What a day.
After hours of waiting for Cliff’s lab results, we had to head back home, and grateful to find out his malarial tests are negative.
But because of his liver transplant and continual fever without the typical URTI symptoms, he’s not totally out of the woods yet.
As we prep for our transition back to SG, we’ve noticed how much opposition and warfare goes on during times of transition.
Thank you for praying with us
💛🙏🏾
Then in the afternoon, I got a call from the ward officer whom I hadn’t heard from in months. Apparently, word had spread about our neighbor’s dog wrecking havoc on the neighborhood and they’re conducting a “Ward Reconcilitation Meeting” tmrw to bring all parties together, including our landlord, to try and solve the problem once and for all.
In a land where laws and guidelines are not upheld by the usual framework were used to back home, I guess I had mixed feelings. All day, I felt like crying and throwing up at the same time.
Maybe I’m afraid to be disappointed. And maybe, I also felt overwhelmed to feel seen and heard after so long. To know that the Mwenyekiti (Chairman) and Mtendaji (ward officer) had heard of the problem enough to want to intervene.
All those days and nights crying alone with my headphones in a dark room… I felt seen.
Wld you pray for us? That tmrw’s meeting would go better than expected? I guess part of me is afraid it’ll just be another traumatizing encounter with the local system, and another part of me is hopeful, that with our landlord and a few other people standing with us, that maybe it’ll be a chance to witness God’s justice and the power of community doing right.
As if the day wasn’t done with its drama, I ordered a cup of chai (tea) only to feel a sharp sting in my mouth.
I thought maybe it was a spice or herb, but it turned out to be a drowned bee— its stinger sank into the tender part of the roof of my mouth.
What could I do? I spoke with the store owner who laughed that it was “the season.”
I guess this is what my therapist shared – that living in a developing country with cPTSD is like walking into a minefield of triggers daily, of feeling unprotected and unsafe by a system that does not have the usual guardrails of what we’d expect back home.
But I also believe, that maybe… God’s will is bigger than our traumas. And we are more than the sum of our traumas.
When I got home, my girls crowded round. Suddenly I remembered I’d found my sewing kit, after “losing” it for months. My 6-year old had been patiently waiting for me to stitch her stuffed toy but I kept putting it off due to the missing sewing kit.
When I said I’d found it, she leaped for joy. Both my girls insisted I put on a pair of scrubs and “do real surgery, Mama!”
That was probably the best part of my day.
As I lay in the dark at bedtime next to my girls, remembering how God had remembered my second born’s desire to fix her stuffed toy and helped me find my sewing kit, I started to cry… as I felt remembered too. That even though it’s been 8 months since the barking problem started, He remembers.
As we closed our eyes in the dark playing this song “You’re Made to Bloom”, my girls hugged me, saying, “are those happy tears, Mama?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”