Life is challenging. Everyone has things that happen to them in the course of a day or a week or a year or lifetime. There's a saying that you can't control whats happening to you, but you can control how you deal with it. It sounds nice, but it's not always that 'cookie cutter' easy. Sometimes life gets too much for me to handle. Bad things come at me in series of unfortunate events. One after another. I try to duck and weave and jump into the closest foxhole and try to put these bombs and bullets into some sort of rational order so I can deal with them. Because that's what the saying tells me to do.
But sometimes I can't make any sense of it. On some days, I can lay my head down on a pillow and know somehow that I survived what could've been a fatal wound. Like a few weeks ago when I was washing the refrigerator shelf and as I was drying it, it exploded in my hands into a thousand pieces and small nuggets of sharp glass flew in every direction; up, down, across, in the sink and even into my shirt and nestled in my bra. I stood there holding the towel and the metal edge frame piece and began looking at my arms and hands and at my feet because I was wearing sandals and I felt the glass in my shoes. I didn't have a drop of blood on me. It took me awhile to get all the shards and cubes of glass swept up and picked up piece by piece out of corners and from the sink drain but I really felt I had dodged a bomb.
I thanked God and rearranged the remaining shelves in my fridge. I miss that shelf a lot but I'm managing where to put things. I have a new normal for that now. And a thankfulness in my heart that God spared me. It could've even gone in my eyes because it happened directly in front of me.
On other days I've layed my head down on the pillow and my mind can't make sense of any of the bullets coming at me in succession. I live in a very beautiful but extremely dysfunctional country for 9 months a year. It was getting Covid-19 in 2021 that brought me back to the U.S. for medical treatment. Before that it had been 3 years since I'd been back. And before that it was 4 years without going back. But Covid left me with post-covid medical issues that required lots of specialists that I needed to access in America. So I've gone back every year, usually in May and for 3 months so I can get in all the doctor appointments and subsequent MRIs, other scans, and lab tests that spawn from each visit.
Each time I spend 9 months in Uganda it feels a bit like war. Let me be clear, to every single American enlisted in or discharged from any branch of the United States Armed Services, thank you, thank you, thank you for your service! For me, I'm in a different kind of army. The Lord's Army in fact. I enlisted when I was called up by my heart to go help people in Africa 11 years ago. Anyone who knows me well knows this is my passion as well as my calling. Helping people is like breathing to me. It's an automatic response to human suffering that I can't relearn or redirect if I tried. It just pours out of me.
I'm not a Missionary. I'm not a pastor or teacher or evangelist or a speaker. I'm not backed by any church or organization. I barely have enough money to eat and pay rent. There's nothing left for bombs and bullets of the financial type. Sickness, emergencies, broken appliances or a horribly uncomfortable mattress. I haven't even owned a couch since 2014. I have just beds and a dining room table. I use a broken table next to my bed to put my make up and medicine and inhalers on. I pray every day it doesn't come crashing down. It's a cheap pressed fiber board stand that we've owned for 11 years. It's fallen apart and been put back together so many times that the holes where the screws go are just open gaps and I set the shelf on top of the screws. If I bump it the shelves fall down. Currently the bottom shelf is flat on the floor with my.laptop on it. So if it crashes down that's the end of my 2015 HP.
So with my new yearly migration back to America every May and my return back to Uganda, it has been becoming more difficult for me to adjust to the latter. After 9 months of jumping into foxholes in Uganda I return back to America limping. Not physically, but in my soul. I am a shell of a person emotionally and psychologically. I'm beaten down and morally defeated. I'm sort of in a state of shock even. It takes me about 2 weeks to start feeling joy again. To stop reactively jumping to any quick or sudden movement in my peripheral vision. To feel physically rested. I call my Ugandan cheap foam mattress my "bed of nails" but my bed at my respite place is divinely comfortable. I go off most of my pain meds for 3 months. As I eat 3 meals a day of food I actually like, I start to lose the guant grayish pale appearance to my skin on my face and my eyes come out of the hallows and start to sparkle. My hair gets a shine back and is more full.
