Two Weeks

I don’t want to find my identity in being a nurse. This past week I realized why I’ve been burying myself in extracurricular activities all throughout college… I can’t stand being around nursing for long periods of time. At school, I can escape and visit my friends who aren’t nursing majors, hang out with Alpha people, and study other subjects besides nursing. Here, I’m a nurse 24/7. I live with mostly all nursing majors, all of the other students are at their service sites during the day, leaving the nursing majors alone doing homework, and all of school work is for nursing. There’s just no break from being a nursing student. It’s not that the nursing profession isn’t noble and incredible, because it is. I have just realized that my goal is find my identity in Christ and Christ alone, in being his follower and here I am identified first as an American and second as a nurse. Right now in my life that means working hard to incorporate Christ into every aspect of my life. However, there are many times when my life is so crammed with nursing that I get to the end of the day and realize that I didn’t make room for God. How is it possible that the most important aspect of my life gets pushed aside for school work?

It’s been a few weeks since I last blogged. I think I just got to a point where there was so much going on in my brain that I didn’t know how to get it down in writing. We ended clinical a couple of weeks ago and it was an extremely abrupt ending. I had a beautiful last clinical day in pediatrics. At Eastboom clinic (which I had not had the best experiences at) I had a wonderful nurse who taught me so much about diagnosing patients and what to assess for when looking at children who come into the clinic. She showed incredible advocacy for her patients which I have not seen yet in one of my nurses. We had a 6year old boy come in with a cold. His mother informed us that he was HIV positive and had started ARVs, but he had stopped taking them 6 months ago because the mother couldn’t get to the clinic they had started the ARVs at – when you start taking ARVs at one clinic you have to continue to go there because they have all of your paperwork and records of your literacy classes. My sister told me that in order for this boy to get started on ARVs again, he and his mother would have to go through counseling and would have to get more blood work done meaning it could be another 6 months before this little boy could start taking ARVs again. My heart just broke for this family. The situation was one of the hardest there is because the little boy needs his medication, the mother probably was not educated enough about non-compliance, and there is no adequate transport for them to get to where they need to go. It’s just amazing to me that with all of the advances that have been made here, there are countless problems just like this one that are preventing people from getting proper medical aid.



These last few weeks have been filled with homework. We’re cramming the last month of our classes into these next two weeks in order to relieve our class work for when we go to Cape Town, but that means that we have had no lives for the past three weeks. Every time I talk to my mom she asks what I’m doing that day and all I can say is that I’m doing homework. But it’s not all dreary work. Two weekends ago we went hiking in the Drakensberg mountains to go and see the san cave paintings from the bushmen who were the original inhabitants of South Africa. The landscape on the way to and in the Drakensberg mountains is absolutely breathtaking. The sky was the brightest of blues and the grassy hills were an electric shade of green to the extent that it looked completely fake.

We spent last weekend on safari at the uMkhuze game reserve riding in open vehicles and enjoying the gorgeous scenery of the bush. We saw countless amounts of animals on these rides like leopard, lion, cheetah, zebra, giraffe, antelope, wildebeest, buffalo, and warthog. They were such an incredible reminder of how creative our God is. I think my favorite part, aside from driving around a bend and seeing giraffe in the street, was being in the bush and admiring the beauty that defines this country. Not only are the people beautiful and diverse and interesting, but the land is gorgeous and thrilling and stunning all at once.

Another amazing landscape moment was going zip-lining through the canopy this weekend. We spent a few hours on Saturday doing an incredible zip-lining adventure through the canopy of a South African forest. The weather wasn’t the clearest, but it was amazing to zip-line through the mist while dodging trees and looking into deep ravines filled with trees and waterfalls while spending time with some girls I have come to love and adore. We had a blast screaming our way through the 8 zip lines and entertaining the workers as we laughed and sang in Zulu.

It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that we’re leaving Pietermaritzburg in less than two weeks. We’ll be traveling down to Cape Town on the 27^th where we’ll spend our last three weeks studying more history and culture of South Africa and exploring the city. It’s not that I’m not excited to go to Cape Town that’s making me feel down these days – it’s the thought of leaving the people I’ve built relationships with and the thought that I can’t ever relive this experience. Even when I come back someday, it won’t be the same. The people will be different and the purpose will be different and it’s just so sad to me. But at the same time there is so much joy in the thought of coming back and seeing how people have grown and how programs have grown and seeking after what God might have planned for me here.

Hopefully I’ll be able to update you soon… the internet is being ridiculous and the president of APU and the head of internationalism are coming this week to visit which is amazingly exciting. For now, love, grace and peace.

Anger

I want to be angry at God. I have seen some of the most atrocious injustices, met the faces of the silent poor, heard the suffering in the voices of those that still have them, and felt the hopelessness that these people fight against every day. I want to be angry at God. I want it to be His fault so I don’t have to look any further into whose fault it might actually be. I want to scream and yell and beg Him for the answer as to why He’s allowing all of these things to happen to incredible, beautiful people. The people I’m surrounded with are angry and upset and frustrated with God, but my heart can’t feel anything at all. It is in those moments where we’re frustrated to the point of the absence of emotion, God reminds us of who He is. I’m re-reading a book called Intercessory Prayer about why prayer is even necessary and how to release God’s power through prayer. In the first chapter (which is the chapter I read this week as I was feeling void of emotion) Sheets explains that the reason we need to ask God for things is because He gave us authority over the earth. Back when Adam was created, God gave him the responsibility of watching over the earth and everything in it. And then, through a simple act of rebellion, our world came crashing down. It’s not that God has done this to us… it’s that we have done this to ourselves. So now the emotion that I feel is sadness… sadness that we as human beings have failed our brothers and sisters by not taking care of them and loving them has God does. He even re-sent us an example in Christ of how to love each other and we still can’t get it right. So my heart is heavy with sadness, but urgency to experience more of what this means and to encourage people to look past their anger at God and to take responsibility so that we can move forward and start undoing the mess that we have created.

