The Importance of Having Fun.

*Today is Day 5 of my trip at a mission hospital in the middle of a jungle hospital with wireless connection in Kalimantan.

As much as I may not like to admit it, I think I’ve always been rather serious. I was taught that work was important, and everything else ought to fit itself around it. Growing up with a strict work ethic, having fun often felt guilty, and I never enjoyed playing card games, pool or bowling. Even after knowing God, I was still very serious. I prayed, I ran alone, I studied medicine, I counted calories. Even during my holidays, I went on mission trips.

Cycling, however, as well as staying here at the jungle hospital and being a part of the closeknit community, has taught and is teaching me how fun is not only important, but absolutely central to the heart of God.

Arriving in Serukam of West Kalimantan, I was full of hopes and dreams of helping the poor, aiding the needy and loving the lonely. Being my 10th mission trip overseas, I felt I had been more informed of the realities of a missionary’s life. Yet, how every trip teaches one new insights, and it didn’t take long before I was hit hard by another self-discovery.

I learnt, possibly for the first time, that I often don’t quite know how to have fun. At parties, I am looking at my watch because I don’t like late nights. I don’t like to drink, not even a drop. I used to run, and only alone. Card games, small talk and playing pool bore me to death- I would much rather sit by the beach in pensive thought.

Little did I know how much of a hindrance this would be to being a good missionary doctor.

Mission work, unlike what I always envisioned, is not just about helping the poor in an under-developed country. These are very grand and very serious ideals indeed. Instead, I am learning how it takes many forms and comes in many guises.

Staying in a jungle hospital means being miles away from civilisation. This means that the doctors, from well-developed places like where you and I come from, have to adapt to being content with the simple pleasures of life. Going to town to buy your weekly groceries or to get a haircut means a five-hour drive up bumpy roads. Recreation means not going to the cinema or roadcycling or going to the mall, but spending your leisure time hosting visitors, extending hospitality to them, cooking up a feast and celebrating one another’s birthdays. Life becomes not just about what one does, or how high one can climb up the urban ladder, but about how much one can thrive, with joy and freedom, in a tight community in the middle of nowhere. Most of the doctors working here are on a one-year stint. Only two couples have stayed for twenty years, another one for more than a decade. Most cannot bear it.

One then realises, that learning how to have fun, then becomes not only important, but essential to being a missionary who can stay on for the long haul. Having fun, is as much serious humanitarian business as it is sitting in a clinic attending to a sick, needy patient.

Little did I realize that all this while when I picked up group roadcycling over the year, God was teaching me a profound lesson I never understood.

For cycling and its company taught me how to lighten up and to celebrate life. It taught me how to be relational, how to laugh and horse around, how it’s really okay to have more than one breakfast and how to stop counting calories. It taught me that taking time outside work, not doing work, actually creates time and this amazingly effervescent yet divinely ethereal substance called fun.

Seeing how the missionary doctors live and work here reinforced that lesson. They are always joking. Having fun is like breathing oxygen. For in a remote place miles away from civilization, living in a different culture with a limited community, recreation and resources, it is not only important but crucial to know how to have fun, how to while time away, how to belly-laugh and eat and make merry. It sounds complacent and decadent almost, but in the midst of a jungle far away from the comforts of home, it is an achievement to be able to enjoy life, and not to be utterly consumed or burnt out with the daily neverending demands and needs of the poor here.

There are poor people every day. There is always work to be done. What does one do?

Last night, as we celebrated the birthdays of 5 hospital staff, had a simple feast to introduce the visitors to the hospital (namely my 2 friends and I) and bid farewell to staff who were leaving, I learnt that celebrating life through having fun expresses the heart of God as much as treating a blind patient. The missionary doctors who have stayed here for decades are those who know best how to pick the best rambutans from the hospital yard, how to take a rendezvous to the city once in a while, cook up a feast for the community and throw a good party. Those who were too serious, always left.

So perhaps it may sound silly, that I’ve travelled all the way here with the intention of learning what it means to be a missionary doctor, only to learn my first lesson which is that of having fun.

But it is a breakthrough nonetheless. Yesterday, as we hiked up a mountain and ran all the way down giggling in the pouring rain, and sang and laughed together, and joked and smiled and poked fun at one another even in between seeing patients at the hospital today, even in the face of a large patient load, I think I learnt a little about the simple pleasures of life, the simplicity of living in a jungle, and the importance of having fun again.

* a picture I took during my morning run before ward rounds started.
The hospital is tucked neatly behind the trees to the top left of the picture.
The house you see is the church.