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No Way Outa Here -9

21 Tuesday Feb 2017

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A year has passed since I posted my last blog entry.  And over two years since the time I was writing about.  A lot has happened since then, and much of what has happened I can only call miraculous.

There is a group of Christians in our city that offers prayer for healing in any respect where healing is needed – emotional, spiritual, relational, and/or physical.  I had been hesitating for months about asking them to come and pray for Michael.  He knew about and was very fond of this group before suffering his stroke, so I knew he’d have no compunctions about inviting them, but they showed certain theological tendencies about healing and God’s will in healing that I couldn’t go along with.  So I hovered for a couple of months – shall I call them or not?  In the end, I decided that beggars couldn’t afford to be choosers, and that I was a beggar in need of more divine intervention than I was seeing.  I called the leader of the group, whose telephone number had been given to me.  We made an appointment for her to visit Michael with a couple of other people from her team.

As soon as I saw them, I was reassured.  They were all nice, gentle people of retirement age, donating their time to pray for my husband, who just couldn’t seem to wake up out of this coma-like state!  They laid hands over Michael and we all prayed.

I think God hides the very things that God does, so that there is no proof that whatever has happened is from God or mere coincidence.  So it was here.  Michael was starting to improve on the day before the healing prayers.  But ever since the prayers, he started to improve in leaps and bounds.  I wrote in an email to friends and family, “Who knows?  Maybe Michael will one day be able to eat, talk and walk again!”

Ever so gradually, that is what has happened.

At first, after a three-month stay in the rehab hospital, Peter was transferred to a group home for tracheostoma patients.  It was a friendly, kind setting with room for only seven patients.  He had his own room which I furnished for him with some of our things and some new things I purchased.  Here the therapies continued.  Michael gradually began to be able to stand again, to eat things like bread and pasta, to walk around the home with therapists supporting him on either side, and to make little sounds once in a while with his voice.  I sang songs for him, leaving gaps in the lyrics for him to fill.  He filled the gaps.  He helped with washing himself, smiled at me, answered yes and no to my questions, and began to read the newspaper!  Everyone marveled at his amazing progress.  Was it all the prayers?  Was it the high dosage of fish oil he was suddenly allowed to have each day?  Both?   It was beautiful to behold.

Michael lived in the group home for a year and a half, making nearly steady progress, with some unfortunate hospital visits due to colds and pneumonia.  The only drawback of living in this setting was that living in a group home with other patients, some had multi-resistant germs, which Michael also contracted.

A doctor suggested Michael go back to the rehab hospital he had been in after his stroke, so he went there in September, 2016 spending five months there.  During his time there, he made enough progress so that they could remove his trach.  That very day he began talking to me, albeit usually in only a whisper.  How thrilling it was to carry on mini-conversations with my husband!  I had not had a conversation with him in over two years.  However, with his ability to speak, I began to see other things that have been lost.  For instance, he still believes that his parents, who have been dead for over fifteen years, are alive, or that he is much younger than he is.  But we can talk about things.

I have been learning interesting lessons about things lost and gained, and about things we normally highly prize.  Being able to remember the past in all its detail would be something to strive for, one would think – a stepping stone to more happiness.  But here is something about Michael that confounds all logic.  He is content with his life as it is.  For the first time in our lives, he is an absolute pleasure to be around.

Some things lost started to come back.  He began writing more and more too, signing his name.  Once he even wrote a letter to our son Chris, although most of it was illegible to me.  He played games with a tablet I had purchased for him, and I could see he still knew most of the capitals of the countries of the world.

Unfortunately, the nurses went on strike about the fish oil and refused to administer it any more, stating he had suddenly developed diarrhea and that the oil was bad for the feeding tube.  I could do nothing.  At around that time, he developed a tremor in his right hand, rendering it impossible for him to write anymore.  His gait changed to baby steps instead of solid forward step movements.  Before long, the doctor had diagnosed him with “Parkinson-like symptoms” and put him on Parkinson medications.  Fortunately for me, I was able to give him some food to eat.  Swallowing has been an issue since getting the trach sewed up.  His concentration comes and goes, and he forgets to swallow, or swallows only incompletely.  But I could give him pureed food, and with that, begin feeding him the fish oil again into his mouth rather than through the feeding tube, beginning with a very low dosage.

The Parkinson symptoms continued, or changed, from tremors to cyclical movements of his hands and arms, like chopping the air.  Otherwise, the medications have changed nothing of his symptoms.  But, the hospital decided he’d had enough rehab to be able to go home.

After two years and three months of hospital, rehab hospital and group home stays, my husband and I are finally living under one roof again!  And I am caught up now in this blog to the present.  From now on this blog will be about our daily life, living with the aftermath of the stroke.  There’s still no way outa here, but life in this place I would never have chosen has turned out to be something very precious.

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No Way Outa Here – 8

28 Sunday Feb 2016

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Acceptance. A key word in the twelve-step programs. I continued going to my twelve-step group, the one I’d been going to for years.

Years before this all happened, I had been so fixated on fixing my husband I couldn’t find a way to live at peace with my own life, or even know what my life without him was about. When I felt he was out of control, I was out of control. At one of these low points, someone told me about a twelve-step group, and I joined one. It was a struggle to learn to let go of this constant obsessing about my husband. Even after I had separated from Michael, it was difficult not to see everything as a project to fix him. If only he’d cooperate, I kept telling myself. Then our marriage would work! Twelve-step groups are all about taking responsibility for our own lives and letting go of the responsibility we take for others.

I worked at it, not terribly successfully, but I worked, and so did Michael. We reunited after a year of separation. During that year, I spent a lot of energy trying to find a way to stop focusing on him, but still, my thoughts kept returning to my longing for him to change. Now back together again, I was hopeful for a new future together. How much greater the shock and my inner outrage to be three months into reconciliation, and then for a terrible stroke to separate us more thoroughly than ever. Now I was technically living with a man who was in a coma, in the intensive care unit, fighting for his very life. I could talk all I wanted to him, but there was even less feedback than from talking to my dog. More reason than ever to obsess. My need to detach was more urgent than ever. I really, really needed to find a way to go on living, to find the strength to go on, to find faith, or I would go under.

My twelve-step group became one of my mainstays, and the prayer we say every week became a lifeline for me. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” I needed to accept my situation as it appeared every day. And slowly, probably because I was truly desperate now, I discovered that I was finding the ability to accept my situation. My urgent neediness was a gift, making it possible for me to accept each new day with the challenges it presented me.

For most of November, 2014, Michael was in a coma. We lived in a constant cycle of high fever (central fever, they called it), high blood pressure, infections like pneumonia, and tremors. His body couldn’t regulate normal temperature anymore, so he had a constant elevated temperature – central fever, and this fluctuated wildly. They diagnosed the tremors as part of epilepsy. More medication now, this time to deal with the epilepsy. At one point, a doctor told me Michael possibly wasn’t waking up because they’d been over-medicating him. So they started experimenting with medications. He continued to have high temperatures and to sleep. I wondered if he would ever wake up again. Once he woke up for a couple of days, and even mouthed the numbers one to four for his speech therapist. The following day he responded to a visitor who came to see him. I was elated! But he fell asleep the following day after another bout of high fever and seizures. What was I supposed to accept? That he would never recover? Or insecurity, uncertainty?

