Teaser...

I played the part of pharmacist at a medical clinic in Bambur these past few days...

Short-term vs. long-term assistance...

Living in a guesthouse with 13 people and one bathroom without running water...

There was plenty of time to write lots about it...and I did! Unfortunately, technical difficulties have prevailed again. Maybe I'll get some access again in the next few days.

Recap:
I spent a wonderful week in the gorgeous country-side of Bambur with the Iowa team. We successfully arrived home today and I'm planning on leaving tomorrow for 5 days in Gembu with Ezekiel as the Iowa team starts their journey homeward bound! It's a lot of time spent in crunched vehicles traversing potholes, but the results are always worth it! Please keep my travel safety in your prayers. (I have only feelings of safety, but travel mercies are always welcome!)

Thanks for your patience with the lack of internet time! Awesome experiences are being had, the sharing is just proving to be a little challenging! (An hour of internet every 4-5 days isn't exactly what I'm accustomed to...I got more when I was living here!!)

Multicultural Journey

This Nigerian expedition started out as a multicultural experience with the cross-Atlantic flight from Atlanta to Amsterdam. I was thrilled to discover that I had a middle seat between two strangers for this 8.5 hour flight. (This may be perceived as sarcastic, but for those who know me well, you can be sure this is true!) I was even more tickled when I determined that one of my travel companions was a stockbroker returning to his home in Iran and another was a foreign exchange student returning home to Turkey after studying at Stevens High School in San Antonio! We had conversed about the culture of the Middle East, determined which of the airplane food contained pork and which was safe, discussed the merits of the man’s grandchildren growing up in the US and not learning their native Persian language and entertained many other fascinating topics during the interminable flight!

After a thoroughly enjoyable week in Jalingo, I left my home to travel with the Iowa group to Bambur, a more remote and rural portion of the United Methodist Church of Nigeria. Our entourage was composed of our driver, Yusuf, who is a Nigerian, Chan and Hee Song who are Korean-Americans and Linda and myself who are native Iowans. Along our journey, we sang many songs in a variety of languages. It was so much fun! I feel the most impressive was when we sang the chorus “God is so Good” in English, Hausa (regional Nigerian language), Mamui (Yusuf’s tribal language), Korean, and Spanish. How cool is that?! People experience God more wholly within a variety of different contexts. Connecting with individuals from different cultures has enabled me experience a more expansive and multi-faceted God in a greater way.

Name Epiphany

Since arriving in Nigeria for the first time, I’d been completely confused about the system of naming here. I couldn’t tell someone’s first name from their last name because sometimes they put them in one order and sometimes another and all names sound like first names. I finally reached a greater understanding last night during an in-depth conversation at a friends’ home. When a woman marries a man, she takes not only his last name as hers, but his first name as well. Then, when they have children, the children are given either the father’s first name OR his last name as their surname. THEN, as they grow, they can choose whether they want to keep that or switch. This means that siblings don’t necessarily have the same last name. No wonder I had always been so confused! The lineage can’t be traced by names!

Warm-blooded and Uninvited

As I’ve mentioned, I love being here in Nigeria. I don’t mind the increased number of ants and mosquitoes that seem to reside here. I don’t mind the many lizard and gecko visitors that like to frequent our little house and I’ve even reluctantly come to accept the cockroaches as occasional cohabitants with me. However, I draw the line if it the uninvited visitor is warm-blooded and has live birth. I arrived home Monday night after my roommate had gone to bed, so I went into the bathroom to prepare for bed. Out of the corner of my eye, I see something dart along the wall! My heart jumps and I hope with all my heart that it is a cockroach. To my complete horror, it is a MOUSE! Kai! I couldn’t scream because Laurice is sleeping, but I stood frozen very unsure of what I should do. As I slowly turning around looking for what I should do, I see a cockroach scurrying along…that I can step on and kill but a mouse…what to do?! If I were thinking rationally, I’d realize that I’m much bigger than it is and know that it's not going to hurt me. But, this is why it’s an irrational fear, it makes no sense. It appeared to run into a small hole in the wall (or into the rest of the house) for the sake of my sanity for the night, it "disappeared"!

