Captain (the kid on the right) was in the hospital for about 3 months
last year; he came back today after not feeling very well for a while at
home. The man on the left is his brother, who's two years older than
him. Captain's 18 years old. He hasn't gained any weight since he was
7 years old -- he was 16 kg when he was admitted then, and he's still 16
kg today. We actually spent a lot of time with his family when he was
here in 2007, organized a meeting with everyone, sat them down, and so
forth, but they have basically said that he's on his own, despite his
chronic diseases. It's very sad to me.
For some strange reason on the bus today we got a mysterious package
from someone I don't know -- full of Twix bars. So I decided that they
must be (at least in part) Captain's Twix bars. Not that Twix is
exactly the nutritional answer for a kid that's malnourished, but part
of Captain's problem is the loss of hope and love in his life, too.
Maybe a gift of chocolate can help him remember that love.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Captain and crew
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
a birth and a death
The Tompkins welcomed Emelyn, their third child, into the world
yesterday morning at 9am. After a somewhat stressful week, she arrived
one week late and without any complications. I've blogged about this
before, but it's a little bit weird being expected to make the medical
decisions for your friends and people that you live with closely; it's
difficult to maintain a good perspective on things and still be
respectful to what other people want to do. Fortunately, my role was
basically as a remote observer, as two of our nurses did all of the work.
yesterday morning at 9am. After a somewhat stressful week, she arrived
one week late and without any complications. I've blogged about this
before, but it's a little bit weird being expected to make the medical
decisions for your friends and people that you live with closely; it's
difficult to maintain a good perspective on things and still be
respectful to what other people want to do. Fortunately, my role was
basically as a remote observer, as two of our nurses did all of the work.
The president of Zambia, Mr. Mwanawasa, died yesterday after being in a
coma in France for over a month. Zambia has traditionally been a very
stable country, with orderly elections and a good democratic process.
Like during any crisis, at home or abroad, this democratic process will
be tested as new elections take place over the next few weeks.
Sometimes it's difficult to remember what it's like for a country to be
only 40 years old or so; the pull of inertia to keep the status quo may
not be as strong as a place like America.
I'm pretty optimistic that it will go pretty smoothly, however, in
contrast to the debacle in Zimbabwe just to the south of us.
Monday, August 18, 2008
chicken coops and generosity
My neighbors, Pam and Menda, want to start an orphanage. In fact, they
are already supporting several orphans, but are currently working to
build an actual dormitory and house so they can have a stable place for
them to live. To do that, they raise and sell chickens in their
backyard. They are not the only ones. In fact, we have so many people
raising and selling chickens for various charitable causes around the
mission station that at one point it became quite tricky for me to
navigate the social circle of the 'chiken corner' when I was deciding
from which of my neighbors I would buy my next chicken.
are already supporting several orphans, but are currently working to
build an actual dormitory and house so they can have a stable place for
them to live. To do that, they raise and sell chickens in their
backyard. They are not the only ones. In fact, we have so many people
raising and selling chickens for various charitable causes around the
mission station that at one point it became quite tricky for me to
navigate the social circle of the 'chiken corner' when I was deciding
from which of my neighbors I would buy my next chicken.
That's pretty typical of my experience of African generosity. My host
family where I learned Kikaonde for 2 weeks not only farmed three entire
fields for their family, but also cultivated an additional 2 fields for
the support of orphans in the community. At our church, we all go and
hoe the hospital field so we will have maize to sell or give to hungry
people who come to the service. The Nurses Christian Fellowship
sponsors work days to buy clothes for their trips to the local prison.
I don't know many people at home who are volunteering to work an extra
job and donate the entire proceeds of that job to their local charity.
If they are out there, I'm certainly not one of them. I'm humbled by
how pale and flabby my giving is in comparison to that kind of 'sweat'
giving that so many people do here. Let me tell you, it's not easy to
hoe one extra field, much less two for the support of people around
you. That kind of exercise of love builds a strong Christian body.