All of the above. I didn’t know what kind of God would allow us to go through what we were going through, but I decided that the goodness I had experienced had a souce, and that this source was the God I had been following.  I would  continue to follow Goodness. Psalm 23 became a mantra – “Surely Goodness and Mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.”  Well, I wasn’t sure they were following me, but I would follow Goodness.  I said this to myself, but it didn’t feel as though there were any God at all in my life.  Goodness was an abstract force for me, but logically the strongest force of all, one that I vowed to trust, no matter what. Even now, if I looked, I could see that there were good things every day – maybe a good meal someone cooked for me, a kind email, a beautiful sunset. I would accept and follow Goodness, with God’s help. I had no divine messages or feelings of being carried, or any sense of God’s presence, but I did find myself carrying on, somehow able to face each new day without falling apart. This was how I could accept the monstrous thing I couldn’t change.

I was also doing the things I could to help the situation.

I went to therapy. As with the twelve-step emphasis on acceptance that I was learning, I had been learning new ways of dealing with pain in therapy. The therapist invited me to look inside my body and identify where the pain manifested itself and to sort of sit there and hold it, watching it, allowing it to be there, also feeling my feet on the floor, following my breathing. In this way I learned that I could tolerate emotional pain and that it would leave, in its own time.

I began every day with what I call my “quiet time”. I read about persecuted Christians around the world and prayed every day for the one on that day. I read out of my twelve-step daily guide, and out of the Bible, focusing now on the book of Job, since it seemed appropriate to be reading about someone else who had suffered at least as much as I. Then I would pray and meditate for around twenty minutes, allowing whatever thoughts and feelings that came to be there. Usually there was nothing special that came, but now and then I had a helpful insight.  I think the most helpful thing was just sitting there with God, letting God be privy to all that was going on. I accepted the tears or whatever confusion or lost feelings I had, and let God have them.

Writing my update/prayer emails also helped. It was good to record what was going on, and to get it out somehow. I didn’t like telephoning and having to explain myself over and over. But writing it in one email to a lot of people was a wonderful way to express myself!

One person on my email list wrote back to me, “You need to have a close friend come and stay with you for a while. You need female companionship.” None of my friends here in Germany had the time to come and stay with me. But my friend Nancy in the States had recently retired and was complaining that there wasn’t enough for her to do. I invited her to come and stay with me, and she accepted!

It was just the thing I needed, having her companionship. We rode the tram every day together to the hospital, talking nonstop in each direction of the half-hour ride. She bore the frustration and disappointment of seeing Michael asleep day after day with me. We did fun things like cook and bake together. We cooked for Thanksgiving and invited my German friends. We watched Sandra Bullock movies, since we’re both Sandra Bullock fans. Nancy was here when the famous Christmas markets in Cologne opened, and she bought lovely German-made Christmas souvenirs to bring back to her family. We prayed together, sharing our deepest thoughts and longings. Even now, more than a year later, I feel so much closer to her because of her time here with me. She still writes me beautiful, encouraging notes that lighten my heart and my burden.

On the day before she left, December 2, we both got an early Christmas present from God – Michael woke up! And he even responded to us, blinking yes to several questions we posed.

He stayed awake off and on for almost two weeks, giving me hope that recovery would indeed be possible. One of the doctors on the ICU at the university hospital went out of her way several times to help me. She even allowed Michael to receive high dosages of fish oil, something a friend told me about. There were several reported cases of people with severe brain injury who experienced amazing healing after receiving two grams of fish oil daily. Fish oil is high in omega 3, the same substance our brains are made of. Was it only coincidence, or was the fish oil really making a difference in Michael’s level of consciousness?

I’d been practicing prayers of gratitude and trying to stay in the moment in a similar way to when I work on a new piece on the piano. I spent my days looking for whatever I could be grateful for, and when my thoughts drifted into worry, I would try and come back to the present.

Michael was doing so well, he would be able to be transferred into a rehab hospital. A week before Christmas, he was transferred. The day after his arrival, he fell into a coma again.

Chris returned from abroad for Christmas, only to find his father mentally gone by the time the holidays began. On Christmas Eve, Chris and I went to church together, and then took our presents by taxi to the rehab hospital. Michael slept as we opened his presents for him.

During the hours apart from Michael, we enjoyed Christmas, eating great meals and enjoying each other.  With Michael, we sat helplessly in the silence of his room, enveloped in surgical masks, paper gowns and plastic gloves. He was in quarantine until they could ascertain that he didn’t have any multi-resistant bugs. No more fish oil. The doctor at the rehab hospital wasn’t convinced it would help. He was afraid it would only give him a worse case of diarrhea than he already had.

I tried to see this as a time to keep focusing on the goodness of God, the things that I knew to be good, and to be thankful for them. I kept trying to stay in the present. During all of this, Michael continued to sleep. Would he ever be healed? The doctor didn’t think so. On two occasions he said to me, “I think your husband will probably look something like this for the rest of his life. You need to accept this instead of clinging to hope that he can be healed.”

No Way Outa Here – 6

03 Wednesday Feb 2016

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I thought I had posted everything I’d written thus far, but when I went to post this, I found that there was a draft which I’d written several months ago and failed to post.  I posted that entry just a few minutes ago.   If you’re reading this all at once, remember that my scenes jump back and forth in time somewhat.  The stroke was in October, 2014, and now it is February, 2016.

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Recreative Suffering

One of our family secrets that came out when I was well into my adult years was that one of my uncles, whom we nieces had long had the sense to stay away from, had a woman on the side. When my mother finally told the story, she moaned, “How could he do that to Alice?” Alice was my aunt, my father’s sister, and Muriel was Aunt Alice’s home health aide.   “Here she’s hired to be there for Alice, and she goes and betrays her.”

We’ll never know whether Alice sensed what was going on, because she has long since passed away. Alice suffered short-term memory loss following a brain hemorrhage that almost killed her. She survived a good thirty years after her hemorrhage. The lively woman she had been beforehand never reappeared again, but still, a vow is a vow, and a person is a person, my mother and I thought. Maybe I had no pity for my uncle because I had seen some of his unsavory side. I certainly avoided being touched by him.

I’ve heard people on radio talk shows defending this behavior – not touching minors in private places behavior, but that of partners of disabled persons who seek companionship or sexual gratification outside of their partner, who is unable to give it. “Those left behind by their partners also have needs,” they say. “They shouldn’t be deprived.” Well, I thought, my uncle ought to be deprived of this Muriel and more.

Now that something similar has happened to Michael, I can well imagine what it must have felt like for Alice. Even if you can’t remember things, you can feel what’s going on. One can have memory impairment and still be very sensitive to what is going on at the moment. People with memory loss can also feel other losses as they occur or during the unexpected moments when their memories are triggered. We’re only kidding ourselves if we think our partners are oblivious to what is going on around them.

I sometimes feel needy for Michael’s affection. I remember times he used to stroke my hair or hold me, times we had sex, and there is an ache, sometimes sharp, sometimes dull.

At other times I stagger, as with a blow to my shoulder, by memories of things we did together. Today I remembered driving with Michael down some German Autobahn or other, on our way to having a good time together, listening to classical music on the radio or an audio book. We enjoyed each other’s company all the time, also on the way to wherever we were going.