Next night, I had everyone on high alert looking for the mouse, but we hadn’t found a trap. I was sitting with Ezekiel looking at pictures when I thought I saw it dash out of the corner of my eye and asked for confirmation. Being smart, he tried to tell me he hadn’t seen anything. Unfortunately, I could tell it wasn’t the truth and this assumption was confirmed when it ran into the kitchen! I definitely screamed and was not pleased. Ezekiel couldn’t believe when he saw it that THAT was the mouse I was so scared of. However, there’s not a lot one can do at night in Nigeria with a mouse in the house except suck it up and try to put mind over matter. I survived and I’m still working on this!

No Pictures?!

I am by nature a picture-taker. However, since arriving in Nigeria, I have gone days without taking any pictures. On one hand, this kind of bothers me because I want to have pictures to refer back to so I can remember this experience very well. On the other hand, it makes sense to me because when you go and just hang out with old friends and family, you don’t tend to take pictures because you are just enjoying on another’s company. This is true here in Nigeria as well. (However, I’m kind of excited that one of the American team members is taking a TON of pictures of the scenery around and I hope to steal some of them from him so I can post what everyday Jalingo looks like without having to be the one to look like the tourist taking them!) 

Facebook vs Facetime

Back home I’m an avid user of Facebook to keep in touch with many friends all over the world and I really enjoy it. However, that said, I’ve currently gone 3 days without any electronic communication (despite my best efforts today to secure a phone number…another story for another time). Typically, this would be driving me crazy making me feel so disconnected with the world as I believe it did when I first arrived in Nigeria. Typically, I check my email no fewer than 3 times a day and really, each evening when I’m home, I’m in a constant state of checking email and Facebook continuously while attempting to also be electronically productive. Most of this is done to maintain relationships to the people that are important to me. After checking the Facebook newsfeed for the 4th time that night it has gone from relationship maintenance to obsessive and time wasting.

Today, I got face time with so many great people from Iowa team members, my former principal and bookkeeper from my Nigerian school, one of my best friends in the world Helen John and her fabulous sisters, co-worker and friend Asper stopped by. I was able to rekindle old relationships with shopkeepers and vendors that I’d frequented here and have dinner with great friend Ezekiel and see his family. It was non-stop with visitors, random encounters and meeting new people through working together. I loved it! Granted, an outdoor, market-type society makes it easier to stop and chat with people compared with the US where you go from your isolated, air conditioned car to your isolated, air conditioned house. Being back here is rekindling my desire to try to get more unplanned, casual face time than Facebook time in my next chapter of life in El Salvador.

Sea Container

Wednesday:
Thoughts are flying through my mind at a million kilometers per second (I kept it metric in honor of the Nigerian experience…and of course science!) It’s hard to know whether to spew them all or choose a few to expound upon. I vividly remember this overloaded experience happening the last time…so many notable things going on.
It was SO HOT last night! I turned the generator off at 10pm fully anticipated the much-talked about NEPA (city electricity) to come on from 12-6am. Don’t worry, the rest of the city got it, but something was wrong with the wiring to our house so we didn’t! I never slept inside at those temperatures when I lived here and it was pretty hot and miserable.

However, I survived and went on to have a ridiculously productive and fun day! I went with the Iowa team to the United Methodist Church of Nigeria Secretariat (offices) to unload the sea containers that were filled by United Methodist Churches from across the state of Iowa. Layette kits, health kits and birthing kits, pill bottles, hospital beds, crutches for the area Methodist Clinics, school kits for kids, classroom kits for teachers, tons of books, solar refrigerators and panels and countless other items many of which are either impossible or difficult to find here in Nigeria. As we unloaded and sorted the goods alongside area Nigerians, many of which are the leaders of the programs who will be recipients of these goods, I was reflecting on many things including the kindness and generosity of the donors, the effort and organization of the coordinators, the thankfulness of the recipients and the sustainability and efficacy of such a gargantuan task.

For the past two evenings I've had the opportunity to go visit my friends in their homes and eat their delicious food. It has been so great to reconnect!

JALINGO!!!

I’ve only been here in Jalingo for about 4 hours and it might already be worth the 48+ hours of travel that it took to get here! It is SO GOOD to see old friends, familiar places and amazing new roads and lights! Wow! To say I LOVE it would be a complete and total understatement. (Things aren’t inconvenience free, but that makes this experience all the more perfect representation of my beloved year in Nigeria!) This place resonates with my soul.