I have benefited so much from being able to learn from people like the
Mendas and my neighbors. It also makes me want to help in whatever ways
that I can -- contribute some clothes to a yard sale, buy an extra
chicken here or there (at one point I was up to seven in my freezer --
not an easy fit in my rattling old fridge). Hopefully my love has
gotten stronger as well for the chance to work alongside people like them.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
which is dirtier, the bath or me?
I won't say that sometimes I don't become frustrated with the
difficulties of the basics of life (at least the basics for an American)
-- electricity outages (I had several pieces of equipment get fried this
weekend with various power surges, including my computer cable --
fortunately I have a backup) and water. This week the water has been
intermittent; this was my long-awaited bath today after two days with no
water in the morning. Perhaps I should have held out for one more day....
Monday, August 11, 2008
handovers
This week marks the official handover of my job as the director of
clinical services at the hospital to one of the other docs who's
planning to stay longer than me. I've been nominally in charge for
about 18 months now (at times it seems like no one's in charge, but I do
my best) but since I'm planning to head back to the US in November we
wanted to try to do the transition a few months early to help work out
the bugs and make sure things go smoothly. So far, it has been less
than smooth, but we've got three more months to work it out.
How to hand things over well must be a recurring issue for missionaries
and aid workers all over the world. I haven't figured it out yet. So
many of us want developing countries to be 'self-sufficient'; this is a
more complicated issue than it seems on the face of it. So much more is
needed to keep a project running here than at home, and it's almost
impossible for the community to support these projects with the limited
resources that they have, even if the community has embraced the idea
and wants to make it work. I see projects that would have died for the
lack of the funds to buy 20 gallons of fuel (currently priced at around
$14/gallon in the town where I live). I see equipment in the hospital
which doesn't work because of lack of batteries, or the simple matter of
a UK-style plug (about $2, plus a 5 hour one-way bus ride to get to the
store that sells them).
But these small expenses, at least to me, loom larger for a community
that is chronically strapped for cash, living on the wages of
subsistence farming (on average $800-1000/family), or who has extended
themselves financially to buy into the 'American' dream of possessions,
comfort, and entertainment. Add to that the need to support large,
extended families -- the money order post at the post office must be the
busiest place in town -- and most of the time even small expenses can be
difficult to meet, and unfair for an institution to expect to be filled
from the pockets of the workers.
So I've been learning to let go, but it's difficult because I know the
road has been made much smoother for me by the gifts and resources that
I have at my disposal as a rich American with good support from home.
The road is more rocky for someone similar trying to do my job without
those resources. True 'self-sufficiency' is still a long way off. In an
ironic way, I'm beginning to see that a good handover actually means
that I continue to be involved, present, and available to help meet
needs even as I'm not the one in charge. Or to put it another way, to
not only hand over responsibility, but also to hand over my resources
and the control of those resources so that the job can continue to move
forward without me.
clinical services at the hospital to one of the other docs who's
planning to stay longer than me. I've been nominally in charge for
about 18 months now (at times it seems like no one's in charge, but I do
my best) but since I'm planning to head back to the US in November we
wanted to try to do the transition a few months early to help work out
the bugs and make sure things go smoothly. So far, it has been less
than smooth, but we've got three more months to work it out.
How to hand things over well must be a recurring issue for missionaries
and aid workers all over the world. I haven't figured it out yet. So
many of us want developing countries to be 'self-sufficient'; this is a
more complicated issue than it seems on the face of it. So much more is
needed to keep a project running here than at home, and it's almost
impossible for the community to support these projects with the limited
resources that they have, even if the community has embraced the idea
and wants to make it work. I see projects that would have died for the
lack of the funds to buy 20 gallons of fuel (currently priced at around
$14/gallon in the town where I live). I see equipment in the hospital
which doesn't work because of lack of batteries, or the simple matter of
a UK-style plug (about $2, plus a 5 hour one-way bus ride to get to the
store that sells them).
But these small expenses, at least to me, loom larger for a community
that is chronically strapped for cash, living on the wages of
subsistence farming (on average $800-1000/family), or who has extended
themselves financially to buy into the 'American' dream of possessions,
comfort, and entertainment. Add to that the need to support large,
extended families -- the money order post at the post office must be the
busiest place in town -- and most of the time even small expenses can be
difficult to meet, and unfair for an institution to expect to be filled
from the pockets of the workers.