There’s a stretch of highway that goes from Cologne to well into eastern Germany. “It’s almost all forest from here to Erfurt,” he said. He enjoyed that stretch. Once or twice we stopped at an outlet store on the way and bought clothing. I can see his driving style, quick, even jerky, confident, in a rush, but competent. “Rub my neck,” he says, and sighs contentedly as I rub the stiffness out of his neck.

And now I long to remember, to dredge up all the memories, to feel their vividness, even as they seem to fade away. I want to write it all down, to not forget anything, for they are all I have right now of the man I lived with for thirty years.

Would I want to run into someone else’s arms for sex or companionship? No way! Part of what pricks my memories now is the knowledge that I was ignorant of my blessings, all the while I was being blessed. I sat in the car and enjoyed Michael’s comments, the easy flow of conversation, but I don’t remember any gilded awareness of this being anything special. I found it awkward trying to massage his neck from my passenger seat. I enjoyed sex, and then enjoyed sleeping afterwards, cuddling into him, all the while wishing he’d reach out for me more often.

My brother told me the other day, “I can’t imagine the suffering you must be going through.” I agreed with him that I suffer. Then I thought to myself afterward, But I do get through the days, don’t I? My life is interesting, even now. So how exactly am I suffering this loss?

I feel it is important to record it, to examine it, not to forget that this man whom I married over thirty years ago is the person I miss, not just some general companionship or the feeling of being sexually aroused. For me what counts is the person behind it all.

The way I deal with this, what I try and do is, not to run away from the suffering, but rather to remember what we had and feel the goodness of it. As I look, I see what we had in a different light. In a way, my memories are recreating the past, making beautiful what were sometimes mundane scenes. They modify and make mellow the painful scenes, of which there were also plenty. But I’m seeing even the painful times through a different lens, and that is a good, heartening process that makes me feel good.

So the suffering has lots of goodness in it. It’s helping me to appreciate, to understand, to value.

Sometimes I am rewarded in the present tense. Yes, Michael is in some ways a different person right now than he was before. But he still looks at me and knows I am his Schöne. There are times when I go to visit him and he is alert. In fact, the good days are so frequent now that even his bad days are fantastic, compared to what they were a year ago. There is hope. I doubt he’ll ever be driving the car again, but maybe one day we’ll be sitting in the car again, on our way somewhere. Then I can ask him to rub my neck!

About a week ago I visited him and his hands leapt up into the air in a greeting of exultation. I had forgotten that gesture. How good to get it back! I remembered the words he always said. At the time, it exasperated me. He was always excited to see me, but his greeting just wasn’t like in the movies. No slow, dreamy, romantic soft gliding of his hands. With Michael it was abrupt. But now that it had come back, I treasured it. Then he reached for me. I bent down and he kissed me eagerly on the lips. His eyes looked hungry for more. He is also needy for companionship, I realized.   He tried to pull me to him with his stiff arm and claw-like hand, bent with contractures. He stroked my hair. Before long, it felt like all my hair was in my eyes, but Michael was stroking it! A year ago he lay rigidly in his minimally conscious state. Now he was patting/stroking my shoulder. I stroked his arms, his face, careful not to lean into him too closely to restrict his breathing. His shirt was moist with secretions from his trach. No matter. We were sharing affection. We still love each other, after all these years. I love him in a deeper way than I ever loved him in the past.

Those moments are so wonderful, I almost think they’re worth the suffering.

No Way Outa Here – 5

03 Wednesday Feb 2016

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If possible, I think the next phase was even more frightening and lonely than the two weeks I had just been through.  After all, just days before, Michael had finally woken up and started to talk to us.  I had found hope that he could recover.  But when he started having violent tremors, combined with a very high fever, sky-high blood pressure, high blood sugar as well, and pneumonia, I felt on the verge of despair.

As soon as I complained about Michael being on a normal ward, the doctor decided to put Michael into the intensive care unit.  I came to know this unit very well, because day after day, Michael just wouldn’t wake up.  At one point, they put him in an artificial coma to see if that would lower his blood pressure and stop the tremors.  It did, but they couldn’t keep him like this.  In addition, he wasn’t swallowing well, and the doctor feared that the breathing tube going from his lung through his mouth, the same thing he had had in the previous hospital, could be causing the pneumonia.  Having my husband in an induced coma was also no fun, but it was better than having him sleeping day and night, when he should have been awake.

The picture the doctors were forming of my husband didn’t help,either.  The tremors turned out to be epilepsy, at least some of the time.  How much new damage had occurred?  In addition to all the other monitors, he now needed regular EEGs.  One doctor said to me, “Your husband is a very sick man.  He has an awful lot of fronts to fight on – the stroke, pneumonia, high fever, high blood pressure, epilepsy, and diabetes.”  Another doctor told me not to expect linear healing.  “Healing with stroke victims occurs in waves,” he said.  “Look for patterns, tendencies, but remember that waves always go down before they come up again.”  This was helpful advice, but with each trough I would tend to panic.  Was Michael going to experience any recovery at all?  Was he going to survive this?  He wasn’t getting any better – in fact, some days the nurses would despair of finding ways to lower Michael’s fever, or for the blood sugar count to come down.  They kept trying new anti-epileptic drugs to stop the tremors, but these drugs may have also contributed to his being asleep all the time.  The “astronaut” tube food he was being fed was not good for his diabetes.

One day a nurse came to me and asked me if the living will we had said anything about resuscitation after heart failure.  I had no idea.  The wife of another patient in the ICU told me her husband had received resuscitation, and that was their mistake – now he was alive, but brain dead.

I went home and woke up the next morning thinking about the living will.  Technically, from what it said in the will, I reasoned, we should be letting Michael die.  It said he should be receiving no life-prolonging measures.  That meant no oxygen and no tube feeding.  What was I going to do?  I didn’t want my husband to die!  But they might make me do it because I’d signed that in the will!

I panicked.  I was at home, all by myself, and started to scream and cry uncontrollably.  I don’t remember the details clearly, but I must have called a friend to help me, because I knew I couldn’t be alone.  She came right over, and I also  called another friend who could spend more time with me.  Together, my friends managed to calm me down, and one of them took me to the hospital to talk to the doctor.

The doctor told me not to worry, that they would do nothing without my permission, and that at this stage, when Michael’s life was at stake, he needed all the things he was receiving.  This was not the time to think about pulling the plug, he assured me.  I was tremendously relieved.

I kept writing emails every evening to all my family and friends, both in English and in German.  It was always a struggle to write in German, knowing I would make many mistakes, and it was more difficult to express myself in German than in English.  But the responses I got made it all worth it.  “We’re praying for you,” was the tenor of most of the emails I got back.  Sometimes I got emails from people I barely knew.  People were passing my emails onto other people, onto strangers.  Churches I had never heard of were praying for Michael.  I made a rough estimate of all the people I had heard were praying.  I came up with about a thousand people!  My husband is well-known in the Christian circles where we live in Germany, and all the pastors he knows asked to be on my email list, and they forwarded my emails onto other people.

