Whew. I’ve been on the mainland for a few days now and I actually feel ready to go back to the island now. The city makes my head spin. It was exciting for a day but now I find it overwhelming, crowded, and full of muffler smoke. I’m tired of being pulled in every direction because I’m white. I have no name here… no personality… I’m just a muzungu. I forgot how this felt last time I was here. Everywhere I go, “Muzungu, muzugu!” And in the city of course all the men call you, “mama”. Hey mama! It’s frustrating. I love going to the market and what but I find comfort when I get back to the house. At least I get to where pants here. Feels good to run about and travel around. I will be traveling back to the island tomorrow with all my goods and my different malaria medicine! Hopefully I won’t have these hives anymore and these headaches. But the new stuff I got makes you really sensitive to the sun so I now have to lather up every time I go outside no matter what. I heard some stories about the other malaria medicine I’m on now. One guy said he starting have significant hair loss from it and just stopped taking anything all together. One guy was having really terrible nightmares that were so real and vivid it was making him afraid to sleep. I never had nightmares but I did have some really vivid dreams. Like one morning, my mother walked into my room on the island, lifted up the mosquito net and sat on the edge of my bed. I sat up and hugged her and she smiled. Then I opened my eyes and realized I was just laying there and it had been a dream. It was so incredibly real.
So something I wanted to discuss is the problem of witch doctoring here. It is so incredibly common for people to go to the witch doctor also called herbs or using herbs. Like someone might say, “Yes, I’m sick and I’m going for herbs.” The words are connected together. So I have to be very careful. Because I use herbs for natural medicine, I can’t talk about it because I will be associated with witch doctoring. I hate that yet another part of God’s creation is being ruined. We have a couple witch doctors just on my island alone. The spiritual is so normal here. I am always kind of hesitant to write about these things as most of us American even when we have our faith placed in Christ so easily dismiss these parts of scripture or these supernatural things. Demonization is so common here. I was told there seems to be more cases of it then ailments. The islands are full of these occurrences. I just met a boy the other day on the island that is demonized. He runs from the house every night at the same time screaming and sleeps outside. I also met another man on the other island who approached me and his eyes were filled with darkness and I turned my face and walked as fast as I could away from him. I had my first attack here in the middle of the night on the island on last Wednesday night. I had gone to bed and the air was unusually still. The night was quiet which is usually filled with monkeys, birds and bugs all making a symphony of song together. That night… nothing except an occasional cricket chirp. I laid there listening to some worship music on my ipod. I noticed my roommate was incredibly restless as she tried to sleep. All of a sudden I heard whispering and chills ran down my spine. I thought, well… it’s just my ipod so I turned it off and took my ear buds out. There is was in the middle of my room… whispering, almost chanting like. I immediately felt sick. I heard drumming but it seemed so far off but the whispering was right there in my room. I felt like a weight was pressing against me and I started sweating. My roommate tossed and turned. I wanted to tell her to get up! We need to pray, but I couldn’t. I remained silent as the eerie whispering continued. Then I looked at the ceiling of the bunk above me and cried out to Jesus to fill the room and change the atmosphere here in that room. I prayed for his comfort and peace. It was instant change. His peace flooded me accompanied by a deep joy that made me smile and almost laugh out loud a little thinking about how the enemy’s plan was to divert my eyes from Jesus but instead it pushed me closer to Him. I just worshiped him quietly until I fell asleep. I have a feeling this isn’t the last encounter and from what the Lord has been showing me, I have some things to see while I’m here. Believe me or don’t believe me, but this is part of missions and this is part of most of the world outside of western culture.
Ok, subject change. Just down the street from where this missionary family lives there was a huge fire last week. About 50 families lost their homes. They are doing a fundraiser and are trying to rebuild the place. I gave some money to buy a couple poles for the places. It’s like 7,000 shillings per pole. For the poles alone for the whole project it will be something like 3,000,000 shillings. So that’s about 3$ a pole. Grand total just for the poles for these 50 families is about $1,300 give or take. Hopefully they will have some shelters up and going for them. The local church right next to them is providing one meal a day for them.
Another thing happening lately is pregnancy tests. We have a school on the island that is partnered with SHIM and we have a lot of sponsored kids in the school. They do 2 or 3 pregnancy tests for every girl throughout each semester. They do one right away when the term starts so they can catch it if a girl got pregnant while away on holiday and then it can’t be blamed on the school. Then they do one in the middle and at the end. If a girl is found to be pregnant it is automatic expulsion from the school and they are sent home. So Keeky tested all the girls this week. We had 3 confirmed pregnancies and a handful of testing that needs to be redone, because the girls messed up their samples by adding water or something so their tests were inconclusive. One of the girls was on the boat with us as we came to the mainland. She was going home. Her name is Sara, she is about 16 or 17. She was talking with my roommate, Ruth, and I listened to their conversation. Sara was saying she would abort the baby and run away. Ruth talked to her and prayed with her. Sara was extremely scared to go home pregnant. Another of the girls had a meeting with Keeky and declared, “I will abort this baby and you will let me stay in school!” Most of them will probably end up having abortions but still won’t be permitted back at school. The SHIM team works hard to make sure there are no abortions. It’s disheartening.
I can't seem to ever load photos online anymore. I did that one time on Facebook but can't get it to work since, but I will continue to try.
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