Today I turn 40.
It is Saturday, the one day we get a break in the Nepali week, and I am enjoying one of my luxuries: Nepali filter coffee. This is tough in a country in which coffee is almost ubiquistously of the instant nescafe variety.
Apparently when you reach the middle of your life, you are supposed to have a reckoning. No similar drama in my life (yet?), but Becky and I started to reflect on the past year or so, and what it has meant living with our family in Tansen. Yesterday we walked up about 500 steps to the local highpoint, and as the kids ran off into the forest throwing pine-needles everywhere we had a few moments to adult-reflect.
Overall we are happy we have come to Nepal — in fact this has been one of the best decisions we have made as a family… Our time here is fulfilling, inspiring, sometimes chaotic, but usually satisfyingly simpler than in Canada. Yes we miss our friends and family dearly but overall feel fortunate to have had the chance to be alongside our new friends here in Tansen.
some surgical friends: Samir, Subash, Archana, and Asmita.
Albert Lobe, a friend and mentor, introduced me to the metaphor of a branch bending, but not breaking, as a teenager prior to my first oversees trip. I’m not sure if he was referring to the Tao Te Ching (living plants are supple and yielding — dead branches are dry and brittle) or perhaps another reference of which I’m unaware. It works on many levels, and continues to be helpful. Becky and I were reflecting on the ways in which we feel we have meaningfully contributed to the community, and to the hospital, and of course the many ways in which we have also been stretched, sometimes close to our limit. We have had many moments of ‘learning’ and bending, and some failures too. Our bending also has limits – at times we have had to make some decisions to not-do / not-participate / not-break.
One of the frustrating things, and simultaneously one of the gifts of being in a place like this, is the fact that because we are here only for a short time, are foreigners, and in many ways will only be a small blip in the history of this place, we are given the gift of being able to step back. I continue to enjoy the teaching that I am doing in the OR and the classroom, and the actual challenge of operating on a wider variety of patients than usual, and attempting to show compassion and integrity to patients despite my broken Nepali. I am occasionally frustrated by cultural differences in the hospital or at home (for instance: taking a consent from a patient in a culture that doesn’t value autonomy as much, the lack of privacy in our living spaces, sometimes feeling like I’m in a cultural bubble, or seeing administrative problems that I think could be *fixed*). But in these moments I have usually been able to remind myself to step back, remember who you are, and your role. Certainly in the history of interaction between the Western church and the global-South, there has been many times when the white christian should’ve stepped back.
And so my branch bends back.
Hopefully this has helped me to be supportive to some of my Nepali colleagues in their leadership roles, as they confront situations or problems which will be solved, or remain unsolved, long after we’ve left. It is my hope that we can continue to support them in this way.
Dr. Rabin – one my friends, who has pushed me to bike harder than I have in my life. Posing here at “The Cliffs”. In Nepal it is always uphill both ways.
Despite a few of the *shining moments* we can re-count over the past year, most of our joy comes in the daily mundane work of being with our kids, keeping the house going, working with Nepali students, friends, and colleagues, and seeing patients — often in relatively normal hospital-type situations. Trying to be faithful, by abiding. Nothing heroic.
It is not only prayer that gives God glory but work. Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, whitewashing a wall, driving horses, sweeping, scouring, everything gives God some glory if being in his grace you do it as your duty. To go to communion worthily gives God great glory, but to take food in thankfulness and temperance gives him glory too. To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dung fork in his hand, a woman with a slop pail, give him glory too. He is so great that all things give him glory if you mean they should. So then, my brethren, live.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
As our family continues over the next year to abide here in Nepal, I pray for mercy in our lives, in the lives of those we work with, and our patients whose needs are sometimes overwhelming. In addition I pray for mercy too in the lives of our friends and family back home.