It was comforting to know that so many people were praying for Michael.  But the prayers weren’t helping to wake him up.  Day after day, I would go to the hospital to visit him, who remained day after day in the ICU.  No change.  The tremors were still there, and he was still out, dead to the world.  Where was God?  Why hadn’t God heard our prayers, given so sincerely before Michael went in for surgery, for protection?  Even Michael, normally so fearful of doctors and hospitals, had gone into the hospital, trusting that all would be well.  Was there a God at all?

It is very difficult to bear the pain of watching someone in what looked for all the world like a coma, wondering if this person would ever wake up.  His face looked peaceful, and that was a mercy.  But it was too much for my heart to take in, watching him.  I longed for the days when life with him was so difficult.  At least I had him, back then!  If only I had appreciated him more.  There was so much goodness in him that I couldn’t see because I had been so focussed on his glaring faults.  Now I knew that I had no idea in those days how deep despair could go.

The emails I was receiving were mostly encouraging, but not only.  Sometimes I felt the pressure of the spiritual expectations of my friends.  “I pray that you receive a word from the Lord for each day,” one person wrote.  A word from the Lord?  I was wondering how the Lord could be so unkind as to let the worst imaginable thing happen.  What could be worse than living in a coma for the rest of your life?  Other people wrote, “I pray that you will feel God carrying you.”  Some reminded me of the piece about the footprints in the sand.  I thought of that myself nearly every day, but I certainly didn’t feel carried.  I had never felt so alone before, even though I was being carried by friends, who kept bringing me food and offering to help in any way they could.  That helped.  But God carrying me?  God felt far away.  “I pray for strength for you to endure,” some said.  I could relate to that prayer.  I was somehow enduring.  I prayed every day for strength to endure, and somehow I did.  I couldn’t feel or sense where the strength was coming from, but I was enduring.

I decided to read the book of Job at this time.  I found it comforting to read that he also felt alone in his misery.  He also wondered where God was, and how God could allow this to happen.  He knew that he was a righteous man, and so his fate could not be seen as punishment for his sins, as his friends so wrongly interpreted.  I knew that Michael had many unresolved issues in his life, issues making life impossible for himself and for me, but I didn’t think any of his weaknesses warranted this calamity that had befallen him – and me.  I was bereft, more than ever before.

But I kept looking for God – all day, every day, even when I couldn’t find any traces.  One evening, though, while out walking the dog, I suddently remembered a line from a gospel song we used to sing in church when I was a teenager.  “I don’t know what the future holds, but I know Who holds the future.”  This was a thought that had come out of the blue.  God had spoken to me!

I also remembered the strange thing that had happened to me on my wedding night.  Just as I was getting ready to go to bed with my new husband, I heard these words, not audibly, but clearly just the same:  “Married life won’t always be easy for you, but I will always be with you.”  At that time, I had never “heard” God, and I was surprised by the message I heard, because I was looking forward at that time to a lifetime of “happy ever after”!  What a comfort those words have been to me over the years, as I’ve discovered that life isn’t necessarily as happy as we would wish it to be

I endeavored to accept the situation, however disastrous I considered it to be, as it was just to let it be.  Every day I prayed the prayer those of us in twelve-step programs say:  “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage t change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”  I put all my energy and will into accepting this horrible thing that had thrown us off our feet.   Actually, knowing there was no way to get out of this desolate place was a help.  This was the place I had to live in now, and there was no running away.  No more agony of too much choice.  Now there was nowhere to run to, except into God.

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Writing this blog is proving to be a very difficult thing to do.  The feelings of months ago come rushing back to me and I feel the pain and horror of those days, coloring whatever my present days bring me.  I still often wish I could run away somewhere.

In my past, leaving difficult situations was my typical solution, albeit after long, long deliberation.  I left Minnesota, where the winters were cold and desolate, and where I felt little warm approval from my strict father and passive mother.  I hated Minnesota, with its strong cool Scandinavian influence.  I escaped to sizzling hot New York City, where people are so expressive, they talk with their hands.  But there, I fled an unhappy love affair, returning to Minnesota, only to leave it again, still dissatisfied with the environment I had grown up in.  A brief stint in Boston, then back to New York, where I started to find myself in God, but then the opportunity to leave New York for Germany.  I soon found Germany to be cool in temperament, and had the opportunity to leave with my husband for Brussels, where I lived in semi-contentment until our posting there ended and we were forced to come back to Germany.  It took a broken elbow and a wrist that won’t quite let me hold my fork to my mouth in the German style, for me to come to terms with living permanently in this country.  When things got too bad with my husband, I left him.  But now I know there is nowhere to run to, and this is where God can catch me.

Sunday I was driving home from visiting Michael, listening to a folk music program on the radio, when they played a woman from Norway.  Her voice stunned me so much, I almost drove to the side of the rode, just to listen to her music.  Her voice captured the solitary state, the loneliness I so often feel in my soul.  There was deep longing in her voice, but also warmth, as if she had also found hope, or even possibly fulfillment in the midst of her longing.  That was exactly the state I found myself in.  I thought, either this woman is longing for what Jesus can give her, or she is singing about Jesus.  Suddenly I heard the word, “Jesus”, the only word I could understand, and I knew.

No Way Outa Here – 4

18 Saturday Jul 2015

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That evening, October 22,  we heard the diagnosis confirmed.  Michael had suffered a stroke on both sides of the thalmus.  What the doctors knew so far was that he had lost the ability to stay awake and alert.  So now, we knew the reason he had been asleep for nearly a week!  Hearing this news was still like a hammer shattering the walls of my heart, but by now I’d had a day to take it in.

In the meanwhile, Michael was talking a blue streak in his new surroundings – the stroke unit of the university hospital.  I hardly understood anything he said, so I asked him, “Are you trying to tell me the story of what happened?”  He said yes.

Chris mentioned to him, “Oh, Papa, I can hardly imagine what you’ve been through in the past week.”

Michael answered, “You have no idea,” waving his hand in the air for emphasis.  But he also told us something that we found very encouraging.  “I managed through the whole of last week, and I will manage the rest.”  This was very different from the Michael I was used to dealing with, fearful of so many things I couldn’t count them.  His blood pressure would shoot to the stars every time it was measured by a doctor, simply because he was afraid of the results.  And now he’s saying, “I’ll manage the rest?!”  Incredible.  God must have been speaking to him during that week.

It was a huge relief to be able to talk to Michael, even if we couldn’t understand most of what he said.  The following day we witnessed him talking to one of the nurses, who was from Portugal.  “Hola!” he said to him, when Michael learned that the nurse was Portuguese.  Michael can speak nine languages fluently, and a smattering of a few others.  Portuguese is one of those with a smattering.

By that Saturday, October 26, Michael was talking a lot more clearly, but was telling the speech therapist things that were patently untrue, such as that he had lived in England for three years, and that was why his English was so good.  Michael has never lived in an English-speaking country.

He was also trying to pull out the catheter, and joking about it.  “Yes, I know, the cat,” he said.  Apparently “cat” is an abbreviation Germans use for “catheter”, which is pronounced without the “h” – “cat’EH-ter”.  He tried to operate the remote control, used to turn the light on or off, or call the nurse.  He was having difficulty pushing the right buttons.  “I’m stupid!” he complained.  Michael is possibly the most intelligent person I have ever met.  It was upsetting to hear him say this.

