Today, as I spoke to a missionary doctor from the UK who’s also a young mum like me, serving here at the mission hospital, seeing cases of Marburg and Mpox, she asked me, “It makes me anxious often to think about the fact that we won’t have the medical care we need here should something serious happen to any of our family. And… it also feels like we are living in a high-stress, slightly unsafe situation all the time, doesn’t it?”
As she put words to what I’d been feeling the whole time, I held back tears.
She understood.
She was right. How do I begin to explain the sense of alienation we feel as the only Asians for miles being taunted and chanted at, the fact that so many things are broken and don’t function as they should (keys, cars and roads break all the time), and how cultural navigations can be so exhausting (what one says and is told and plans together is rarely what is executed).
I know we serve at a mission hospital- but what happens when people tell you to go only when it’s your last resort? What happens if it’s the only facility we have here.
And for all the healthcare we have back home, it makes me agonize to think about all the deaths that happen here every day because of the lack of something- access, speed, knowledge, money…
… and I close my eyes thanking God for another day. Another day here to breathe, without pain, without unspoken tragedy. Every day here is a gift, a miracle of sorts, whether we acknowledge it or not.