The water in Uganda that barely falls from the shower head (gravity fed) comes from a tank of stored water high up on a platform. It is fed by demand by a valve that floats at a certain level and if water drops below it, it fills. The water that comes from town (I live in the city) often comes brown or cloudy. All that settles in the tank. Usually when I wash my hair and it looks dirtier than before I washed it we know the tank needs cleaned. It maybe gets done once every two years. But it isnt long before it has silt on the bottom again from the water coming from town. But for 3 months in America I enjoy shiny hair.
When I talk about bombs and bullets, I can explain the difference. In Uganda, nothing goes right, is on time, or is EVER what you may expect. For instance, I can wake up a decide that today I'm going to wash clothes. I have an apartment/college sized roll around washer with a tank on one side and a spinner on the other. I have no where inside the house to connect it to a water inlet and a drain in the same vicinity, so I drag/lift/carry it outside, remove an outside drain cover and run the water inlet hose through a hole in the kitchen window screen to connect it to my kitchen sink faucet. So I'll have it decided that today I'm going to wash clothes, carry it outside, set it up and connect the faucet, turn on the water and.......today they have taken our water. It's my fault I didn't check that first though. When I first return from America I forget to do this. But by May I wake up and go try the water THEN know if I'm washing clothes or not. This situation I call a bullet. Sometimes water is there when I start but goes off mid washing. Or they take our electric. In america i can throw the clothes in the machine, pour in the soap, press 'on' and walk away. And 30 min later toss them in the dryer. This one you fill it. Spin the dial to the desired minutes you want it to wash, then come back when it buzzes and switch it to drain mode. Then refill it, set the dial to how many minutes you want to rinse the clothes then come back when the timer buzzes, switch it to drain then put them into the spinner and set the dial to how many minutes you want them to spin then when it stops go hang them on the clothesline. Bullets.
Sometimes bullets come in the form of creepy things. I'm always on the lookout for a black mamba but on Saturday I rounded the corner coming from the back where i was hanging out clothes, and came face to face with 3 foot long (head to tail) very scared and extremely fast giant lizard. I yelled "it's a dragon! " to no one in particular but since my brother in law was the only other person around, he ran out the front door to see the dragon see him and turn around running back to ME! I yelled "oh no!" and it ran back towards him, where he was busy opening the gate door to let it out and it ran past him, (over his feet maybe even) and out and into the field across the street. That one was a bullet but sort of more like birdshot.
Then there's electricity. Or lack.of it. I can wake up in the morning and take something out of the freezer or think about what I'm making later. I've ever put meat in the oven to bake for supper and half way through they take electricity and the meat goes cold. We eat a lot of egg dinners. The other night I planned for pizza. I made my dough early so it would rise, prepared all my toppings, shredded my cheese, prepared the sauce and had everything ready to just put it all together and bake it for 25 min. Easy peazy. Nope. That night they didn't take away the power but it was so low that the pizza took an hour and a half to bake. We ate late that night. That's a bullet.
A bomb is more like when water goes off from the tap for more than 4 days. It's difficult to do anything without water like wash dishes or do laundry or fill the cats water bowls or refill our water purifier tank for use when cooking or just rinse your fingers in the tap after cutting an onion. But the toilet still flushes and the shower taps work until......the tank goes dry. Now it's time to start using the reserve bottles of water which are 5 gallon water bottles that we use on our water cooler machine, given to our ministry for free because we buy more than 10 bottles a month.Clean, cold water is a 'bandage' for me.I cannot drink boiled tap water here. I get sick.
