A whoa nelly month!

Have you ever had so many important, big things going on at once that you feel like you are in a fog and can barely see one step ahead of you? Welcome to my life for the last several weeks!

In the last month, we had a visitor from our home church- Paradise Community Church in Phoenix, Arizona. It was wonderful having Erica come visit! The girls were enamored with her and she was so kind- doting on them and playing with them. She even hosted a sleep over for Charlie that included a fashion show and nail painting! In addition to blessing our family with her sweet spirit, she was able to shadow doctors at the hospital in Banyo as well as Mbingo. She even saw an all day long surgery where two surgeons reconstructed a jaw bone from a piece of leg bone!  (Hopefully these times will inspire her future medical career!) She visited an orphanage, saw many, many muddy roads, visited big cities as well as small villages, and trudged through the daily rains!

A highlight for me of her trip was the teaching we did for teenage girls. Erica taught about puberty and I taught about caring for one’s body as well as our identity in Christ. The lovely and amazing ladies at Paradise Community Church sewed 50 reusable menstrual kits to give out to the community! Each kit (based on the “Days for Girls” designs) had reusable menstrual pads, underwear, soap, and a washcloth inside a beautiful bag. They were a big hit with the girls and a gift that will keep on giving as they will empower the girls to care for their bodies in a dignified and sustainable manner. Also, the kits were so pretty!

And, bless her heart, Erica put up with me as I packed up our house in Banyo and moved to Mbingo. Ya’ll, I was in full-on crazy mode. I could barely remember my name I was so frazzled. But one foot in front of the other and we managed to pack up everything we owned and put it in and on top of a bush taxi we rented! Whoa nelly, I don’t know how they got it all in/up, but they did (trunks were piled 3 high on top!). As we unpacked, one of our friends said, “This is amazing! They keep taking things out. It is like a clown car!” We traveled 14 hours over muddy roads (at one point 10 men had to gently guide our van down the road as slid in the mud with absolutely no traction- our van was on a giant slip and slide) and roads with pot holes big enough for entire cars to fit in! This journey was not for the faint of heart to be sure! 

We then moved into our house in Mbingo and I frantically unpacked trunks while simultaneously packing to go on a trip to the capital to escort Erica to the airport less than a week later. We rode 9 plus hours on a public transport bus to Yaounde. Spent one day shopping at all the fun “big city shops”! Then she went to the airport and I made another 9 plus hour trip on public transport back to our home in Mbingo (after having mud splattered on me from head to toe thanks to a taxi).

The next day, the girls and I traveled to Bamenda for Charlie’s homeschool coop! In a period of 10 days, I think I traveled 44 hours on public transport! That is almost 2 full days in hot, cramped, uncomfortable buses/ cars on muddy and bumpy roads. My back, neck, and tail bone were sore for days!

For two weeks, I taught “cooking skills” at the homeschool co-op while single parenting the girls as Josh worked 16 plus hour days in Mbingo. And let me tell you, I was tired before we even started the co-op time. Then O decided this would be a great time to debut epic toddler tantrums- hitting, kicking, screaming, biting, and so many time-outs. Poor thing. She has had so much transition in the last few months, but did I mention how tired I already was and that I was spouseless at the time?! I texted Josh so many times, “I CAN’T DO THIS!!” 

But Charlie had so much fun with her friends and she even learned to hula hoop!

But, alas one step at a time and one foot in front of the other! I am thankful for a Lord that carried me through it all!

Now on to our next journeys- 1^st grade, the next steps in the adoption process, and new ministries in Mbingo! But hopefully I won’t have to take any big trips for a while!

I am enough!

It is almost Mother’s Day. Shout out to all of you fabulous mother’s out there!

This will be my first Mother’s Day as a mom of two! That thought still seems crazy, yet totally normal to me. We are doing well as a family of four and O is adjusting great. We have been back to “normal life” in Banyo for about two weeks, but of course it is a totally new normal now. Can we just talk about how two kids somehow make more than double the mess of one child?!

We are also consumed with adoption paperwork! Just one of the many forms we had to fill our is 45 pages! And not 45 pages of easy fill in the blanks like tell us your address type stuff! No! 45 pages of questions like- tell us about your childhood and any trauma you experienced, what are your strengths/ weaknesses, what is your philosophy of discipline, and my favorite: Describe your feelings about yourself.

Um.

Where to start. Well, the “Miss America” answer would have been- “I feel like I am the best person in the world, totally the best possible candidate for adopting a child!”

Ha. Most days I feel like I am drowning in dishes and Legos! Surely the “best candidate ever” would have figured out how to get it all done quickly, efficiently, with a smile on her face, while crafting with the kiddos.

Ha!