AHHH!!! Nigeria!!!

Monday Night:
I LOVE being back in Nigeria! Every sight, sound, smell and taste brings back its own set of wonderful memories. From the moment we touched down in Abuja and left the airplane, the delicious, humid air filled with all the familiar petrol, smoke and exhaust smell consumed me. Riding from the Abuja airport to our little hotel along unlit roads, seeing the cell phone charging stations and small cans used to measure out petrol on the black market, feeling our car bottom out, fitting 4 people in the back of a tiny corolla-sized car that was questionable whether or not it would have enough strength to make it over the next pot hole, and crossing the median of a highway under construction so that we could get across to the road that we needed to turn onto brought me immediately back in time. I could hardly contain my excitement and joy bursting inside! All of this happened in the first two hours that we were officially in Nigeria.

I LOVE it!

I have written up multiple posts since arriving and diligently saved them to my flash, but had forgotten that I need to save them in an earlier version of Microsoft Word to be able to open them on Nigerian computers! Alas, this will just be a quick, less-insightful and less-descriptive summary than I what I have already written (and will try to post later).

We made it to Jalingo safely after 48+ of travel! It's SO GOOD TO BE BACK! It's like stepping back into my former life and it's wonderful! I couldn't ask for anything more.

Jalingo, Here I Come!

Plans
After being back in Iowa for almost two years, I’m super excited to be heading back to Jalingo, Nigeria on Sunday to do some work with a team through the Iowa-Nigeria Partnership of the United Methodist Church. While I’m a little uncertain about the exact nature of the work I will be doing, I know it will include some computer and leadership training of the church leaders, checking out the EmpowHER micro-lending program that was recently implemented, celebrating the high school graduation with the students that I taught and last, but certainly not least, to catch up with some near and dear friends while I’m there. Please pray for our group over the next month that our work and interactions with the people of Nigeria will positively impact one another.

Expectations
As I was running around getting my packing done at the last minute before heading to Omaha to celebrate my cousin Beth’s wedding (Yay and Congrats!) I was reflecting on how different the preparations are this time returning to familiar territory as opposed to embarking blindly into the unknown. I know that toilet paper and laundry detergent are available 10 steps outside the compound where I’ll be staying and aren’t necessary to pack. I know that my friends LOVE the little Crystal Light drink mixes and will be excited to get some. I know that despite my strong desire to pack sweat shirts, sweaters and fleeces due to freezing everywhere inside in the US, they are rarely needed in Nigeria! I know how quickly things can change everywhere, so I’m looking forward to seeing how things have evolved and progressed since I’ve been away.

Perspective
It was a big deal for my parents to send me off to Nigeria for a year that first time (much bigger for them than for me!) However, I think I prepared them well because this time, they keep saying, “at least it’s only for 5 weeks!” Additionally, my time in Nigeria has made them thankful that I signed a contract to teach in El Salvador, which is in the same time zone, and has constant electricity! :) Perspective is everything.

Bittersweet Endings

Describing endings as bittersweet is probably considered rather cliché, but I believe it has become cliché because of the dichotomy that it so aptly portrays. As I packed up my apartment in Clinton and said my final good-byes to friends and co-workers, I was struck by the finality of this current reality. I’ll never again live above landlords who notice my bike tires are low on air and pump them up for me or knock on my door to bring me the most delicious baked goods. There are inside jokes with co-workers that can’t be relayed to other audiences and remain humorous. Friendships have been built; we will work to maintain them, but they will change due to distance and time. Finally, leaving this set of students means leaving their insatiable appetite for love and attention and the opportunity to practice patience on a superhuman level. There is a compassionate (masochistic?) part of me that will miss that.

While leaving these aforementioned people will create a void, how sweet to have “done life” with them for a time! My life has definitely been enriched and enhanced by those I have met and experiences we’ve shared!!! Now that the Clinton chapter in life has closed, I’m waiting and preparing for the adventures to come. First up, revisiting old friends in Jalingo, Nigeria June 12th-July 19th! I can’t wait!