Sloosing.
As some of you have read in my past blogs, this month I have been working with a church in Lilongwe, Malawi that has church branches that extend into villages in the bush. This is the story of how my first bush experience went.
Read at your own risk. Towards the end it gets messy. Shev (my mom), I’m sorry if the honesty toward the end of this story offends you. I just want people to have a real, honest view of what my life has looked like..and to my southern, polite upbringing– this lifestyle is offensive.
After about 1 week working from pastor Harvey’s house in Lilongwe, it was time for us to take a 4-5 day trip into a more rural part of Africa to do church planting. So we packed up our day packs and headed out. After a 1 hour bus ride to the next town over and then another 1-2hour ride out into the bushe we arrived. It was night when we got there and all we wanted to do was get some sleep but within the first 15 minutes of arriving about 40 people were surrounding us just watching our every move. As we just sat there in the dark watching people watching us, our contacts talked to the people about our lodging. When our contacts came back they told us that the head village chief was gone for the night and how the people of the village really didn’t want us staying there. When I heard that I was thinking, “what?! if they don’t want us we definitely shouldn’t be here.”. But then he explained that because we were Americans they felt really bad that we would have to stay somewhere without nice accomidations and without electricity. I really hate that people think of Americans as some kind of god because we are sooo far from that.
After all that was cleared up, we put up our tents in what was the middle of the school yard (a dirt patch between a tree which was a classroom and a building). Then we were told it was time to worship/preach. We so weren’t prepared but we pushed ourselves through it the best we could. That night we were so ready for a good sleep and were excited we didn’t have to start that early the next morning.
We were wrong about the not starting early. By about 4:30am the next morning we all woke up to people worshiping and praying in tongues. To be completely honest, I didn’t hate it. I was accutally moved that the people there are so spiritually fereverent.
That day after having and interesting bathing experience and squatty potty expereience about a mile from where we slept, the fun began. We split up in 2 different groups and went to share God’s love. The group I was in went to 2 different villages and prayed with 10+ people. It went really well. Then that night we had the first of what we’d call a revival in the states. Each night we would all get up and preach and sing and dance. It was a lot of fun.
Our second day looked a lot like the first, going in to villages and praying for a lot of people, coming back for lunch-which was always huge ground up maize patties called seema(sp?) and eaten with our hands, resting and preparing for the night and then more preaching. The second day was extraordinarialy fun because I met a lady named Treesa-just like my stepmom!- and she was soo sweet she taught me how to wrap and wear a baby on my back and then let me carry her son home:)
On the third day stuff started getting messy.
I woke up about 4 am and had to run to the bathroom. It was a precurser to what my day would look like. During breakfast, my stomach started cramping a ton. I started feeling really light-headed and feverish so while my teammates were preaching or something I went back to my tent and fell right back to sleep. When the session was over, it was time for baptisms. This part of the whole revial was something I was really excited for! Who doesn’t love baptisms??!? I can tell you that as a girl raised in the church of Christ, I am all about some baptisms! I probably like baptisms more than anyone else that was at the revival AND this was the first baptism since I’d left for the race! I was jazzed…Until the time came to go.
When my team woke me up I could barely pull myself together enough to make it to the squatty potty, much less make a walk to the river. I was bummed and the sun was getting hotter. So as they left I crawled into my hammock to continue to sleep and pray this sickness away.
Africa in a village is not where you want to get sick. Especially when getting sick means your resting consist of laying in a hammock while 20 African children sit and stare at you while 10 more are swinging on the branches of the tree your hammock is connected to. As the children bounced me I thought I might explode from both ends on myself or possibly beat the children until they left me alone. By the grace of God and His self-control in me I did neither. I just prayed and tried to sleep. As I laid there I honestly thought, if I pass out here surely I will survive until my team gets back from the river. Dramatic? yes a bit, but I did feel that bad.
When my team got back from the river I had successfully made it to the squotty twice, vowed to never eat again, and work up a high fever and chills. As they covered me in prayer and love I really started to realize that this was a spiritual attack.
I don’t remember much of what happened from lunch until the night session but I’m sure it wasn’t anything exciting. By that time my teammates and I had decided we needed to leave the village that night for I could get to a doctor or hospital. So they went to the last session which was just held on the other side of the schoolyard, as I laid in the hammock praying for it to go by fast. Sometime during the session Kendra felt like God was telling her to go check on me. When she go there I was needing to go to the bathroom but failing to gather the strength to do so. Go God! His timing is perfect! As she tried to help me get up my stomach just turned and up came every little bit of liquid I had managed to get down that day. This was when I knew without a doubt I’d be getting help soon. So we went to the bathroom and then I walked over to the session to receive prayer. After the session the village people insisted that we eat dinner before we left. So as I lay on the floor trying not to throw up, my poor teammates were dealing with the dinner. I am so glad they knew I was too sick to eat because the rest of them were having to eat a duck (I think). And in Africa they eat every part including the intestine and liver and so-on.
