Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 2:11

Can you believe I’m halfway done with my term on the ship?? I almost can’t. It feels like a long time yet a short time. I still remember the days leading up to my departure, and how emotionally tumultuous it was to fly out straight from a memorial service trying to grieve the close of a chapter of my life and the loss of a family friend while still being open to what new chapter was awaiting me on the ship. Ship life is my new normal, and I almost forget what it’s like to be around the people I’ve lived with in community for the last seven years in Chapel Hill. I’m faced with new struggles on a physical and spiritual level as a result of being here, but if I weren’t being challenged I think it would be easy to coast and let life and lesson pass me by.

A hospital first?

Something that I’ve struggled with a bit this week is really realizing that the spiritual environment here is not as “on fire” as I was probably hoping it would be when I came here (it only took 8 weeks to realize this). I think this is a follow up from last week’s thoughts about our Kingdom purpose.

I want to also emphasize that what I’m about to write is my own personal thoughts and opinions on my experience on the ship and doesn’t represent the entire organization. There’re a lot of really wonderful things that are accomplished here, but as an imperfect organization run by imperfect humans, with the politics and challenges that come with being a non-profit, compounded with the world working against us in many ways, there are a lot of fine lines that Mercy Ships has to balance in its operations that throw me for a loop.

There’s a parallel to be drawn with the way that the Church exists in the world and the way that Mercy Ships navigates its operations. There is a lot of struggle with the powers that be, I think. When I was being coached for a possible interview, they even said not to use terms like “Christian” because it can be misunderstood by the wider public. It is better to say that Mercy Ships “follows the model of Jesus” which confuses me a bit—isn’t that just … Christian?

I think what makes it hard is that we’re called to be bold and declare our faith, but at the same time as guests of our host nation, we have to be respectful of cultural norms. Mercy Ships operates in a lot of majority-Muslim nations, and we may not be welcome if our main aim is evangelizing, since then we wouldn’t able to practically operate at all.

In a way, it kind of reminds me of how Jesus had to navigate His ministries. He preached something so against the world’s norms, and was crucified in the end for it. He had to work within a world so that He could see his ministry to completion, including telling people to stay quiet about what He had done for them. I think that’s helping me accept some of the guidelines that they’ve set in place while interacting with patients, and the way that the Christianity can feel a bit “toned down” or quieted here (which is what I struggled with).

Before I left North Carolina, I took a photo of the sign in front of our church. The side that welcomes you says, 來敬拜主 // Come worship the Lord.

It reminds me every time what it is that we do when we gather together, but it has become something that I feel like I’ve had to do a lot more on my own since coming here.

As you exit the church parking lot, the sign reminds everyone, 去傳福音 // Go spread the Gospel.

I’ve never really thought about how it might look like, the act of spreading the Gospel. A lot of the times I imagine preaching to an audience or sitting down with someone and literally telling them the story of the Gospel and what not. Perhaps, can it look like something else? It seems so obvious when it’s asked like that, but it’s not really something I realized, I think.

I think Mercy Ships uses a strategy of doing good work and while branding itself as following the model of Jesus—those who are curious and want to know more have a place where they can start seeking. I think it works well with the patients and their families, but that strategy isn’t so effective with crew who are used to living in (mental) comfort. Comfort in the sense that it’s possible to avoid having your beliefs challenged and having to put the energy into sorting them out. The “Christian-ness” of Mercy Ships is just enough that those people tend to choose what activities or people or things to avoid, and not enough where people who do have a strong faith feel like they have to hide some of it. And that, I think, is a problem.

I don’t have the solution. It’s a complex problem that partially lies in my own perception of what a healthy spiritual environment looks like, and the hearts of those who are unwilling to see the truth here. I think there’s also more that can be done at an organizational level. Maybe some of it is having to appease governments, bending to non-Christian donors’ visions for the organization, or navigating the politics of corporate partnerships, but they’re all things that can make us lose sight of why Mercy Ships does what it does. These are just my thoughts after having been here two months. We’ll see where it goes in the next two.

Filipino parties are the medicine for my food homesickness

Monce left us this week, and Stella as well.

So per usual tradition, there was another Filipino house party. It was at the same place as the party that acted as our initiation into the cohort! The spread per usual, was amazing.

I realized I was getting a bit food-homesick. Food is a really big part of my life and having good home cooked food is something that I think I took for granted. Also, variety. I’ll be honest, this week was the first time I ate a full serving of vegetables in a couple of weeks. (My poops were fine, thank you very much.) I can only eat so much steamed-but-not-seasoned veggies before getting sick of them and completely rejecting them. Since we had proper cooked vegetables at this meal, I ate plenty. :)

This section has a photo of a screen showing a photo from surgery just so you know

Each week, we have a medical in-service where someone will give a talk or presentation on some relevant medical topic. Dr. Gary Parker, one of the foundational max fax surgeons of Mercy Ships, gave the medical in-service on maxillary/facial tumors. The majority of the tumors operated on on the ship are benign tumors which have grown uncontrollably over the patient’s lifetime—unlike cancerous tumors which can break off and spread to other areas of the body and cause complications by shutting down systems, the benign tumors of the face will kill a patient by slowly suffocating them or starving them when they are unable to eat or drink. I’ve mentioned it in the about Mercy Ships section of my website, but a lot of the physical deformities that we treat here are often associated in African culture with witchcraft which lead to these people becoming outcast and abandoned in their communities.

The tumors are often extreme in size because people here cannot afford to have it removed while it’s still a small problem. In the United States, such tumors are often removed when they’re small and maybe the size of the tip of your finger. In places where surgery isn’t accessible or affordable, the tumor continues to grow and grow and grow without stopping.

