mind the gap

I was working to dig out stumps in the orchard one morning. The Senegalese hoe is wide and flat with a short though substantial handle. It cuts clean through the sandy-soft soil, but my soft hands exact a blister per stump mileage that is almost as painful as the thought of driving a Hummer down the highway. I paused mid-stump to wipe the sweat sting out of my eyes, and was surprised to see a gum-booted lab technician ghost into the orchard atop his smoothly purring motorcycle.

The apparition introduced himself as Kalidu ______, a man paid by USAID to work with NGOs and local fruit growers on reducing the fly population. We shook hands gingerly: I because of my blisters, he because of how dirty my hand was. As I returned to work, he abruptly said:

"Why are you doing this?"

I stopped, and straightened again to answer. Before I could, he resumed:

"It is very hard for you. You could pay someone here to do this for you."

"Because I want to understand. ... And because I feel like God has called me here to do this" was my oblique answer.

We stared at each other in friendly, but deeply uncomprehending silence. I believe he understood what I had said, but we were separated by an idealogical chasm that went far deeper than language barriers. He was fed by a culture of aid that says: "Pay the locals to accomplish foreign agendas." I was the living antithesis to that culture.

As I turned back to digging on my stump, I couldn't help but wonder if he was right. Thousands of airfare dollars later (dollars that could have been used to employ local workers), I was blistering over the slow performance of a job that would have been child's play to a local worker -- toughened and trained as they are to crank out hard manual labor by the necessity of a lifetime. "Yes," I thought to myself, "maybe the Dispensaire would have been better off if I had ..."

A branch snapped nearby and I looked up to see the fly-man placing a perfectly good mango in a small shopping bag. Sometimes one might pick a diseased or infected mango to control flies, so I bit my tongue and kept working, with one eye on the tread of the gum boots. I watched in disbelief as Kalidu continued to fill his shopping bag with perfect mangos. The white lab coat fluttered in the breeze under his well-stuffed backpack as he puttered out through the gate with a friendly wave of his hand.

There is often a gap between ideas and application. When ideas cross cultural boundaries, the rift potential increases. USAID pumps money into an idea: reduce flies in the Casamance, and you'll jack up fruit productivity and cut disease. The application? USAID pays for a man to steal mangos in a white lab coat and gum boots.

The gap between ideas and application is a problem that afflicts every level of society. While it is most obvious on a "big level," where money and culture and religion gets thrown into the mix, it is most intransigent on a personal level.

Our garden beans are getting eaten by bugs. I tried making a natural Neem-tree pesticide for our garden here. Following the directions of an organic gardener (originally from france) named Lucas, I put the leaves of a Neem tree in a 5-gallon bucket, and waited for them to turn white -- the point where the leaves have released the active ingredient to combat the biters. At this point, I was supposed to add a little bit of soap so that the mixture would stick to the leaves, and spray it on. The idea appealed (and still appeals) to me as an eco-friendly solution. Five days after my attempt at applying the idea, I'm frustrated to find the Neem leaves are still quite green. As I watched the bean plants slowly disappearing, I decided to resort to spraying a pesticide self-labled as "DURSBAN: 480 g chloropyrifos-éthyl" [(not quite IUPAC, is it ;)] on the beans. The pesticide reminded me forcibly of some nasty paint I put on the bottom of our sailboat every spring: I'm not sure whether that testifies more to the illegitimacy of "Dursban" or the toxicity of the paint. At any rate, you can see how my application of an "eco-friendly" control of the buggers quickly degraded itself into a corrosive slap-dab last-ditch attempt that would justify my immediate expulsion from the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA) that I was once an upstanding member of.

And if you're like me, you see even deeper, darker corners of your life where there exists a gap between "the idea" and "the application."

If we, through the grace and power of Christ, were to start first with filling in the gap between our personal, spiritual ideas and applications, we would see every subsequent layer of society changed for the good. This is integrity: a quality of oneness or wholeness that consistently denies the hypocrisy of personal gaps.

So I've kept away at digging at those stumps. I do want to understand... I want to bridge the gap between my soft hands and their tradition-hardened minds. But most of all, I want Christ to change me ... on the inside. If the world were a subway, we'd do well to mind that voice in the darkness:

"Mind the gap."

"He told them another parable. "The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened." Matthew 13:33 - English Standard Version

No Greater Love

"Do you want to come with me to take a lady into the hospital in Ziguinchor?" Boaz asked.

"Yes... I do. I'll try to be quick."

I ran beside the peanut fields to my house about 150 feet away to change from my work shorts into my last clean clothes (a pair of scrubs I pillaged from a donations pile in Peru, donning with them the role of jungle dentist). Boaz was soon nursing our ambulance skillfully across the badly pitted surface of the road. Dr. Andres (a visiting GP who had worked in Niaguis not long before), Nurse Jean Sambou, and I sat in silence punctuated only by periodic rendezvous with especially savage potholes.