By now, realizing that we were in for a long haul of recovery and therapy, I tried to mobilize my resources.  I had started writing emails to all my family and friends, even before he went into the hospital for surgery, asking them to pray for Michael.  I’m not nearly as eager to communicate in languages other than English as Michael, but I decided I’d have to grin and bear all the mistakes I’d make writing in German.  I started an email prayer list in German as well as in English.

Before long, I was receiving all sorts of offers for help, something Chris and I truly needed.  I had told the language schools where I was teaching English what had happened, and they found substitute teachers for me, which was a relief, but I was in no position to cook.  I was far too upset.  People started bringing food over.  One friend gave me a massage.

“We’ll get through this,” Chris and I told each other.  But on Sunday he had to fly back to Korea, where he was finishing a master’s degree.  I would miss his presence and support.  Now I would be on my own, dealing with the aftermath of Michael’s stroke.

We went to church on Sunday.  It was so good to be among the support of fellow Christians!  They crowded around us and offered support and prayers.  Then we went on to the hospital, so Chris could say good-bye to his dad before leaving for the airport.

We had difficulty finding him at first.  “Oh, we’ve moved him!” said a nurse. “He was doing so much better, so we moved him off the stroke unit into a regular unit.” As soon as we entered the room, we saw something was very wrong with Michael,   and he wasn’t hooked up to any monitors.  No one was witniessing what was happening to my husband.  He was gone to the world, in a deep sleep or some sort of unconscious state, and his right shoulder and head were in constant tremors.    This was the state Chris had to leave his papa in.

After Chris had left, I went back to the hospital that evening.  Michael was still unconscious, and still having tremors.  “Is this epilepsy?” I asked the doctor.

“No, I don’t think so,” she said.  “I think it’s just his high fever.”

I went home to bed, lonely and scared, praying like I never had before, but less sure than ever that the God I was praying to heard my prayers.

*

This blog series is about the process I have been going through in my thinking, my emotions, and especially how my relationship with God is changing, so I don’t want to give it all away.  I want to share the process with you.  But I do want to share a bit of today with you.

A lot of what I’ve been going through has been challenges.  I am confronted with what I see every day, and also the question:  Where is God in all of this?  Is God there?  Am I going to trust God anyway?  So, I often make flat decisions to trust, no matter what I see or feel.  I read my Bible every day, I pray almost automatically, without ceasing, bringing it all to God, even if I feel horrible, I meditate, waiting for God to speak to me, even though I am often left without an answer I am aware of.  There must be at least a thousand people praying for Michael and me – I have asked everyone I know to pray, and they have asked people I don’t know.  I meet regularly with some friends in a prayer/support group, where we pray regularly for each other.  And I go to church every Sunday.

Tomorrow I’m going to give a testimony in church about how going to church has helped me.  Today I read in Hebrews 10:24-25 – “And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another.”

This church supported Michael and me all during our separation.  I never told the members exactly why we had separated because Michael didn’t feel ready to talk about his issues with them.  But they supported each of us, just the same, never criticizing or judging us.  After Michael suffered the stroke, they would come up to me each week and ask how I was doing, how Michael is doing.  They pray regularly for him, and also for me.

I have been a Christian for so many years, and I am a critical listener.  Usually, the sermons don’t touch me that much, but I am learning to listen to the heart of the speaker, and this is helping my critical mind to be more open.  So I am changing, even in this respect.  Sometimes the sermons even touch my heart!

The sermons may or may not reach me, but the worhsip never fails to touch me.  Every Sunday there is some song we sing that stays with me, speaking to me all week.  I often find that even by Wednesday or Thursday after Sunday, that song is still ministering to my heart, building my faith.

Years ago, I felt obligated to go to church every Sunday.  Michael had decided to be a pastor, and so I had no choice but to join him, I thought.  He said that God had called him into the ministry. I couldn’t see it, though, and I resented the feeling of being expected to minister to others, whether I liked it or not.  On warm summer Sunday mornings, I would see couples out for a stroll, people out walking the dog, families gliding past our car on bikes.  I wished I could join them.  I felt roped into going to church.

Now I wouldn’t miss it!  Both Michael and I have a lot more support than anyone else I’ve encountered outside the Church.  And every Sunday, I am ministered to, as well as sharing in the ministry myself.

This Community that Jesus dreamed of, when it is drawing from Christ, is a beautiful, wonderful life-giving thing, a living, breathing organism, and I am now so thankful to be part of this body of Christ.

No Way Outa Here – 1

19 Thursday Mar 2015

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There is a fact that I did not disclose when I wrote “Rubies in the Rubbish” – my separation.  I had separated from my husband a few months before going to Egypt.  We have known each other for over thirty years and had been married for almost thirty years when I decided I needed to live elsewhere for a while.  There were some issues in my husband’s life he was unwilling or unable to deal with, and they were getting worse.  The worse his condition got, the more I sank into anxiety, fear, anger and frustration.  I was unable, no matter how hard I tried, to just detach and let him be.  His problems had begun to spill over into our married life and into the space of my life with him to the point where I simply could not let go.  So I left.  I found a way out of my misery.

In this series I’m going to change the name of all the characters to protect their real identity.  Those of you reading this who know me will know who I’m referring to.  In these posts, I’ll call my husband “Michael”.

I told Michael that I would come back after he had gotten some help with his problems and I could see that he was working on them.  I went into therapy and continued with the self-help group I had already been going to.

It felt good to finally be away, to find my own space, to find a life of my own.  Being with Michael had felt like carrying a huge load of bricks.  Now, the weight was lifted.  I hoped with all my heart for recovery for both of us, but in the meantime, life on my own was much easier.

We continued to see each other, and sometimes Michael would cook for me, or I for him.  Cooking was one of our mutual passions, and talking together while eating another one.  Actually, Michael and I are ideal partners.  We love so many of the same things, and we love discussing all the things of life we encounter.  We love discussing ideas, politics, current events, literature, music, religion, psychology, and of course analyzing other people.  I loved listening to him uncover historical details about the places we traveled to.  We are at our best, perhaps, during our travels.  We had already traveled twice together to Egypt, and Michael was involved in my plans to stay with the Coptic Sisters long before I separated from him.

But now here we were, separated physically, emotionally and spiritually.  I stopped going to the church he was pastoring, needing to also be separate from his spiritual energy.

We lived separately for about a year.  Going to Egypt on my own, living in my own apartment, making my own decisions, I felt like I had been let out of a pressure cooker, with the simple push of a button.

During this time, some things started to get resolved and dealt with.  Michael went into a clinic where he could get help with some of the things troubling him.  He changed some things about his lifestyle, and I could see that he was serious about making these changes.  There other things I could see that lay beneath the suraface, things that would need a lot of work.  Michael was beset with a miserable sense of self-worth, especially since I had actually left him.  And shame, mixed with overwhelming anger at his mother, the cause of most of his problems, but dead for ten years already, invaded our home.  Shame, self-hatred and anger lived in our house, like ghosts who refused to leave.  I was still trying to change Michael, still caught up in a mothering role I had developed over the years.  We had lots still to work on.

