Master Plan for Avoiding Malaria

So I’ve had a couple of personal run-ins with malaria recently—not particularly enjoyable encounters, I might add. I’m in good company. Of the roughly 50 people we see a day at the clinic, probably upwards of 90% of them go home with malaria medicine. My sympathy meter has increased dramatically after experiencing it myself. And so, on behalf of all the people of Fimpulu,* I present for your consideration my Master Plan for Avoiding Malaria.

1.) Assault Approach: Hire village kids to follow me around with fly-swatters and kill all mosquitos that approach me.

     Pros: Cuteness factor.

     Cons: Kids are easily distractible. This is likely to devolve into a friend-swatting war amongst children.

2.) Unattractive Tactic: Mosquitoes are attracted to CO2. Erego I will hold my breath during high mosquito prevalency time (dusk to dawn).

     Pros: Current scientific knowledge suggests less CO2 would be good for the environment, so this is eco-friendly.

     Cons: Current scientific knowledge suggests that breathing is necessary for survival.

3.) Drought Endeavor: Malaria parasite lives in human blood. Drain all blood from my body,.

     Pros: Mosquitos relying on my blood for survival or sustenance will starve.

     Cons: Unsightly pallor related to blood loss. Also certain death.

4.) Russian Doll System: Sleep inside of a mosquito net inside of a mosquito net inside of a mosquito net.... etc.

     Pros: Increased barriers between myself and mosquitoes.

     Cons: My cat will tear holes in all of them to get to me.

5.) Iron Man Method: Create impermeable full-body suit.

     Pros: Coolness factor. Superheroes are awesome.

     Cons: Limited access to pilatium in the village, which is necessary to power an Iron Man suit.

6.) Predator Plot: Fill house with geckos, spiders, bats, and other mosquito-eating creatures.

     Pros: Lots of new creepy crawly friends.

     Cons: I don’t actually want creepy crawly friends.

7.) Mole Woman Scheme: Live underground. FOREVER.

     Pros: I get to pretend I’m a hobbit.

     Cons: Danger of cave-in.

8.) Human Glue Trap Technique: Wrap body in double sided sticky tape to catch and trap mosquitoes.

     Pros: I get to kill all the mosquitoes that stick to me.

     Cons: Daily full-body wax might become uncomfortable.

9.) Bored to Tears Policy: Read boring academic book aloud at all times to annoy mosquitoes into leaving.

     Pros: Appears to be working for my husband. Also, fairly enjoyable for my little nerdy self.

     Cons: May be ineffective on highly intellectual mosquitoes or those who don’t speak English.

10.) Superhero Experiment: Expose self to high levels of radiation in hopes of acquiring superpower of malaria immunity.

     Pros: See pros for “Iron Man Approach.”
     Cons: Possibility of acquiring unwanted or undesirable superpower, such as irreversible invisibility.

*No locals have endorsed any of these methods, for reasons that I assume are obvious.

Spaces

We find Him in the spaces. We share Him in the spaces.

David and I have relatively secular jobs. I’m a nurse. He’s a teacher. And while I find nursing, the act of healing and ministering to tired and sick bodies (and by connection to tired and sick souls) to be one of the most spiritual things I ever do, no one labeled me a “missionary” when I worked 12-hour shifts as a nurse for sick foster care kids in Chicago.
 

Our ministry here in Fimpulu is of the subtle daily grind variety, not the door-to-door evangelism or Jesus Film Conference variety. Choshen as a whole does do a significant amount of more obvious evangelism-- they hold training conferences for pastors and teach Bible stories at preschool and a myriad of other awesome things. We love and wholeheartedly support that work and have truly treasured the times we’ve been able to contribute to it in tangential ways, like when David helped build the conference center for the aforementioned pastoral trainings. Nonetheless, we often feel pressure (real or imagined) from those back home to emphasize the “Jesus” in what we do, to share stories of overt evangelism or conversions or whatever. 