Along with teaching the amazing techniques they use to excise and repair and reconstruct patient’s faces after tumor removal, Dr. Parker showed us some really crazy pictures from surgery. The photo he’s showing is of a patient’s facial tumor after the skin has been peeled back prior to removal. This particular tumor grew so large that it pushed the patient’s eye 5cm away from its normal neutral position.

I wasn’t able to attend the entire talk (I really wish I could have), but from what I was able to learn from the last half of the talk was that the human body was created to be incredibly resilient with amazing ability to heal given the right conditions. What I thought was really crazy was how extreme some of these tumors had deformed the people they afflicted and how amazingly normal looking they were post reconstruction and recovery. When a patient’s eye is pulled so far out of its normal resting place and the tumor is removed, the patient oftentimes regains sight in the eye if the optic nerve is undamaged (just stretched) because the nerve slowly contracts and the eye is no longer deformed by the pressure of the tumor.

The other thing I learned was just how powerful the gift of medicine and medical advances are, and how physical repair can bring emotional and psychological healing as well. Dr. Parker said at the end of his talk, “In order for hope to be credible in the future, it must be tangible in the present.”

During the question/answer session after the talk, there was a man who was really moved who asked about how the extreme and shocking nature of these cases impacted Dr. Parker’s faith now and before as a junior doctor. I remember feeling really similarly when I finally got to spend some time with the patients here. The work that these surgeons (and really everyone in the medical operations) can do while still conserving resources effectively and being extremely low cost compared to the US is really incredible. It makes me marvel at man as God’s greatest creation. We aren’t perfect or all knowing or any of those things by any means, but when I get to witness things like this that, I really do see the image of God reflected through man. We really can’t do these kinds of things on our own; God gives us the privilege of partnering with Him, and that’s something we have to remember.

Hall happenings

Krysta from pharmacy left this week. We threw her a party per usual, complete with brownies. We also lost Sarah :( but we got a new lab friend, a Dutchie from South Africa named Maartje (Like “Martha” but with tj instead of a th?).

Now that I look at this photo, we’ve had some departmental changes since I think the last time I posted a group photo. Like I mentioned, Maartje is the new lab friend, Angela is the new radiology tech, and Shaleeni is in pharmacy. The “new Krysta,” a lady (FROM GREENSBORO!!!) named Caron, isn’t in the photo yet.

We also gave Krysta this card, after which we spent a lot of time debating what the cloth shape was meant to be.

We eventually decided it was supposed to be this abstract idea of a map of Guinea, but perhaps the execution could have been better.

Lab low-down

I was reading a KOH of some skin scraping or something and found a MOLDY BOI!! Look at all that wiggly wiggly hyphae. I think.

I don’t really know for sure to be honest, I don’t do mycology but it looked enough like what I expected hyphae-like things to look like. After a couple of days, the specimen has some fuzzies growing from it on the chocolate. Since we don’t have a 28ºC incubator (I think that’s the temperature of the mycology incubator where they keep their molds????), I put some sort short tubes in our 37ºC heat block and sat the plate on top of them so it’s a liiiiiittle bit warmer than room temperature but not quite 37ºC warm. I don’t really know, I’m literally making things up as I go and feeling like I’m half making up science and everyone is like just like, “WELL JASMIN HAS THE MOST MICRO EXPERIENCE SO LET’S JUST GO WITH IT” and I’m just like waaaaaah I didn’t validate my tube-stand-above-heat-block method oh well you have to do what you have to do.

We also got a shipment of lab supplies and inside was a BOX OF MERCY SHIPS BRANDED CHOCOLATE. There was 16 pieces of dark, milk, and white chocolates, but I didn’t think of taking a photo until we were about to eat the last piece but here it is:

The chocolate was quite good, probably Dutch chocolate since the lab supplies came from the Holland office? We went online to look for them to see if we could buy them to send to people back home but to no avail. There was no note or anything with the box, so we don’t know who sent it, we don’t know who it was even for (so naturally, we ate them), but that’s the deal, if you don’t include instructions, we’re free to do whatever! But then again, Maartje who came this week is Dutch and so maybe the Dutch office was sending them to the lab as a welcome thing for her. We’re still not sure because they didn’t tell her anything either, so we shared the spoils.

I met another Jasmine

For at at least a week (I think more) I kept hearing about another Jasmine on board (but this Jasmine has an E). I even found a piece of paper on the floor in the ship that was for her that had gotten loose from her things, but still never figured out who she was. Anyway, randomly at lunch this week I sat next to her! She is from Belgium and she works as a hostess in hospitality.

I was clearly WAY more excited to finally meet her (I don’t think she knew I existed), and I took this photo right away immediately solidifying all stereotypes in her mind about Asians and selfies. She’s a kind and quiet older lady but I’m sure we will cross paths again. I didn’t actually get to learn a whole lot about her because she had already finished eating when I sat down and made her exit soon after (probably because I’m an American that is weird and obnoxious as).

RIP Toilet

Our toilet has been having troubles… to spare you the gross details it runs on a vacuum system (think airplane toilets) but our vacuum has starting having troubles so we’ll get sewage backup. YUCK. So we put in a maintenance request and then one day I walked into a super smelly cabin and (wait for it):

It’s been since reattached to the wall, but the problem hasn’t been fixed. Perhaps one day. Until then we just kind of have to flush at regular intervals or the smell will start becoming pretty bad. Which is not very good given we’re on water restrictions…

Anyway, that’s all for now. Thanks for keeping me in your prayers and keeping in touch. Miss you all. Halfway home!

Jasmin