In Senegal, the village is the family unit. The act of life is simply played on a larger stage; as the village is bounded only by the river, the rice paddies, or the untamed vegetation which surrounds it. When we arrived at the mud-brick house, the family was there to greet us... the village family, that is. Women lined the walls of the house, sitting in chairs or on the ground. A crowd of men stood separately under the shade of a mango tree in the front yard. We pushed through the stares to enter the low doorway, as Boaz waited outside with the Ambulance. We were led to a back room, dark except for the dusty light which filtered in from the outside door. In this dim world there gradually appeared two women. Our patient lay face up on a blanket which intervened between her motionless form and the dirt floor. Above her, an older, heavier-set woman stood hunched over in sweaty anguish. The story was simple enough:

"The girl gave birth a few hours ago" --here, the older woman gestured obliquely behind her.

"She bled a lot. Yes, quite a lot."

"She was sitting up after the birth, talking with family. Then she stopped talking. No, she wouldn't respond. So we called you ..."

Dr. Andres knelt on the floor. Pulse -- weak, but still there. Barely breathing.

She stirred once in a weak, restless way.

Cell-phone light to check her pupil reflex. Nothing. That's bad. She's brain dead.

Dr. Andres rose from his knees, brushing the dirt away as he did. He spoke in english to Jean: "She's brain dead. I'd star CPR and take her to the hospital, but even in the unlikely event we could make it 30 minutes over the deeply rutted road, she will be a vegetable. Maybe you should explain to the family... I don't know the culture well enough."

Jean spread his hands palms up in the universal gesture of futility. Turning to the older woman, he explained the situation to her in french. Family members who had been eavesdropping from the door now pushed into the room.

"Why don't you take her to the hospital?" "Is she dead?"

"No, no, she's not dead..." said Dr. Andres. Jean knelt to find her pulse. We joined as he adjusted his fingers for a second try at her wrist... different position... try the neck ... try the foot... nothing ... wait! was that something? ... nothing now, no ... no ... no ... nothing.

Family men chiseled by hard work now surrounded us. "What's going on?"

"We're very sorry, but she was effectively dead before we arrived..." Jean explained again and again as each relative pressed in and wanted to hear the truth for themselves. Grief etched its determined lines over their faces as we watched.

"What about the baby?" Someone asked.

The older woman turned wearily to the bed behind her and scooped up a small bundle of rags. In the faint light, I saw an impossibly tiny form swathed in a single dirty cloth. The mother, it came out, had not yet fed her baby. Hours after birth, this baby -- which at 1.5 kilos would have been committed to a NICU in the states -- was indeed in a bad position.

News of the mother's death reached the outside of the house before we did. As we considered what to do, the wild wailing of relatives and friends pierced the former whispered silence. Some were in favor of us taking the mother's body out in the Ambulance, but the family at length asked us to take the baby and leave the mother. The older woman -- who turned out to be a family friend and midwife of sorts-- moved with us carrying the baby to the ambulance. Amidst the wailing women, one passed out cold, but was revived within a short time.

On return to the clinic, we wrapped the baby in a clean towel, and committed the care of the baby to LaRae's capable hands. The first few days were "touch and go" for the baby: risk of infection was enormous ... and dehydration proceeded from the baby's disinclination to drink from the bottle. Dr. Andres placed an IV after several attempts and much prayer in the baby's threadlike veins, and from that point, there has been gradual but steady improvement. LaRae has carefully tended to the baby (now named Fatou by relatives), and the sure reward of such loving care has been that the baby has gained a good amount of weight and smiles a great deal.

The saddest part of this story is the prologue, which was related to us several days later. Fatou's father is an alcoholic ne'r-do-well that depended upon his wife to support the family and his habit. The wife had continued to work at collecting sticks throughout her pregnancy in order to keep food on the table for her lazy husband and small children. This doubtless contributed to the premature birth, but the true irony is that the mother's life-giving spirit -- her overwork during pregnancy -- may have been what killed her.

This strange juxtaposition of life and death reminded me of what Christ did in dying for us, that we might have His life. He who lived that we might live also died that we might live. In some ways, we fought harder for Baby Fatou's life in those first days because we realized at what price she had be born. Do we realize at what price Christ purchased our birth as His children?

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." John 15:13

"But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Romans 5:8

"This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers." 1 John 3:16

the living word

When I read from Ephesians 3 this morning, it reminded me of the way I write to my fiancée, Martina. When Paul speaks of Christ's love (starting in verse 14), superlatives link one on another, tumbling into a small avalanche of run-on sentences. What struck me before as the dense circumlocutions of erudition are now the hopeless but enduring efforts of a man who is completely in love.

It's a hard thing to describe, but lack for words or eloquence has never halted love's expression. I'm not sure how I'll communicate with Martina in Senegal, but I know I'll try every day this year. I'm even less sure how I'll ever tell her how much I love her, but I'll try every day for the rest of my life.

Paul lived that love for Jesus. I want to do that, too.

God's love, of course, came first. In the beginning was the Word . . . the Word became a human, and lived with us, full of grace and truth. Of all lovers, God is in the best position to write a love letter. He could simply create the perfect words to describe the fullness, the essence, and the intent of His love to his rebellious creation. Yet the Word chose to live among us -- to actively define His love by example. Yes, He left us a book full of the most beautiful love poetry in the world, but that wasn't all. He lived that love for us. I want to live my love to Martina, and I especially want to learn to live that love for Him who first loved me.