A Home Visit.

“ Why don’t you make yourself more useful?”

 

A few days ago, sitting in the clinic of a Ugandan psychiatrist to learn more about the intense psychosocial issues that the African elderly go through, for a project I’ve been tasked with to impact vulnerable elderly people in Uganda, I was taken aback by his pointed question.

 

“Leave the spiritual and theological things to your husband,” he laughed, with a hint of pomposity. “You should do your Masters of Public Health, not a Masters of Theology.”

 

When I had asked if he would like me to help in any way in his capacity as a Professor in one of the universities here, he had replied, “You can’t do anything with just one degree, you know. You need two.”

 

Having had the opportunity to train and live in Canada for 2 decades, this was not your typical Ugandan doctor. He asked what on earth I was doing in Uganda with my husband. When I replied that it was God’s call, a look of disdain fell upon me.

 

“I am more religious than you religious people,” he said. He went on seeing patients, explaining to me their psychosocial statuses and how he had given up a $400’000 salary a year to returning to his home country. “Don’t you think I am more religious than those who have a religion? I could there earning much more, but here I am, back.”

 

That conversation haunted me for days. One night, thinking about it in bed, Cliff turned to me and asked what it was that was bothering me. “Nothing,” I said, to which he probed more and I spilled that I had never felt so belittled for a long time.

 

For the longest time I struggled with how medicine integrated with my faith. Being a medical doctor married to a missionary preacher and serving in Africa, the answer should have been obvious enough. But the rift between the two niggled at me, taunting me from time to time. Deep down inside, I felt guilty both ways- that I neither was practising enough of medicine in my capacity as a medical doctor, nor spending enough time building the spiritual lives of the community.

 

My thoughts swirled: What was wrong with pursuing a Masters of Theology? Was I really daft to have forsaken the opportunity to pursue a Masters of Public Health at Johns Hopkins? Do my friends back home think this of me, too?

 

Cliff wiped my tears as they rolled down unconsciously. I thought I was done grieving about this. But a single look of disdain and a conversation of condescension filled me with self-doubt, all over again. Lying in bed, I asked God how my capacity here as a doctor aligned with His call for my life.

 

Today, came the rare and precious moment which brought tears to my eyes when God presented His answer to me. A Ugandan bible student who has shown incredible warmth and hospitality to us had asked Cliff for a favour, which was no favour at all, given all he had done for us.

 

This morning, as we sent his seventy-four year old, crippled mother, whom he carries in his arms like a gallant knight to transport her around, to their regular questionable, makeshift clinic from her home (no more than a little dark room with a bed, stove and chair), I was able to identify her severe contractures. Contractures are what happen when muscles become so tight that they go into spasms. Because of this, she was neither able to sit nor stand. This affected her life greatly.

 

Two phonecalls to my newly-befriended colleagues later, and together with Cliff, we adjourned brought her to the public health institute where I volunteer at, for my amazing colleagues in the Physiotherapy and Occupational Therapy Department to see them. They helped them with some exercises to relieve her pain, and were even willing to conduct a home visit for them for free, out of their own free time.

 

As the bible school student and I used a wheelchair clumsily to help his mother to use the toilet to ease herself, I saw with my own eyes how precious this visit to the Physiotherapist was. Such services here, unlike back home, are expensive and hard to find. Worse, the ones with real skills are rare. The previous doctor at the makeshift clinic had assured him that massage oil would cure his mother.

 

After the hour-long consult, as Cliff sent them back home, I sat down and started to tear silently.

 

Such are these precious, God-given moments, that serve as a reminder to me that it is not my academic aptitude as a physician, the degrees I earn or the self-imposed “Key Performance Indices” that I “need” to meet as a missionary preacher’s wife that matters, but seeing God at work in the little opportunities that present themselves day by day, for us to be a blessing, in whatever ways that we can, wherever we are, whenever we can.

 

 

“If anyone ministers,

let him do it as with the ability which God supplies,

that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ,

to whom belong the glory and the dominion forever and ever.”

– 1 Peter 4:11