So now what? That’s always my next question. What do I need to do now that I have this information? What are some action steps I can take? Well, I can tell you, I can encourage the people around me here in South Africa to think about this as a counterargument as to why God would allow this to happen, and then I can go and do something in the community that surrounds me and encourage you to do the same. This week the non-nursing students are starting their community engagement projects and the nursing students were able to sit in on the introduction of the course that will be taught by Francis Njoroge. It is an incredible course about how to go into a community to facilitate growth and understanding of their own needs and how they can improve their quality of life from within their own context. The non-nursing students will be using the material in this course to start a project with specific African groups of people to try and help them discover some problem areas in their communities and work toward developing solutions to those problems. For me, it’s giving me tools with which to take into communities at home as well as preparation for things to come and it’s teaching me to be culturally relevant and focused on building peoples’ capacity so they can do things for themselves by walking with them toward their own personal goal.

Ok… I have to tell you about the other parts of my fantastic week that don’t have to do with life revelations! Last weekend was a catch-up weekend… on sleep, strength, and homework. We were supposed to go hiking in the Drakensberg mountains to go see some sand paintings done by the bushmen, but the weather here is ridiculous and they wouldn’t let us go in the rain, so we stayed home and hung out around campus.

Monday began homecoming week, which for normal APU students is a semi-big deal, but we went all out. It was like high school spirit week on steroids. We had dress-up competitions between our chalets every day and activities almost every night. We started out the week with by roasting marshmallows and making makeshift S’mores out of Marie cookies and Cadbury chocolate and small marshmallows that we had to double-up. Monday was inside out and backwards day and we all put our clothes on inside out and backwards and walked around campus in that all day long. Mind you, there is a conference going on at the center this week, so we’re having meals with a group of people who look at us like we’re crazy every time they see us.

Tuesday brought an interesting day. I was supposed to be at an HIV and AIDS facility that does research at the same time as treat patients, but instead, they sent me to the clinic next door where I was of far more use. I saw primary health care (chronic patients who need medication and colds) and drew bloods in a room by myself, and spent time with the equivalent of an LVN in the states who was taking blood pressures, giving Depo (contraceptive) shots, and taking blood sugars. He let me do a lot, but I noticed that he was very flirtations with his patients which bothered me a little. At lunch time, he took me on a walk to go and see the community because I hadn’t been there before. We walked the dirt roads and met the women in the community and he literally flirted with every woman we walked by, which made me uncomfortable. When we got back, I had about an hour left and he proceeded to flirt with me for the remainder of the time with me. I didn’t really know what to do. He was talking about flying to the U.S. and paying labolo (the bride price) for me and bringing me back to have his 7 children and kept asking me when I was coming back to see him. I was composed enough, but in my head I was just angry. All I could think of was these poor women who had to subject themselves to being cared for by this man because they don’t have the rights that he does here and they don’t have a voice to stand up for themselves. Ugg. So frustrating. When we got back to campus (after much venting in the car about my anger) we got dressed up for crazy hair and mismatch day and it snapped me out of my anger and helped me focus on the beauty of being in this place aside from all of the things that are wrong with the system.

Wednesday was another incredible day. We dressed in black and white, went to the mall for a cup of coffee, and then headed out to the Drakensberg mountains to listen to the Drakensberg boys choir. They are a group of 4th-9th graders whose main focus in school is singing and they are incredible. I had goose bumps multiple times and you could just drink in the beauty of the music as they did songs from all eras including classical, contemporary, and traditional South African music. They even did “We Will Rock You” by Queen and added a little stomp in with their South African music. Thursday was a very uneventful day out at Caprica (which is the HIV and AIDS facility I was supposed to be at on Tuesday) and I literally did nothing all day because there wasn’t anything to do besides paperwork and do blood pressures which my sister insisted on doing herself. We went back home to twin day and had just a few hours to prepare for an “Air Band” competition which turned into a dance competition. Allison and Teresa choreographed our dance to “Battlefield” by Jordan Sparks and which was so amazing and we came in with war paint and dressed in black and busted out an awesome dance! After the competition (which I still think we should have won) we busted out a spontaneous dance party in preparation for the “Homecoming” dance the next night. Friday was color day and our whole chalet dressed in pink and we ended the day in a Brie (BBQ) and a tacky dress dance. We looked aweful and it was amazing! I got to do big stage makeup on a bunch of people which made it glorious and we just danced our hearts out for a few hours.

All in all, it was a glorious week and I can’t wait to tell you about the weekend, but I’ll save that for another day! Thanks for reading so much! I’ll try to cut the next one down ; ) Enjoy the pictures and leave me some comments! Miss and love you all!