise chapter that refuses to let us prepare for it. Aha! Touche, life. Touche.

In view of my circumstances I think to my selfish self, "I did not want to be here at all." Why, self?  Well, I don't actually know. And actually, after all the unexpected... I don't know where else I could be. Or should be. Or would be. I think God has this one. And I better get my abiding act together if I want anything in this short life to matter or last.


PS: The unexpected Asia journey's tales, mishaps and God's timely rescues all still to come...shortly..ish.

Hello, October

 These days I'm overcome with anxiety over the fact that I can't predict what my eyes will behold in only a couple weeks.

I plan to miss my flight. I plan to stay in my room and lock the door.

  

But then, I think about the sights I'll be re-visiting...

...the sights that I'll be seeing for the first time...

...the sights I've dreamt about seeing for the first time for over 10 years,...

...and tell myself that I am literally time traveling from the safety of my room...

...then I don't think I want to pass it up.

Lord, help me. I'm so gripped with fear and simultaneous excitement.

Precious Indeed

In that moment He impressed the truth, "Circumstances do not prove I am trustworthy. My trustworthiness is proved despite your circumstances."

For some reason I wish I knew the formula for for the next time I'm desperately searching for something, I have finally found my promise ring. Missing since February, seven months later, seven months of despair, frustration, dreams of finding it, blahblahblah... Thursday was finally the day for the dreamed for breakdown. 

In the process of getting ready for the day I went into a jewelry box that I've been in countless times when looking for this ring. I swear I had torn apart every box (this one included), pocket and dusty corner and never saw it anywhere.  So this day I was completely caught off guard to find it laying safe inside. Shocked really. Shocked in that overwhelming relief and humility when your hope in God is proven trustworthy, even over so small a thing, and you're ashamed you even doubted. 

 My dad's conviction of its impending return was proven true. This one is mine, and has collected even more meaning than it already came with. It is precious to me indeed. 

But even more than this ring, God has become more precious. Still wrestling with Him in this new uncomfortable season, I'm surprised this reunion was not the climax or proof of love I was looking for. It is merely because He chose to. Merely because He let me have it back. And He didn't have to. That's the revelation. God is not obligated to give me everything I ask for. Him saying "no" is not against His goodness. And Him giving this back is humbling. To be honest I almost feel aweful for the tantrums I threw if it weren't for His sweetness that makes this kind of humility exactly what I crave. Phew!!

A classic song. It never gets old.