Michael had a lot more than emotional and spiritual things to work on.  His back, always a bit sensitive, began emitting excruciating pains in the back itself and also in his legs.  He tried osteopathic treatments, physiotherapy, exercise.  Nothing helped.  His orthopedist finally recommended surgery.

In September, 2014, we went on a trip to Turkey together.  Michael lumbered heavily through archeological sites in Ephesus, Miletus, Pergamon and other places, determined to see it all, despite excruciating pain.  He would have surgery in October, and he wanted to see it all beforehand, just in case anything went wrong, rendering him unable to walk over these sites.  It was a lifelong dream of his to see these sites.  Michael has always loved history, especially from the Greco-Roman period.

Reunited, we had a wonderful two weeks together in Turkey, cooking up a storm in the evenings we ate in our apartment, feeding the cats who came to visit us, traveling in the daytime to archeological sites, swimming before dinner, shopping.  I was grateful for the release I had enjoyed during our separation, and now tranquil in the hope of a future together of mutual healing.   There was lots to work on, but we could do it.  After all, we had God helping us!

SAMSUNG

Pergamon. What a peaceful place to be, high above all the stress of life down at the bottom of the hill! In Pergamon we felt as though lifted up by an eagle into space.

Then Michael went in for surgery, and things went horribly wrong.

Rubies in the Rubbish – Day Twelve

06 Friday Dec 2013

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Today is not my day.  Do things go in cycles, or what?  Day Five was also difficult.  Day Ten wasn’t so easy because I was tired.  Funny, you never know at the beginning of the day what your day will bring.  It could be glorious, or in more and more places in the world, there could even be a bomb.

I read today in my devotional, “I am with you.  I am with you.  I am with you.”

The day starts out well enough.  I’ve had a lovely time of reading, prayer and meditation with my delicious cup of coffee, I am calm inside; I’m ready for a new day.

I walk over to the convent, and someone lets me in.  But when I get inside, the table isn’t set for breakfast, and there’s only one sister in the dining room.  “Fasting day,” she says.  “Wednesday.”  I didn’t know that they fast on Wednesdays.  “But only breakfast.  One eat lunch.”  I see a pot of beans boiling.  I get to eat a sumptuous breakfast on this morning when practically everyone else is fasting.  The foul is there, all of it for just Nagette and me.

As I prepare to leave for the school, I see Marsa, the cook, with a live chicken in the sink.  The chicken is squirming, but silent.  I can tell what’s coming, though.  Protest wells up inside me.  This must be one of Sister Mariem’s chickens!  I’ve already asked Mariem if we’ve been eating her chickens, and she has assured me, her chickens are only used for the eggs.  Just to make sure, I ask Marsa if this is one of Sr. Mariem’s chickens.  It is.

I haven’t seen one killed since I was a little girl.  My grandfather killed a chicken every time we came for a visit, and that really upset me.   I almost didn’t eat the chickens, but the smell was always too tantalizing for me to resist, no matter how sorry I felt for the poor chicken.

I leave the kitchen quickly and go to the bathroom.  From the kitchen, I hear loud squawking.  And then silence.  By the time I return to the kitchen, the chicken is dead.  Even as I write this, it brings tears to my eyes.  That poor chicken didn’t want to die.  It protested for all it was worth.  But it had to give its life for our sakes.  Possibly for my sake.  I have no idea if this chicken will be cooked just for me, since today’s a day of fasting.  Did that chicken have to die?  We eat chicken and meat heedlessly every day, amidst laughter and jokes.  We may even compliment the cook, but we give no thought to the life that was spent on our behalf.  A life that didn’t choose to be given.  We humans have tremendous authority over the animal kingdom, and we rarely even think about it.

One of Mariem's chickens

One of Mariem’s chickens

That chicken could have been someone’s pet.  I know a little girl in Germany, Leah, who had a pet chicken she taught tricks to, like riding down the slide.

I have a pet dog , Toffee, whom I pet and kiss every day.  I’ve just been reading an email from my husband about how Toffee is doing.  Toffee is almost like a person to me.  Here, dogs run wild in the street and no one pays any attention to them.  They look mangy and unkempt.  You wouldn’t even want to pet them.

Two dogs

Two dogs have found a resting place on the hood of a car.

The same thing goes for the cats.  And chickens, apparently.

If I could, I’d refuse to eat this chicken, but that won’t do any good.  I’m a guest here.  I have to eat what’s served.  Besides, it’s already dead.  It’s also organic, free of antibiotics and hormones.  But it had to give its life for us humans.  I consider going back to being a vegetarian.  But I do love chicken, and I know I won’t give it up, sad as I am today.  I will treasure and be thankful for the chickens I eat in the future, though.

I arrive punctually at school, and basically everything goes fine except that one kid, Bolla, a wild little clown, continually interrupts the lessons, dancing like someone on MTV, and he’s only five.

Bolla

Bolla, who never sits still, not even for a picture

You just can’t get him to sit still.  He has a bag of Doritos he shares with Mahaariel, who also turns into a jitterbug.  She even starts licking the leftover salt off the table when I take the empty bag away from Bolla.  I later talk to Marleen about this.

“I think he may have ADHD,” I say.

“I know,” she sighs.  She says she has repeatedly told his mother and other parents not to give their kids chips and sweets, that they need to eat healthy food, but they don’t listen.  She suspects they give in to the pleading of their kids.

I have plenty of time to talk to Marleen because my driver hasn’t shown up yet.  I know Rohmy knows I need to be picked up because this morning as he dropped me off he asked me if he should come at ten o’clock, and I answered yes.

One hour later, Marleen is finishing up a teacher’s meeting they’ve held in the lobby.  A kid walks into the lobby with some of that soft, lovely bread they eat for communion.  He gives it to Marleen, and she takes off a bit and gives the rest to the teacher next to me.  I’m engrossed in my cell phone by now, since there’s no Rohmy, looking at the New York Times headlines, and don’t notice that she’s trying to give me her bread.  It’s after eleven by now and I’m kind of hungry.  I start eating the bread and go back to the news.  It’s delicious.  I take another bite.

The teacher nudges me.  “Excuse me.”  I look up.  “Give the bread to next person.”

I finally get it.  This is communion bread, meant to be shared.  I quickly pass it on, as the others smile.

I’m supposed to be visiting the handicapped center this morning, but it looks like it’s not going to happen because of this driver situation.  It’s twelve noon now and still no Rohmy or any other driver.

I keep talking to Marleen, who then asks me if I could give up some clothes I don’t want, for some people at the school.  “They are needy people,” she says.  I think she means that I should mail clothes from Germany, but no, she means the clothes I’ve brought with me.  Actually, I like all the clothes I’ve brought along.  I don’t really want to part with anything.  But I tell her I’ll find some clothes and wash them.  There happens to be a state-of-the-art washing machine on my floor.

Finally, at about one o’clock, Marleen spots another driver from the Salam Center passing the school in his car.  He’s on the way back to the Center with one of the sisters.  She yells and he stops, confused.  She asks him to take me back.  Finally, after three hours, and a morning wasted, I’m back in my room.  I only have about a half hour before I have to go to lunch.

I hurriedly gather clothes together.  I’ll have to hang them up to dry because they need to be dry before I give them to Marleen tomorrow.  I throw my jeans and almost all my shirts, and some underwear into the washing machine.  I change into some black slacks, and still have my black top on, which I have decided to hold onto.  I walk through the training center to go to lunch when Teresa stops me.