And if I’m honest, sometimes that gets to me. Sometimes it makes me feel like I’m not missionary-ish enough.

So I could tell you stories about how Mwewa and Robert come to my door and ask if they can sit on my couch and read the Bible (duh, of course you can, whenever you want to), and I could let you think that these two teenage boys are totally on fire for Jesus and that’s why they’re foregoing the opportunity to play with my soccer ball in favor of the opportunity to read scripture.

And I hope that’s part of it. I do. I hope there’s a little curiosity and wonder brewing in their mischievous little souls, and that they’re absorbing some of the words that they read aloud to me, their cadence painfully choppy and halting the way that it is when one is still trying to grapple with the art of reading. 

But honestly, I think a lot of it is just that they love reading something in Bemba. They love the praise they get from me when they finish a chapter.  They love that I pull that sacred book down from the top shelf where it normally rests, away from the more sturdy children’s books that everyone is allowed play with. I think they feel a little important because I won’t let preschoolers play with the book that they get to read out of. They’re special.

Can that just be okay? Can it just be okay for exposure to the Gospel to wind its way into the little spaces between the normal of their lives? Can it just seep in between discussions of whose turn it is to hold the book and arguments over what an unfamiliar word means and humor over their desire to skip the genealogies because snore? And can it just be okay that those spaces minister to me too, that my own soul is never more at rest than when it shares an ordinary and mundane and undefined space with some village kid and that Still Small Voice?

The simultaneous allegiance to and fear of animism and witchcraft exists simultaneously alongside profession of belief in Christianity for most locals here. Mother’s tie (or allow other’s to tie) charms and “medicines” around their children’s necks or waists. These witchcraft charms are meant to do everything from preventing convulsions to warding off curses. And so when I’m checking over tiny bodies, listening to fevered hearts or percussing consolidated lungs or trying to get a read from my portable pulse oximeter as it dangles from a wiggly and uncooperative finger… When I’m scrubbing burned escar off of mangled limbs or sitting on an uncooperative 2-year-old while I force him to take his medicine or cutting out stitches or cleaning off ill-kept umbilical cords… These little interactions, they create spaces. They create spaces where the breath of Aslan sweeps through. They create spaces that are somehow exactly the shape of my soul, like I was made to fit into it. They create spaces of trust, spaces where momma’s tell me why they don’t feel safe taking off that charm because they fear this or that or the other, spaces for me to talk through how much bigger our God is than all of those other things. Spaces to voice fear, and spaces to drive it out with the Perfect Love that is our Jesus.

I don’t mean to insinuate that all of the charm-loving parents of Fimpulu have started renouncing their traditional ways because of my pleading (they haven’t). If it were that easy, Choshen would have tied the bow on that box a long time ago. But every once in a while, I hear a mom “educate” one of her peers as they wait in the long clinic queue using words that I’ve previously spoken to her. “Don’t dress him. His body is too hot, so wash him with this cool water and fan him. The clothes are like a blanket that make him hot.” Or a co-worker tells a mother that she mustn’t fear the spirits but must put her trust fully in God, because if she knows the power of the blood of Jesus and trusts fully in Him, then no other power has dominion. Or a young momma brings her baby boy in just to say hi, because we fought for him when he was so so so tiny and new and every auntie and grandma in the village was whispering in her ear, but she listened to us instead. And he lived. And we celebrate every ounce of gained weight with a dance and a laugh and Joy— you know, the kind of Joy that fills those kinds of Spaces.

But can it just be okay if the first mom covers her baby up anyway? If the second mom leaves the charm on for now? I mean, obviously it’s not “okay” in the sense that it’s “okay” for all of eternity, but for just the right now, can it just be okay that that they’re still working through the Spaces? 

Those spaces where He finds me.

Those spaces where I find Him.

Those spaces where I yearn to take Him to them.

Those spaces where He whispers to me that He is already there.