I’d never been homeless before.
Sitting on my bag, with my purse clutched in one hand, a fizzy orange drink pressed on my forehead, I looked like a disaster. I had a low fever, a pulsing headache, two huge bags, anxiety, and no place to go.
Oh, and I was sitting in West Africa.
I wasn’t alone in this experience, beside me sat 20 others, all with packs and bags and water bottles and no place of belonging, we were in this together, though I think I was the only one with the headache.
We were World Racers, doing what Racers do best. We were homeless, planless, and trusting God to show us where to go. Sometimes, that doesn’t work exactly the way you’d expect. After sitting there for over an hour, we finally managed to find a bus that could take us to Tamale, a city in northern Ghana that was relatively developed and had a good hospital. I needed a hospital. We had two weeks on our own; to find our own type of ministry and place to be, and my team of seven was in search of medical care.
You see, not only was I homeless in West Africa, but I had malaria. Again.
This was the third time in the last 30 days I’d been diagnosed with the parasitic disease. I’d been cleared of it twice, and the third time, it felt as though my body was being eaten alive. I wanted real help and I wanted it quick. The past numerous doctor visits were really only visits to small clinics and pharmacies with under-qualified, under-educated locals who were happy to throw drugs at me. Finally, my team and the other two traveling with us to Tamale were loaded on this bus, and I swallowed two Dramamine pills to knock me out for the six hour drive, and we were off.
We didn’t have a plan to act on upon reaching Tamale, only the hope that someone would find us seven white kids and offer us a place to stay. When the bus arrived in a sunny parking lot in the middle of Tamale, we didn’t have as much convenience as many had hoped for.
While we were in the parking lot, we noticed a white girl who looked just the same age as us standing by a truck close to us. After introducing ourselves to her, we learned that she was from Virginia and was volunteering for the summer with a Ghanaian missionary and that they were always taking volunteers. After praying together, my team decided not to join them, as they were heading out of town and we still needed to find medical attention, but the other fourteen racers traveling with us decided to go with them. As they prepared to leave, my team sat in the blazing sunlight and prayed for answers. I prayed to stay alive. Before leaving, the pastor offered my team a ride to a guesthouse down the street, and drove us all there with all our things, free of charge. Just before driving off, he gathered us into a circle and prayed for us, prayed for healing and for safety, proclaimed victory in Jesus’ name, and declared that he knew that the kingdom was definitely going to be brought to wherever we went. While he prayed, I felt a wave of disappointment in myself for doubting that these two weeks would be worth while, or that God would have anything for us. We’d gotten this far with no plan, and we were ok, and we already had met up with believers willing to help us out. I wiped away a little tear as Mustafa closed the prayer and drove away, leaving the seven of us in the guest house lot with our bags and our faith that God would orchestrate his own plan for us.
We paid for two nights and bunkered down for the night. My team was tired, as five out of the seven of us were recovering from nasty bouts of malaria. We were all wishing I was healthy so we could get out of the city and just be free of sickness, but I was not, and that evening in our little room I cried, hard, afraid of the fact that my body was going through some serious damage. I was scared for my organs and afraid for what was to come.
Tuesday morning my team woke up for breakfast and gathered together to spend some intentional time together with God. We began with worship, and spent almost an hour singing along to some of our favorite songs. I found myself crying throughout most of the music. I was struggling with putting my trust in God to provide for me everything I needed, and I was anxious about the unplanned weeks ahead of us. After worshipping my team spent some time in prayer and after much discussion we finally concluded that we weren’t going to pursue working for any ministry in particular, but that we’d just build relationships with people wherever we went and leave the rest up to God. We agreed that we needed to get healthier and just trust in God to provide for us whatever he had for us. I wanted to let go of my desire to control the situation, but it was so hard to just let go of the reigns. I wanted to have a place to stay for two weeks and know the solid plan for food provisions and it was driving me crazy to not have control over that. I was battling with demons inside my head telling me that I could just do it on my own and that I didn’t have to wait for God to do it for me. I was fighting the idea that I could just go home where I made all my own decisions and where I had a solid plan for my everyday life. I had to repeat over and over in my head, God, I trust you, and I give this to you. I resolved to take each day a step at a time and to not worry about what was going to happen tomorrow.