So I've been learning to let go, but it's difficult because I know the
road has been made much smoother for me by the gifts and resources that
I have at my disposal as a rich American with good support from home.
The road is more rocky for someone similar trying to do my job without
those resources. True 'self-sufficiency' is still a long way off. In an
ironic way, I'm beginning to see that a good handover actually means
that I continue to be involved, present, and available to help meet
needs even as I'm not the one in charge. Or to put it another way, to
not only hand over responsibility, but also to hand over my resources
and the control of those resources so that the job can continue to move
forward without me.
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
the power of prayer
My friend Hilary has been out to visit me the past month (she's the one that has been guest blogging on the site) and she's been challenging me to improve my prayer life with the patients at the hospital. One of the beauties I've found about practicing medicine here in Africa is that I feel less self-conscious when I'm spending time with my patients (maybe because I feel so much more self-conscious everywhere else....) and often feel free to share the gospel or pray with them and their families. However, even though I pray for patients on my own, or in prayer meetings, or with the chaplains, I rarely do it with the patients themselves. Part of me gets nervous for my patients when I pray with them -- what if they don't get better? What will that do to their faith? And part of me just plain gets nervous for myself -- what does it mean to take a public step of faith, in the middle of a whole ward, with other patients looking on; God's reputation, so to speak, at stake? Can my faith survive another 'unanswered prayer'? It's a test of the strength of my relationship with God to see if it can withstand months and months of heartfelt prayers that often seem to end up being answered with deformity, or disability, or even death in my patients. Maybe it would be better just to ask for safe things -- God to 'bless them', or 'give them comfort', instead having the boldness to ask for what I really want to see happen -- my 7 year old patient Edward to wake up from his cerebral malaria coma and drink some water; my 16 year old patient Tom to get up from his mysterious paralysis and walk again, my 60 year old patient Vincent to fight off his drug resistant TB and go home after 120 days in the hospital.
Most of us have been faced with situations like that in our own lives -- the parent who died from cancer, the young person who died in a traffic accident, the young baby that died from SIDS -- and these things often test our faith. It can be difficult to work in a hospital where those crises of faith happen every day, several times a day, as you watch the hope fade away from some of your patients and their families until they become resigned. But Hilary reminded me that God's reputation is God's business, and it's not my job to pray the prayers and answer them too (a conundrum which sounds easy, but quickly becomes complicated when you're the doc caring for the patient that you're praying for). This has been freeing for me to keep praying for patients on the wards, in the hallways, sitting on the fence outside -- wherever I find them, and let God take the circumstances and use them for himself as he sees fit.
Most of us have been faced with situations like that in our own lives -- the parent who died from cancer, the young person who died in a traffic accident, the young baby that died from SIDS -- and these things often test our faith. It can be difficult to work in a hospital where those crises of faith happen every day, several times a day, as you watch the hope fade away from some of your patients and their families until they become resigned. But Hilary reminded me that God's reputation is God's business, and it's not my job to pray the prayers and answer them too (a conundrum which sounds easy, but quickly becomes complicated when you're the doc caring for the patient that you're praying for). This has been freeing for me to keep praying for patients on the wards, in the hallways, sitting on the fence outside -- wherever I find them, and let God take the circumstances and use them for himself as he sees fit.
Back to usual
I wanted to say thanks to Hilary for being willing to contribute to the
blog for the past few weeks. She's winging her way back to the US
today. I hope you've enjoyed it a little bit. Now you're back to just
boring old me....
blog for the past few weeks. She's winging her way back to the US
today. I hope you've enjoyed it a little bit. Now you're back to just
boring old me....
