Passion

We work very hard and we play very hard here. So my story continues as already I have been with Mercy Ships since January! Wow, the times passes quickly and there is still so much more to do!

Our awesome God uses our gifts to change lives. I am thrilled to branch out as a Trainer at Bethesda Hospital in Cotonou teaching office systems and computer programs. Four days a week a team of three of us from Mercy Ships will be working with four West African administrative assistants already employed at this local hospital. One day a week they will come on-board the Africa Mercy ship to see how our systems function. I will be training them to be leaders in their workplace so they can teach their coworkers new skills. In turn, I hope to learn from them! Emily, one of the students, has offered to help me learn French. Our most important goal is to build relationships and I am happy to exchange my gifts with the knowledge they can give me.

Recently, I met one Benin lady in her mid-forties after she had the fistula surgery that you’ve heard so much about. The surgery repairs a hole in the vagina after a traumatic pregnancy leaving the baby dead and the mom severely injured with endless urine leaking. This woman lives in the bush country about six hours north of Cotonou, where our ship is in port. We arranged for transportation for her and several others to have the surgery on the ship. On the day they picked her up to come to Mercy Ships hospital, she got in the vehicle driving away from her village, and when they reached the road, she told the translator that she had never seen this ribbon of ground that he explained was a road.

As they travelled the great distance, she kept asking if she was in another country yet and he kept telling her, “no, this is still your country.” She arrived in Cotonou never having seen a city and then to the port seeing the ocean and ships for the first time in her life.

When I met her, post surgery, and ready to travel back to her village, she had a big smile on her face with several missing or crooked teeth. She seemed excited to meet me another face from Mercy Ships that had brought her healing and discovery of the world around her. Not only the surgery changed her life, but she seemed in particular to enjoy every new thing she saw. She will return to her village with fond memories for a lifetime of her transforming surgery AND what she saw for the first time in her life.

On a day off of duty, we took a trip west of Cotonou to Grand Popo with a stop along the way, a monument called The Point of Nor Return. It is difficult to describe the impact of seeing The Point of No Return. The site commemorates the center of the transatlantic slave trade. Between the 16th and 18th centuries, millions of Africans left the continent for the new world to be slaves and most of them were shipped from Benin.

It is a striking structure, facing out across the Atlantic Ocean. Yet it is also bleak beyond words. The top of the arch depicts on one side the two long lines of naked, chained men being marched away from a specific tree called the Tree of Forgetfulness. Men had to go round it nine times, women and children seven. This experience, they were told, would make them forget everything - their names, their family, and the life they had once had. On the other side of the monument, it depicts the chained men heading for a ship on the sea.

While walking through the streets of Cotonou, too loud for conversation, I thought about what it must have been like for people of this nation to be stolen from their homeland and end up in other countries that were strange to them. I thought it must be what I was feeling in this unfamiliar city. Cars and traffic I know, but the smells are unfamiliar of what is cooking in the pots as I walk by. Their clothing is loose and colorful, mine are capris and bland. They carry things on their heads and speak a language I don’t understand. My skin is pale and probably, in their eyes, inferior to their skin. This is just a tiny fraction of what the slaves must have felt away from their native soil. Still, I am free to walk back to our comfort and air conditioning and popcorn and Coca-Cola. Slaves were ripped from family, familiar surroundings, languages, clothing and most of all, their dignity. I guess I will never fully understand what they felt.

After our visit, we headed for Grand Popo, a relaxing small resort with a restaurant, very warm pool and rough waters of the ocean. It was a much needed rest. I enjoyed the break.

But, on the way home, we had a flat tire and it was changed in no time by many able hands.