After lunch, my team and I walked down the road to find a clinic to get a full blood count done, and I was a mess. Needles always caused me to faint, and as pathetic as that is, I often would do anything in my power to avoid them. One of my teammates held my hand as I cried and squeezed my eyes shut, and the phlebotomist took my blood. When she finished, I stopped crying enough to exclaim my surprise at how easy it was and how I didn’t feel dizzy, and then went on to cry because of how easy it was as how upset I was at myself for getting so upset. We left the clinic that day with no more answers than we’d had before, but a full blood count showing abnormally high white blood cells and malaria parasites seen in my blood stream. I was tired, exhausted from the emotional toll that needles take, and wishing I could just feel better.
Wednesday morning my team switched guest houses to a more affordable option, and the caretaker Joseph offered to bring me to a clinic. Brittanee and I hopped on the back of Joseph’s motorcycle and off the three of us went. We rolled through town with people pointing and laughing at us the whole way. White people are not commonly seen and when they are, most people wave and shout their greetings. It’s even more uncommon to see a Ghanaian man driving two girls on the back of his bike. It was a fun ride despite the discomfort of malaria, and we got through the process of the hospital quickly and soon enough I was sitting in an office speaking to a doctor who willingly answered all my questions. He prescribed me medication to take, on top of an injection I’d have to have in my back-side. I decided to be courageous. If I could survive a little blood draw, I could survive one more needle, even if it was twice as big and hurt a lot more. I met the nurse who would administer the injection and warned how I was a bit of a wimp and that there was a possibility of me passing out, and she ushered me into a hospital room with two beds in it, one for me, and one that was taken. She introduced me to Madame Jennifer, who was laying down looking quite uncomfortable.
After laying down, holding Brittanee’s hand, and squeezing my eyes shut, the nurse worked as quickly as possible, and after a rather painful prick in the butt, it was over. For the second time in two days, I overcame something that I’d given up beating on years before. What seemed like nothing to most people was everything to me, and in that moment, I thanked God from the depths of my heart for helping me through something so scary to me, and for keeping me awake for it all.
Brittanee left the room to get her own blood drawn for some tests, and I rolled over to face Madame Jennifer laying across the room from me. After explaining why I’d needed to lay down for a shot, she rolled over onto her side to face me like I was facing her, and she told me to just call her Jennifer. We chatted for a while before I told her who I was and how I was a missionary, and then I asked her what she believed. She told me she was an evangelical Christian and she believed Jesus was God, and I laughed. I looked her in the eye and said “Jennifer, you know this means we’re sisters, right?”
Jennifer was a great friend in the short time that I knew her. She promised to pray for me, and I for her, that we would both be better soon and not need to return to the hospital. She held my hand as I prayed over her, and when we closed, she closed in the name of Jesus. We shared a sweet moment; two women, strangers, with such small chances of ever meeting each other, joined in conversation with Jesus. All it took was for me to roll over and say “Hi! I’m Sara, and I’m in this bed because I’m afraid of needles. Why are you here?”
When I left the hospital, I left with a new confidence. I left realizing two things. I’m not completely hopeless, I can survive needles without passing out. The second; Ghana is not lost. Many people I’ve come in contact here say Jesus is good, but they don’t believe Jesus is God. Most people are passive, unwilling to admit that Islam is not the same as Christianity. People here are polite and don’t ever want to offend anyone else or tell them what they believe is wrong. Unfortunately, as sweet as people are, that doesn’t bode well with what the bible says is true. When Jesus said he was the way, the truth and the life, he meant the only way, the only truth and the only life.