Monday, August 04, 2008
Mukinge Hill Academy teaching staff
The fabulous teaching staff at Mukinge Hill Academy: from left to right
- me (Auntie Hilary Burg), Auntie Patricia Fungaloko, Auntie Grace,
Auntie Mabel Pollock, Auntie Brasselo, Uncle Humphrey, Mr. Fungaloko
(teaches at Mukinge Basic School). Normally everyone has beautiful
smiles - maybe we waited a little bit too long to take this picture :-)
report card - end of term
From Hilary: Hi, everyone! I'll be headed back toward the United States of America a little later this week…. I hope my guest blogging has provided a wider perspective on life here in Kasempa, Zambia. It's been a little hard to describe the differences between education in the United States and education in this part of Zambia in just a few entries. I think the general prevailing attitude is one of doing the best we can with the resources available. We haven't had running water in the school the entire time I've been here (there is a faucet in the classroom but nothing has ever come out of it), which makes science and art projects a bit challenging. There's no photocopy machine for the school, and there's only one math book for each grade level, so the kids take turns copying the problems out of the book then passing it on to the next student. As you can imagine, it takes several hours/days for all the kids in a particular grade level to complete the homework for the current math lesson. I've been amazed at the lack of wastefulness when it comes to paper. The kids typically have a small exercise book for each academic subject in which they write all the answers during their independent curriculum work. The kids are very careful to write on both sides of the paper, all the way across each line on the page. If a child leaves the school, his or her exercise books are=0 Acollected, and the remaining blank pages are torn out one by one to be used for taking tests, etc. It's quite a bit different from our throwaway society.
Things have been a little bit different instructionally as well. As I mentioned in a previous blog, the students spend most of their days working independently on the main academic subjects (social studies, science, mathematics, English, word building) with some whole/large group instruction for Zambian social studies, Kikaonde, art, and physical education. We had the students stop doing the independent curriculum work one week before the end of the term in order to allow enough time for grading and doing report cards, which meant that we were able to provide a little more creative instruction during the last week of school. Apparently the kids don't spend a lot of time writing in school; during this last week I gave a mini-lesson on writing a five sentence paragraph about their field trip to Mukinge Hospital (introductory sentence, three sentences with supporting details, concluding sentence), collected their first drafts and made corrections, then handed the corrected drafts back with instructions to write a final draft. The first drafts needed a lot of work, to say the least; the kids also told me that they had never done a final draft of their work before, so explaining the idea of fixing mistakes and turning in a second copy of their writing took a little bit of=2 0effort. Our second writing assignment was also a bit challenging but highly entertaining; I had the kids write a short script then create their characters with popsicle sticks, pipe cleaners, colored markers, and stickers. (One of my favorite scripts called Cat and Mouse went something like this: CAT – Look, I see a fat mouse that I can eat. MOUSE – I think I will go for a little walk. CAT – I think my dinner is in front of me. MOUSE – I think I can smell danger. I will run home. CAT – My dinner has disappeared.… pretty good for a first attempt!) Once again, the kids' creativity came to the forefront as they started making capes, hats, and all kinds of other decorations for their characters.
So all in all, being and teaching in Zambia has been a great experience. If anyone has the opportunity to teach or work in Africa or another foreign land, I highly recommend pursuing the adventure. And if you come to Mukinge Hill Academy in Zambia, bring lots of rubbers (erasers), high quality pencils, and paper – we would certainly appreciate the contributions! Please feel free to email me at hilaryburg@aol.com if you would like any further information or have any questions… and thanks for bearing with the sideways pictures, weird text appearance, and other blogging mishaps! Lots of love to all, H ilary (Twasanta, mwane – that means thank you in Kikaonde!)
still learning the languages
From Hilary: Hi, everyone! Mabel and I celebrated the last day of school for the term this past Friday with the kids. The language lessons are still continuing…. from Mabel I've learned that "yunks and yunks" means years and years (for example, "I've lived in this house for yunks and yunks"), and that "She's a real gaig" means that someone is very funny. I've gotten used to the kids telling me that their stomachs hurt by saying, "My stomach's paining me," but it took me a while to figure out that my reminders to put a period at the end of each sentence weren't very effective because the kids refer to a period as a "full stop" (in addition, capital letters are officially known as big letters). Learning the form of English spoken by people from the United Kingdom like Mabel has been helpful for me; Zambia was a British colony (Northern Rhodesia) for some period of time, so I think Mabel's version of English is perhaps a little more familiar to the children. I didn't realize "quite" had so many variations of meaning until I saw the phrase "quite good" on the children's report cards and asked Mabel about it. I was trying to figure out the difference between good, quite good, very good, and excellent; I was mostly puzzled by the two phrases "quite good" and "very good" since to me these meant pretty=2 0much the same thing. Mabel explained that "quite good" means "almost good" or "less than good." Oops - I think I had tried to pay a few of the children a compliment earlier in the week by telling them that their work was quite good…. I hope my words didn't demoralize them but maybe inspired them to work a little harder.