“Your clothes,” she says.  “You’re wearing all black.  In Egypt when you wear only black it means someone has died.”

Actually, it feels like I’ve given up a part of my own life by giving up these clothes.  I’m also going to donate my nice ankle boots that I was going to wear on the plane back home.  All I have left is dirty, ripped up walking shoes and flip-flops.  I won’t give up my flowered Italian flip-flops for these women.  But then again, maybe I will.

I tell Teresa I’ll go back and see what I can find that isn’t black.  I find a turquoise printed blouse and a turquoise necklace, and return.  Teresa has already left to go home, but a male worker there assures me I look fine now.  “Gameel!”  Beautiful!

I go back to the convent to go to lunch, but the buzzer doesn’t work.  Someone working on the entrance has actually shown up for work today, and he comes to the gate to let me in, but his key doesn’t work.  Another worker has to come and help him open the door for me.

And then, when I’m finally ready to hang up my clothes, I discover they’re all full of paper bits.  I think it’s Kleenex until I start looking for the list of Arabic words I’ve lovingly prepared.  It’s my lifeline!  I go over this list many times a day.  This list is what is helping me to speak the few words of Arabic I can manage!  But it’s gone.  Now I realize where it’s gone – into the wash, torn up into shreds.

Is there a lesson in all of this?  I think so.  It has come to me while typing this account.  But I’ll leave it to you, the reader, to find the lesson you think is in this day.  Is there a lesson in your day today?  One of the things about being on a pilgrimage is the awareness that all of life has something to teach us.  We just need to be aware of it and ready for the lesson.

Rubies in the Rubbish – Day Eight

20 Wednesday Nov 2013

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It’s 8:30 on a Saturday morning – time to go to school!  I sit inside the passenger seat.  There is no seatbelt for me to fasten.  I’m lucky that the car starts.  Sometimes it seems sluggish.  But it’s always clean.  Rohmy washes all the cars every day.  He sits in the driver’s seat, slams the door shut and hands me the window crank.

Rohmy

Rohmy, my usual driver, and just about everyone else’s.

There’s only one window crank for the whole car, so we have to share it.  I roll down the window and desperately try to see everything there is to see.  There’s so much happening, I feel anxious about missing or forgetting important things.  Oh, well, I’ll just let the impressions simply drop into my mind.  The drive is becoming routine.

I wonder if I could find my way there alone if I ever had to walk.  No, it’s too complicated, despite the grid pattern.  Today another road is blocked off with a huge piece of canvas about three meters high.  A wedding?  Rohmy says they sometimes block the road for special occasions like weddings, so he has to drive around the block.  Even if I could walk to school, I am told it would not be safe for me, a Westerner, to walk alone.  Theresa, the woman who translated for me when I spoke to the ladies last week, walks alone every day to work.  It takes her about an hour each way, when she factors in taking the children to school and picking them up in the afternoon.  She tells me she lives near the closest metro stop, which is about thirty minutes’ walk from here.

Theresa

Theresa, who heads the social work program

I see a giant poster with a photo of Morsi hanging from the wall of an apartment building.  I’ve noticed this poster before, but today I notice that it is only a couple of blocks from the Salam Center.  Copts are telling me that the Muslim Brotherhood are terrorists.  They compare them to Al Qaida.  Since my arrival, I’ve experienced Egypt’s first drive-by shooting that targeted Christians.  I’ve been told that the Muslim Brotherhood condemns this killing.  And yet, this poster makes me a little nervous.  Just what are the intentions of the Muslim Brotherhood?

I see posters of other politicians, presumably, hanging from walls.  I have no idea who these people are, or why their pictures are hanging, but I assume they’re various politicians.

Hanging across many of the streets are giant posters with photos of Shenouda, the late Coptic pope.  I assume these placards identify the neighborhood or street as being Coptic.

I see men in clean, pressed shirts and trousers walking along the dirt roads.  They must be on their way to work.  At shortly before 9 am, I don’t see many men in gallibayas (long robes).  Most of the women, however, whether Copt or Muslim, are dressed in gallibayas.  I think I’m learning to tell the difference in appearance between a Coptic and a Muslim woman when both are in gallibayas.  Their heads may both be covered, but the Coptic woman wears a scarf that may expose some hair, and her gallibaya looks more like a decorative long tunic.  It may be made of cotton or velveteen, and may be brightly colored or with trimming or embroidery.  A Muslim woman, at least in this neighborhood, is dressed in a plain, dark-colored gallibaya, with her head entirely covered.

The Coptic children are dressed western-style.  Many of them are wearing brown/beige uniforms.

There really isn’t that much trash on the roads.  I see someone sweeping bits of paper into a little pile.  Somewhere else a little pile is burning.  Most of the roads are actually pretty trash-free.  I realize that the path I take in Cologne, Germany, when I walk to the supermarket, has more trash strewn along the way than I see on these streets.

I see chickens running freely in the road.  With this number of chickens running around free, it’s no wonder the nights are so noisy!

I arrive at the school.  I don’t notice the smell of garbage anymore.  I’ve had these kids for almost a full week now.  My students, age five, have learned to say the entire Lord’s Prayer in English.  Today they’ve also learned to sing all of “Jesus Loves Me”, and the “ABC song”.

I notice that the classroom is almost twice as full of kids today as it was in previous days.  I ask why.  Because today, Saturday, the public schools are closed, so Marleen, the principal, has invited them to come to the Coptic school on Saturdays.  Imagine kids from Europe or America choosing to go to school on a Saturday!

As far as I can understand it, most Egyptians have Friday, the Muslim Sabbath, and Sunday, the Christian Sabbath, off.  They work Saturdays.  But not those with government jobs.  They have Fridays and Saturdays off.  I wonder what they do on Sundays.

In front of the school

In front of the school

My lesson is finished at 10:30 am.  As I wait for Rohmy to pick me up, a boy, about twelve, walks up to me with a bag of corn puffs and offers me one.  I say “Thank you” in English and eat it.  He responds, “I love you!” and runs back, giggling, to his friends, who all yell at me from back in the corner, “I love you.”  Who wouldn’t want to come back to a country where people tell you every day, “You’re nice,” “I like you,” “You’re beautiful,” “I love you”?

It’s a madhouse when school lets out and everybody, parents and kids alike, are waiting for each other and it’s packed like a school of minnows.  But I love it.  This is when I get to do my informal teaching.  Some days I have the kids write their names, or I show them illustations from magazines and we talk about the words, or I go over an English lesson with someone.  There’s always someone eager to interact with me.  Today my entertainment is filming them interacting!

The other day I was showing Marleen some of the photos in my smartphone, and she came upon one with me playing my piano.  “You play the piano?” she asked me.  Now Marleen has asked me to give the children piano lessons next time I come.  I ask Marleen if there is a piano here in the school.  I can’t imagine there being one.  She says no. Assuming I come again, I’ll have to bring my keyboard.

Others are talking about what I can do next time I come, or telling me that I should stay longer.  I’m having the same thoughts.  In Germany I wouldn’t normally volunteer to teach kindergarten kids English, and giving piano lessons is sometimes tedious.  It’s not a skill I usually offer to teach others.  But here, it is entirely different.  Here, where children volunteer to come to school on Saturdays, I find myself wanting to teach them everything I know.