So I went with the honest answer:

Right now, I feel that I am enough. Or at least I am trying to tell myself that I am enough- that I am mom enough, woman enough, nurse enough, missionary enough, etc. As a woman, a mom, and an international aid worker, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the “expectations” each title carries, but I am realizing that most of those expectations are my own and perhaps I should reevaluate those expectations! I may never be the perfect Betty Crocker, Florence Nightingale, Mother Theresa hybrid, but that is alright. I know how to make cinnamon rolls from scratch, I can give chemotherapy, and I can teach about AIDS in a rural village, but I don’t have to (and can’t) do it all at the same time. I am learning about balance and seasons of life. Right now, my kids are young and they need my time to take them to the bathroom and cut up their food. Right now is a season of motherhood.

Ok, so even that answer was 95% “Miss America.” The real honest answer might scare them away: I totally don’t feel like enough most days, but I know that God is enough. He has me covered so therefore I am enough. I am enough. I am enough. I am enough.

So dear mothers out there (especially missionary mamas ‘cause we are a whole other breed)- take a deep breath, relax, and know that YOU ARE ENOUGH BECAUSE HE IS ENOUGH!

Happy Mother’s Day!

(oh and sorry can’t post pics of O until the adoption is final. I know, it is a bummer.)

Engineering in Mbingo

It has been an absolute whirlwind the last month and a half after leaving Banyo for Mbingo.  Our whole family was excited for months at the upcoming arrival of my brother Zack and friend Jessica.  They arrived safely although having to go through a ghost town in the largest city in our region due to the anglophone/francophone conflict.  My brother aka 'Dr. Zax' as he is called here was able to get involved right away with all the medical happenings around the hospital.  Everyone of course immediately fell in love with Zack and tried endlessly to figure out how to get him to stay forever.  He was able to perform many surgeries and has a sea of new crazy medical stories as you could imagine.  


Jessica and I jumped right in on a project to ultimately fix a challenge that was cursing the hospital for years now.  The challenge was that there is a linens cycle and if anything slows or stops the linens needed for a surgery, the operation cannot start, ultimately resulting in delayed patient care for critical surgeries.  As are many thing in Africa, there was a much more complex than anticipated set of variables that were causing the problem.  Our initial assumption was that the drying process was slowing things down and so we set out to build a more cost effective, higher throughput system to get things dry when it rains.  In the rainy season it is almost guaranteed to rain at least once every day.  Currently we have 2 large plots of land set aside to dry clothes on lines in the sun.

When things can't get dry we fall back to our 30,000 watt electric dryer similar to the one in your house only scaled up.

Electrical challenges in Africa are mainly caused by poor design/planning, maintenance and funding.  Adding the large electrical load of the dryer to our grid is expensive and will cause us to need to buy a new transformer sooner rather than later at best or blow out the current transfer at worst.  The new transformer is easily $60,000+.  Therefor reducing/eliminating the dryer would be cost effective and buy us time before needing to upgrade to a new transformer.


The next challenge is that the OR is hot and humid even with 12 AC units attached to it.

So now the fun begins.  We tried to think of every creative way of solving the problem.  From simple to completely insane, we tossed around every idea.  Jessica was able to put all the variables into her computer and kick out some terribly useful numbers.  Jessica is a friend of mine from college who specializes in mechanical engineering that relates to HVAC.  She has spent much of her professional life designing HVAC system in Colorado.  Her company was kind enough to let us use a laptop and specialized software which helps in solving challenges like this.

We spent nearly every day she was here working on different ideas.

We went ahead and prototyped what we felt was the best idea in our front yard.  Very simple really.  When it starts raining, release the lever and voila you have an instant tarp protecting your clothes from rain.

Obviously this was a scale model and the real system would need to be 50x larger but we wanted something to show the hospital administration to sell them on the idea.  I don't want to put you to sleep with too many technical details but needless to say the challenge is complex.  We presented several different ideas including this one to administration and a large collection of 'simple fixes' which should help make a big dent on the numerous challenges.  We also started another project to collect more data to help solve the procedural part of the linens challenge.  Their response was very positive and hopefully a tarp deploying system will be built before rainy season this year.

Zack and Jess both left and everyone was sad, especially Charlie.


A week later started IT Class.  I spent 6 days solid with the heads of IT from numerous CBC hospitals throughout Cameroon to train them to prepare their hospitals for the upcoming EMR (electronic medical records) installations.  This is class 1 or 3: upgrading their networks.  The class was pretty intense with 5 hours of lecture and labs per day.  I was very pleased with their performance and passion for the topic.  We even had our first female IT 'guy' who was one of our top students. 

I ran out of adrenaline after the 6th day and crashed hard today.  Sunday as a day of rest is a great idea.  Tomorrow starts another new project...

Lori has been busy teaching Charlie through Kindergarten, visiting with Fulbe patients at the hospital and keeping all of our taste buds very happy.