Sunday, August 03, 2008
Friday, August 01, 2008
In honor of Dr. Matt
Hilary: My guess is that Dr. Matt will probably continue to be rather understated about the difference he's made during his time here in Africa, but it's clear that he's found his way into the hearts and lives of many individuals and families in this community. Here's a sampling of some of the things that Zambians and non-Zambians alike have shared about Matt:
Everyone says Dr. Matt is very hardworking.
People don't tell him thank you nearly enough.
I am so pleased with that young man.
You (Matt) are coming back, aren't you?
He's the best single (unmarried) cook.
I didn't know Dr. Matt was so talented (playing the piano, and so on)
Is there anything the man isn't good at?
Even his cat is intelligent.
His language (Kikaonde) skills are impressive.
Dr. Matt is a very good doctor.
He is a good brother in the Lord.
We will miss him very much.
Matt still has a little more than three months here in Zambia before he starts heading tow ard the United States of America, but his host family – the Yanjishas – have already expressed their sadness about the fact that he's headed away from Zambia. I think prayers for a wonderful transition for people on many continents who love and care about Matt would be warmly appreciated. With love to all, Hilary
Photo captions: Scenes from the community education class on nutrition that Dr. Matt has been teaching; giving a lift to a member of the Yanjisha family.
occupational hazards
Hilary: I've been spending a few hours each week praying for the hospital patients with one of the chaplains, so I've had the opportunity to experience some of the joys and sadnesses that the medical staff here encounter on a regular basis. I think teaching and doctoring are not all that incredibly different; the specific job descriptions may vary, but doctors and educators are both essentially interested in helping people and making the world a better place, at least from my perspective. There are, however, a couple of specific differences about working in Zambia that stand out to me:
1. Matt's job is a lot less dusty than mine. By the time I walk the half mile to school on the dusty road being passed by multiple vehicles traveling far too quickly in my opinion, spend the day surrounded by lovable but dusty kids, then walk the dusty half mile back, I'm usually covered with a fine orange coating. Matt, on the other hand, comes back from the hospital looking just as clean and shiny as he did in the morning. It's a bit irritating :-).
2. Matt's patients don't spend most of their days rubbing their hands in his hair and attempting to braid it into little plaits. My hair naturally tends to be a bit on the voluminous side, but it seems to have reached new heights and widths with the help of my amateur classroom beauticians. (note from Matt: perhaps Hilary should shave her head like I did?)
Zambian social studies
Hilary: Recently I had the chance to sit in on the Zambian social studies class that Auntie Fungaloko, the grade 1 instructor, teaches to our grades 4 and 5 students twice each week. The subject matter is a little bit heavier than the geography-focused social studies the kids work on during their independent curriculum time. Currently the kids are studying "Social and economic problems in Zambia" including HIV/AIDS, unemployment, and poverty. The kids' homework assignment for the week was the following:
1. Decide 3 ways in which to educate people in your neighbourhood about HIV/AIDS.
2. Interview your parents or grandparents about how life in Zambia has changed since they were young. Write down what they say.
3. Pick one social problem (HIV/AIDS, unemployment, poverty) studied in this unit and draw a picture story to show how the problem is being dealt with. Write good English to explain what is happening in your pictures.
The next unit in the social studies book focuses on human rights, including sections on the Law of Inheritance (passed in 1989, this law ensures that widows and children receive a substantial portion of their deceased husband's/father's estate; previously the estate often returned to the husband's original family) and violations of human rights.
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