I’m sitting in my room now, after having taught my morning lesson.  Rohmy has delivered me safely back to the convent.  I’m drinking a lovely cup of black tea with mint from the convent garden, reflecting on my morning.  I, the teacher, have learned a whole sentence today in Arabic:  Ana ashram kubay chai. “I’m drinking a cup of tea.”  I’m so proud of myself!

I find that I’m teaching some of the same kids in the evening program at the convent as I encounter mornings at the school next to the garbage dump.  They too are opting for more lessons.  My heart aches for them to succeed in life.  I’d love to be able to help.  Here, it feels like the work I do is more important than what I do in Germany.

I do wonder about the future of these kids.  Will they spend their adult lives sorting through garbage, like their parents?  There’s one girl I’ve been thinking about – Marina.  She’s very shy, not very good in English, and she’s young – only about nine years old.  She comes to school in a training suit and stiletto half-boots she must have inherited from someone.  They’re way too big for her little feet.  What will happen to her?  Will she ever find a good job?  And then there’s Rosaria, in the sixth grade.  She’s really good, and she always does her homework.  But her pronunciation is terrible!  Sister Maria has told me that Marleen wants to get her best students into the elite private “language” schools, where lessons are taught in English or German.  Sister Maria tells her, forget it.  They’ll never get accepted because they’re from poor families.  This mirrors exactly the fate of one of the characters I read about in The Yacoubian Building, a novel by Alaa Al-Aswany.  In this novel, a boy from a poor family is consistently rejected, even from the police academy, when he’s successfully finished school, because of his background.  He ends up becoming an Islamist terrorist.

Rubies in the Rubbish – Day Seven

18 Monday Nov 2013

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I am so happy, my heart is so full, I can’t sit still.  I can’t concentrate.  I can’t believe I’m doing the very things I have been longing to do – in Egypt.  My gifts are being used, just like the broken parts of the wheelchairs I see piled up in the parking lot.  And I’m learning to value them.  In Germany I have often thought being an English teacher to be beneath my level of intelligence.  Not only is my life as an English teacher reductive, I keep getting the lowest level students, reducing my vocabulary still further!  My once vast vocabulary has been reduced to a few hundred words.  When I speak to native speakers of English, I think I must sound like a simpleton, my English has become so basic.  But here in Egypt, that is exactly what they need.

This morning, a new thought emerges.  It is so beautiful and new, I think it is God speaking to me:  “These are my beloved children.  I am so pleased that you are open to them, I am opening your heart up, just as you have asked me to do.”  It is as though my openness to the poorest of the poor opens me.  As I close myself to the weakest, the most broken, my heart closes in direct proportion.  What an amazing principle.  I have asked God to open me up more and more to God’s love.  And it is happening.  I tingle.  My heart burns.  The condition for receiving this love is to be open to all of God’s creation.

Today is Friday, the Sabbath of the Muslims, and everything is closed.  Most of the sisters are fasting, and there are no activities scheduled for today.  All I can report of this day thus far is that Sister Mariem has prepared a magnificent breakfast for me – breaded fried eggplant, French fries, noodle soup, tomato slices with rucola, and bread with molasses.

Egyptian breakfast

An Egyptian breakfast, made just for me

Sister Ologaya sits across from me, eating foul – cooked fava beans and pita bread, her favorite breakfast.

Each day I am more impressed with these sisters and their work.  I recall a Bible passage about the worth of a woman.  In Proverbs 31:10 it says, “A wife of noble character who can find?  She is worth far more than rubies.”  These women are celibate, but I believe that in the Catholic Church, when a nun makes her vows, she becomes a bride of Christ.  So, these Sisters are also, in a way, wives.  They are beautiful gems, and I find them models of what I admire in a woman.  I find myself calling them rubies – rubies who have chosen to live in the rubble near the rubbish heap.

Sometimes I wander into the dining room and discover a sister or two working in the kitchen.  They’re often humming pretty songs, which I assume are Egyptian songs worshipping God.

One day when I was in the dining room I showed them that I had Egyptian worship music in my computer – music from a group called “Better Life“.  “Oh, I know that group!” they all exclaimed.  Since then, when I come into the dining room to check and write emails, they ask to hear the music, and then translate the lyrics for me.  Sister Marina even owns the same CD as I, and Sister Elleria sings a song for me.  What a beautiful voice she has, and how lovely these songs are.

Each day they overturn assumptions I had made the day before.  Now I know that the entry to the convent is filled with sand piles because they need the sand for laying the terracotta tiles.  There are plans to turn the garden I thought was so messy into a little paradise.  Parts that look as though they are randomly lying around, are actually there for a reason.

The washing machine I thought had been discarded into and defacing the garden was placed there because it is next to where the handicapped children live.  These children are helping to load trucks with things like the washing machine, as well as the wheel chairs now sitting in the parking lot, for repairs.  They are helping load lumber and furniture onto trucks for delivery to a new school/dormitory the Salam center is opening.  Nothing is wasted here – not the gifts of the handicapped children, and not the leftovers from the meals.  Sister Mariem’s dog gets all the chicken bones.  I thought dogs couldn’t eat chicken bones, but this dog does, and is not harmed.

It seems I am not harmed from the food either.  I tried a little rucola the other day, and my stools were fine afterward, so I’ve been increasing my intake of raw vegetables.  I’m still in the best of health.  At breakfast I look at all the food in the garbage and ask if this is for compost.  No, it’s for the chickens.  You have chickens here? I ask.  Oh, yes, they’re Sister Mariem’s chickens.  I ask to see them.

Sister Mariem's chickens

Sister Mariem’s chickens

I am ushered outside to a dilapidated building, where the chickens are kept.  We have delicious eggs nearly every day here.  Turns out these eggs are from Sister Mariem’s chickens.  So I ask Sister Mariem, whose English is the best of anyone’s here, if the garden is organic.  “Oh, yes,” she answers.  “We don’t use any chemical fertilizer on the garden.”  I found out that the tap water is safe, just unpalatable.  So the food here is also safe for Westerners to eat.

Sister Mariem

Sister Mariem

One day Sister Ologaya shows me the garden.  We discuss the names for herbs and vegetables.  Sometimes her English fails her, and she resorts to French.  Either way, I’m learning so many new words for these things, I can’t keep track of them all, although I write down and practice new words every day.  Green beans, fava beans, lettuce, cabbage, rucola, molokhaya (the vegetable that tastes like slimy spinach), mint, sage, onions, mango, date and orange trees, and more.  She leads me to a stall, where I discover a beautiful young cow and a goat.  They plan to inseminate them so that next year they can have their own fresh milk.  Knowing the sisters, they’ll probably find a nice male cow somewhere and put the two cows together.  The cats have the run of the garden.  My first day I discovered a cat resting on one of the chairs in the dining room.

Sister Ologaya

Sister Ologaya

I love this place that converts old apartments into chicken stalls, old hospitals into schools, and lets cats run around the dining room.  I find myself, for the first time, wholeheartedly accepting a Christian community.  I feel like I belong here, and that I want to belong to these women who are so full of love and joy.