So This Is Love

I am sitting in my house, gazing into a bucket filled with grey liquid. Miniscule pieces of bone float to the top. These are the ex-contents of my stomach which are also partly the ex-contents of a goat’s stomach. And this is love. Tangible, smelly love. It’s been a week.

Teaching is my side job. What I really want to do is love people, and I have been given many opportunities to do that this week. I do not share these stories to brag on myself. I did not do any of this well and certainly not better than anybody else could have done this. I share these stories because they are examples of what my life is like here and illustrate small, small ways I am able to identify with Christ and His life on earth.

One of my students has seizures. Usually, they are quiet episodes where she goes stiff and unresponsive for 5-10 minutes. Sometimes she wails and thrashes her arms. Sometimes she runs. The running kind was new to me.

Class was just beginning, and my co-teacher was teaching Bible. It is all in Dinka, so I use the time to prep for the day, monitor classroom behavior, or pray for the students in my class. I wasn’t paying particularly close attention when a student walked out. Often they ask to be excused to blow their noses outside. This student, too, had been mad at me this morning, so she might have just stalked out in a temper tantrum. I saw that she did not stop outside to blow her nose, and I slowly got up and followed. I called to her and she did not respond, so I assumed she was still mad at me. However, she was heading off the school grounds. I watched her, trying to decide whether to go after her or give up – teaching in South Sudan is a bit different than teaching in the US – when the headmaster saw me and said, “You’d better run.” In a flash, I realized this must be a new kind of seizure, and I ran. The student was running steadily, but not too quickly, so I reached her before long. I caught her and held her while she tried to free herself and beat me with her fists and kicked me in the legs and stomach.

For what felt like hours, though was only a few minutes, I held her as a crowd gathered. I asked some of them I knew for help, but it was two strange men who came forward and carried the girl back to the school compound. One of the men stayed with me for a long time, holding one of her arms and receiving blows and kicks for his trouble. Eventually, two others came and tied her legs, and the man left. I crouched on the ground, my body shaking with the effort of holding her. She grew quiet after about half an hour and sat up. She didn’t seem to realize what had happened and asked why her legs were tied. She told me that we needed to go back to school. I was exhausted, sore, sweaty, and covered in dirt from her dirty fists and feet.

I tried to wash a bit before going into the classroom, but I still caused some stir. Most were concerned and told me to go wash, but one laughed. The girl whom I had helped laughed. She laughed at my hair shaken loose from the tussle. She laughed at the dirt on my face and legs from wrestling her to the ground. She laughed at my tired, sweaty face from patiently absorbing her blows so that she would not hurt herself. I wanted to scream, to curse, to shake her, and make her grateful, but I was too tired; there was nothing left to do but teach.

That was the start of the week. Now, back to the smelly love. Almost every weekend, I am invited to eat with a different family from school. I greatly appreciate their generosity, but almost every weekend, I get sick. My stomach is not up to this kind of love. Last weekend was particularly bad. As soon as I stooped through the low door of the hut, I thought, “This meal is going to kill me.” There were four men sharing a bowl with me. Men who had done who knows what with their hands and then not washed with soap. I gingerly tore off a piece of sorghum dough (kun) and dipped it in the sauce (kedang). Thankfully the kedang didn’t seem to have a lot of meat. The meat was what sent me running to the latrine the next morning and a few mornings after. I was making conversation and trying to make it look like I was eating more than I was when my friend Akuol brought another bowl of kedang and lump of kun for me and the younger boys. This one definitely had meat. The smell was rancid. I gagged four times trying to eat and spit out many small bones. The meat had an odd texture, rubbery in places and unexpectedly soft in others. I avoided it and sopped up the sauce around the pieces of meat, but the flavor pervaded everything. I felt nauseas but smiled for pictures with the family before we left.

When I got home, I decided that, in the absence of activated charcoal, vomiting everything I had eaten would be the best way to minimize the after-effect; so, that’s where I was, hurling into a bucket, when Cinderella’s song came into my head and made me laugh. “So, this is love. So, this is what makes life divine.” And it truly is.

All the things I had experienced this week - the beating from my student followed by blatant ingratitude, the lunch of death, and the hundred-other small culture-stress experiences of daily life – all these serve to make me more like Christ. All of these are small opportunities for me to love like Christ. This is what makes life Divine.

I didn't take a picture of the aforementioned (you're welcome). Here's a picture of South Sudan traffic from Beth Smith.