The rest of day was spent resting, as were the following few days. My team woke up in the mornings for breakfast at 8:30 and spent the next hours in worship and discussion. We began reading through the book of Hosea, and asking each other questions that followed with hours of discussion. I stayed curled up on the bed while we sang, chatted and read together, and the seven of us began to really enjoy our mornings. The afternoons were ours to meet people, and the team would walk around and chat with any of the locals they met. I stayed back most days, the medicine I was taking made me very weak and dizzy.
A few days went by, my malaria medication was the injection and then three days of pill popping. Those three days passed with me staying in bed, fighting to keep my eyes open. A side effect of the drug was intense sleepiness, and it was certainly extreme. I slept a lot. After the last round of medication, I was off to the hospital again for a follow up blood test. They drew more blood, an easy experience for me, and ran some extra tests on it because I was still feeling quite sick. The results came back negative for Typhoid and Malaria, which was good news, but I had a high white blood cell count, so they prescribed me some Cipro to counter act the infection that was somewhere in my body.
I took the cipro that night on a full stomach and snuggled up in bed. (I say snuggled as a loose term, as it is always hot and one doesn’t exactly snuggle in 90 degree weather.) I shut my eyes, thinking that the worst was over and that I was on the mend. An hour later, it seemed like my insides wanted to be my outsides. By the time morning came, I’d not slept, hardly been able to move from the bathroom floor, and thought I was dying. I think the cipro was too hard for my body to handle after three rounds of anti-malaria medication, and I refused to take any more of it.
My muscles were aching, my joints were on fire, and my head was pounding. I laid motionless in bed all day, my team checking on me and taking care of me periodically through the day. I prayed a lot that day. I laid there repeating to the Lord “I trust you, please help me, I trust you, no matter what, I trust you.” I said it over and over again to make sure I believed it. It was hard. There were moments where I wasn’t sure I did, my faith in God was trembling. I kept on repeating those words, and I continued to pray for God to get me through the day.
And He did.
The following morning, after easily the hardest 36 hours of my life, I was carted off to the huge hospital in Tamale, the real-deal giant hospital that I’d been hoping to avoid. After two hours of waiting in lines and paperwork, I got to a doctor, who ran numerous blood tests. After three hours connected to an IV drip, I had some electrolytes back in my system and was rehydrated enough to take new medication and start new antibiotics to fight whatever infection I had. When I got home, I calculated that in the last five weeks I’ve faced 12 hospitalizations, 15 needles, and many days in bed. I’d only been to ministry a handful of days, three or four, in all my time in Ghana, and that was disheartening.
Remember five weeks ago when I was first diagnosed with malaria? I’d written a blog post about how worth it this battle was? A few days ago I was wondering if I still felt like it was worth it. I think it is, and here’s why. In all the days that I’ve been in bed, my faith has become real and reliant on only God. I haven’t had anything else to cling to, no safe place or easy way out, no substitute and no back up plan. It’s been solely God carrying me through this. It’s been the hardest trial I’ve ever been through. Not only that, but my team has gotten to baptize ten new believers in the pool behind the guest house we’re staying in, and just yesterday while I was writhing in pain on the floor of the bathroom, Joey led a young woman to Jesus, and that young woman declared him Lord. This trip, as “out-there” and crazy as it seems, with all its spontaneous moments, unplanned events and sickness, it’s worth it. Everywhere we go, people are droppin like flies for the kingdom of God. Names are being written in the Book of Life. And realize, this is just my little team of 6 girls and Luis’s account. There are 54 of us out here right now. God has reasons for allowing us to endure hard things. I may never know what they are, but I’m learning so much, growing so much, and I’m trusting in Him.
And hey, I no longer have a fear of needles.
Summary of “Ask The Lord” weeks: my team is staying at this guest house until the end of our time in Ghana, and are flying out of Africa to Montenegro on the Fourth of July. I’m feeling a bit better, and I’m praying that my health continues to improve. My good friend and teammate Joey is waiting on some test results about some serious health issues, so please be praying for her in general, as the results will be greatly impactful and can change the way her race looks. We are being well fed by the guesthouse caretaker, Joseph, and have a pool to cool off in on the hot days. God has provided for us everything we need, and He is good.