After dinner the girls packed up all my stuff and theirs and we said audios to the village. As we drove away I really thought that I would be at a nice hospital in a couple hours and was really happy about it. Its like I was seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. While driving down rocky dirt roads for the next hour, that light at the end of the tunnel is what I focused on. I thought if I can hold myself together for the next hour I’ve got this. It took everything I had to not poo or throw up on myself. With every bump in the road, I prayed even harder to hold it together.
Then we “arrived”. I thought this was where my story turned to unicorns and rainbows,but not yet. Its actually where I went into a small dirty room that was explained as a doctors office. The one nurse that was working took my temp, gave me tylenol (or something along those lines), let me use her toliet (twice), then sent me on my way. what.a.let.down.
I was then told that I couldn’t get to a hospital until morning. By this time it was maybe 10 or 11pm. The last think I wanted to do was stop this long journey and wait longer before I got to the hospital but I knew everyone was doing their very best and everything in their power to get me better asap. So I accepted the fact as we settled down for bed at the house of an elder we had been working with. I was still feeling weak but since everything in my stomach was gone (including the bile) I thought I was safe and not going to get sick . Then my sweet little teammate, Sami, said ,”Rach, you really need to try to drink more water”. I then told her I felt that if I drank more water I would possibly poo myself but drank some anyways knowing that I was extremely dehydrated. About the same time I was pouring the water down and Sami was bent over caring for me, the water came up. I had been at this elder’shouse for maybe 20 mins and had just managed to throw up all over his couch and floor, my whole body, Leah’s sleeping sheet she had given to me because of the chills, and my dear teammate Sami’s feet. Perfect. I thought I can’t get any grosser than this.
Wrong.
After a long night of little sleep and a lot of squatty visits, I was finally headed back to Harvey’s then on to the hospital with his wife. As soon as we arrived at Harvey’s I greeted them by throwing up all in front of their gate. Then Ethel, Harvey’s wife went with us to the hospital. By this time I feel shameless about how my body is rejecting everything and really dont care anymore. As soon as we get to the hospital I have to go to the bathroom-of course then got in line to see the doctor. It didn’t take long to get in. The doctor talked to me sent me to get some blood work done and the blood work said no parasites so he wrote me a prescription and sent me on my way. I thought they’d at least give me an iv but I didn’t care by that point I was too tired to not trust the doctor. Then the dotor called me back in while I was getting my prescription filled to get an iv. YAY! Now lets see if they can actually find a vein. I have super tiny veins so thats always an issue no matter where I go and in this care I knew my veins would be harder to find because the dehydration but God is bigger than the dehydration and the nurse got it right away! Yay!
Though I was walking closer and closer to the light at the end of the tunnel, my gross symptoms were still attacking. By this point I can barely walk 10 step without needing to go to the toilet and they were walking me to another end of the hospital.
As the doctor walked I of course prayed and the second we got to “my” room we frantically asked the nurse for a bathroom. She didn’t seem to care and wasn’t really responding so Sami, Leah, Kenj and I frantically searched. When we found one at the end of the hall it was locked and for some reason the nurse wouldn’t come unlock it so we started opening the doors around the bathroom.
Then I saw it. The sloose. To me, it looked a little funny but at this point it was either use this toilet looking thing or humilate myself by using the bathroom on myself. I chose my first option. About the same time I sat down, a nurse yells down the hall that it was broken and it was not a toilet.
Horror covered my face. As I came out of the bathroom, I wanted to cry. I looked at my teammates and just said,”oh no. what have I done?” About that same time I got a key and opened up and used the real bathroom.
Come to find out the sloose is actually a chemical washing area. Its wear doctors or patients would go to wash their eyes and faces if they came in contact with dangerous chemicals- a lot like an eye wash you have in chemistry lab.
That sloose is forever tainted.
My teammates and I have now decided its a moment you have to laugh about. If I didn’t laugh I’d be mortified. So now we are starting the word sloose. If you need to number 2, you need to sloose. If you need to vomit, you need to sloose. If you feel like you have really messed something up, you sloosed it up.
So there it is. The whole step by step story of my first experience in the bush and the story behind sloosing. I hope that you can leave with a new appreciation for your bathrooms in the US and laugh about the word sloosing. Though the experience sucked at the time, I left it with funny stories and the confidence that God worked and moved in that village. If God wasn’t doing great things, satan would’ve had no reason to fight back. And in the end, I am healthy and laughing because God always wins. He has already overcome the world:)