So now, to pick up and carry those bottles to the sink or bathroom requires strength. Most days I'm home alone and have to do it myself. All day long. My back goes out after a couple days. These continuous daily bombs get to me until finally they fix the water problem and we are back to normal. For awhile. Water goes out like this several times a year
In 2021, after having covid, coming back to America, getting vaccinated so I could fly, and flying back to Uganda, a big bomb was dropped on me. Health bombs scare me the most. As soon as I returned in September, I started feeling weak. By November I had malaria. By December I was feeling awful. I was dizzy every time I stood up and most days was too nauseous to eat. I was having a lot of shortness of breath. By January 2022 I turned yellow. I was so sick I couldn't stay out of bed except to shower sitting in a plastic chair and almost passing out every time. I got malaria and treated it 10 times in 5 months. I was almost dead. My white count was 1 (normal 5-10) and my platelets 35 (normal 150 -300). If I had cut myself I would've bled to death and died. I flew back to America so weak and sick that I know it was only God carrying me. I couldn't stand without my knees knocking together. My hands shook so bad I couldn't hold a fork to feed myself. I could only fill a cup half full. I knew before I left that I would not be coming back. Between power going off all the time, water going off, chronic malaria, liver failure, kidney failure and post covid lung failure, there was no way. You have to be healthy and strong to be a soldier in God's army on the equator. I truthfully didn't think I was going to live. I know now that either the covid itself, or the vaccinations for it, caused my 3 autoimmune diseases to flare and I gained a brand new one, autoimmune hepatic cirrhosis. My liver (the actually organ itself) was fine in March and I had cirrhosis by May. My liver enzymes were a mess. All my labs reflected failing organs and all the autoimmune markers were in the red. I wasn't going back.
But somewhere around September I made a turn for the better and was missing my husband terribly. We had moved out of our rented house, gave away almost everything. He was living in a small studio apartment and going to school for his Bachelor of Arts in Social Sciences. I told him to hire a property finder and they found a beautiful house in a good area that had a huge solar system. Just exactly what I needed to endure the endless power outages. It was more expensive but we took it. I removed my mental and physical bandages and I came back fairly okay. Having solar to run my fridge , charge my devices and watch TV when power was off was a miracle I could have never dreamed I'd have in this difficult country. But oh, I enjoyed it.
I washed clothes when power was off because my college washing machine takes regular electric. The only thing I couldn't run was my fans because the solar burned up the motors but I have a USB charged fan that I could plug in the power strip with the solar on and run it all night while it recharged. I have asthma and can't breathe without a fan at night. I technically am supposed to have a cpap machine but I told my pulmonologist it was be futile as power goes off all the time.
I never had to light a candle anymore when power went off at night. The solar was directly wired into the lights at all times. In this house, I had found my bandage to my big bomb wound. Solar.
Fast forward to the present. I returned from America last month on August 14, 2024. I was refreshed, had a renewed mindset, was excited to get back to helping people, I was physically strong and my hair was shiny. But almost immediately the bombs and bullets started. I had a terrible sinus infection that took 2 full rounds of amoxyclav to get under control. Then the fridge shelf exploded. My first week back they took the water. The temperatures at first were moderate but it soon became unreasonably hot, in the 90s every day. Then they took power for two days. It was then I found out that while I was in America the solar batteries died.
The house was built 8 years ago and we were the ones to enjoy the last of the convenience of this solar. Now there's no way to charge our phones except a small power bank. The fridge and freezer just sit there for hours in 90 degree heat. The batteries are completely dead.The landlord said she can't afford new batteries but we could buy them lol. I call myself a dignified indigent. If I had that much money I'd buy a new mattress or a couch. Maybe a real bedside table. But instead, I just this past weekend, endured power outages that started Friday night (off 14 hours) then went off again Sat night and we got it back on Monday after being off for 37 hours. It was a very devastating bomb.
This one broke me psychologically. It was the straw that broke my camel back. I cried and cried until the tears wouldn't come anymore. It's one week before payday, with just enough food to get by and I had to throw away everything from the freezer and fridge. Thank God a dear friend sent money to help with replacing some of the food.
I've been back from America just 38 days. I did give a half-thawed whole chicken to a lady who came to weed in the back garden. She was very happy. I still have the desire to help people, even though I'm crying. It's automatic. I give while wiping my tears.
I have 8 more months to go until I get a break again. I feel beat down and defeated already. Usually I don't feel this way until January and then I start counting down when I can go 'on leave' from this war. January starts dry season and it's 100°F + every day until the 3rd week of March. Its hot Every. Day. When power goes off and no fan can run I feel hopeless. I have a portable air conditioner but the power on a good day is too low to run it. It's just shuts off. That's a bullet.
Even as I struggle to find hope, I will keep getting up every day and trying again. And maybe one day my war will end and I will find my peace on earth. Maybe in Uganda. Or maybe in America. Or maybe somewhere I can't even imagine right now. Hopefully then I can stay out of foxholes for awhile. And I pray there's consistent and functional power and water there.
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