If Curiosity Killed

If curiosity killed the cat
Then this feline had enough catnip arsenic
To destroy all nine of her lives
Chasing balls of twine she was never meant to unwind

See it started when she was very young
A few vague ideas planted on a fertile imagination
And they spread like gangrene
Taking her innocent mind along for the vacation
Because what she didn't fully know
And now couldn't ever unlearn
Would eat away at her soul
Pushing her to want a turn
And playing with dolls became a guilty affair
As she acted out scenes
She shouldn't know existed
Till it switched to books in her teens
Cause even if her mother checked most of her novels
There was always some way to sneak one in
And late at night she began to feel things
By day, changed the way she saw men

And her turn finally came
As he spoke sweet nothings in her ears
Whispered empty promises into her soul
And she sold herself cheap for those tears
That would all too ultimately come
Because 'emptiness' can't fill you
And 'nothing' can't satiate
At the end of the day she was still alone
Maybe more so now than ever before
Having tasted the nectar of Eden's love
She was cast out into this hell we call the world

And she turned where all disappointed, starving go
And that was the first time she saw it
Never occurring to her she could have a problem
Cause it's guys who get addicted to this kind of thing
But somehow she kept going back
And slowly the poison spread as it infected
Relationship after relationship
With its screaming yearn for more
The burden of guilt growing heavier and heavier
Every time her eyes settled on the vast store
Til she became the performer not the audience
And plied her trade for the chance
He would find her desirable...
Beautiful... Notice her... Even once

Who's fault is it?
Who is to blame?
Is it the industry or the individuals
Gaining money from barring their shame?

See I want to tell you this story has a happy ending
That the girl found help and healing
But how many people would that be true for?
How many instead lose their feeling?
How many young girls are just like her?
Thrust prematurely into a world they can't cope with
Carrying scars into marriages and relationships
Still looking for that perfect man and myth

And how many of her brothers have it worse?
Locked inside prisons of their own shame
Shackled to things they think they need
Never knowing character or heart or name
And won't they carry these scars as well?
Hurt the very women who love them best
Because there is no competition for an airbrushed pic
And he'll find he can't settle for less

If curiosity killed the cat
Then this feline had enough catnip arsenic
To destroy all her nine lives
Chasing balls of twine she was never meant to unwind

But thank God He saw her in her hurt and her pain
This is one cat that has been saved from the game.

** Uganda recently passed what has been referred to as the "miniskirt" bill in an attempt to curb pornography and indecent exposure within the country. While this may seem a bit strange on a country running rampant with teen pregnancy, HIV infection, and scandalous dressing, I loudly applaud the intentions behind wanting to preserve the original conservative values which have been honored in Africa in the past. May all nations take an example and feel the need to protect innocent lives and hearts from the evils of this dangerous industry.
** For all my brothers and sisters affected by this may I just say that God has not turned His back on you and He loves you yet. There is nothing and no one who can separate you from the love of God and that includes your own shame. Remember that guilt is from the devil and conviction is from God. You can change with His help. Maybe the change won't happen all at once but every day is a decision and you have the power in Christ to be victorious over this life of sin and death!

This Week

This week in Africa...
My tablet, external harddrive, and computer all broke (to varying extents)
I tried to get an apartment and realized that I can't afford it yet
I held like 7 babies and played with many more and realized how badly I want my own
I ran a low grade temp for 3 days and still went to work
I cried, like really cried for the first time this year
I nearly lost my way completely with a very broken heart and then found it again with help from a very unlikely source (the person who started my problems in the first place)
I started reading Walking with God by John Eldredge again... And got reminded how many things I am trying to do on my own without even asking God if it is a good idea

On page 87 this is what I found:
"And so God must, from time to time, and sometimes very insistently, disruptn our lives SO THAT we release our grasping of life here and now. Usually through pain. God is asking us to let go of the things we love and have given our hearts to, so that we can give our hearts even more fully to Him. He that's our attempts to make life work so that our efforts fail, and we must face the fact that we don't really look to God for life."

But that wasn't enough so He thought He would emphasize the point by having me read in Acts chapter 27 about Paul and the shipwreck... Interestingly, God told Paul that the only way for every life to be spared was for them to stay with the ship, no matter how bad the seas got. Act 27:25 " So keep up your courage, men, for I have faith in God that it will happen just as he told me.". Its like He was also whispering in my ear... "The storm is bad, but I'll bring you through this if you hold steady and stay with Me." But the verse continues, "Nevertheless, we must run aground on some island." There may be worse to come, but somehow those few simple words spoke to my heart well enough for me to be able to pick myself up and continue on.

Thanks for reading, hope you were encouraged with what God has been teaching me, and mob love my peeps!

Nursing African Style

Well after my extensive sabbatical from writing on blogger, this will no doubt come as a shock to you that I am taking time today to update you, my dear readers on a little of my life.
Of course I had started out with very good intentions of routinely updating you all on all my African adventures, but one thing led to another and its very easy to find myself feeling too busy or too tired to write. Its not as if this is the only form of communication I use and by the time I am done updating facebook and instagram pictures, writing an email to my Mom or sisters, writing in the diary, prayer journalling, and keeping up on all my facebook messages from friends about the only writing I want to do is post a silly anecdote to twitter and call it a day. Somehow 140 characters seems much more manageable than an entire blog post.
Anyway, I am here today, so aside from the obvious apology which I've just made (and yes, it did sound more like excuses, oh well), let me just say that I have missed writing for you all, maybe as much as you have missed reading.
At present my heart and mind are too full to narrow down many stories for this page though, so let me just tell you a little about my nursing experience of late.
I have been working, as an orientation period for my nursing license, in the National Referral Hospital here in Kampala, called Mulago. I have worked on Medical and just finished Surgical rotations this last week. I have been so surprised by the tremendously warm welcome I received from the nurses on the wards (and the doctors, interns, and pharmacists for that matter) and their attitude towards me. Its truly been a blessing to get to know and work alongside these valuable health care professionals.
My first day I managed to faint during rounds, but they immediately came to my rescue and looked after me ever since. (I guess it was the closed room and standing too long... i don't know)
My favorite moment was when this last week one of the nurses said of me, "But Joanna, she fits in everywhere. She eats our food, doesn't complain about the work, she even has our accent; she just fits in. I think she's actually African."
Now people tell me that I am "actually African" all the time. I have my hair braided, and I got an nurses uniform that looks like theirs. My general philosophy is: "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." The thing that I loved about this is that this sounds so close to what I picture Jesus would look like working on a hospital ward in Africa. He would just be Emmanuel, God with us. He would eat our food, talk like we talk, work hard, and shine light wherever He went.
Now I hope what she said is true and yet humbly admit that there are days I am nothing like Jesus on that ward. There are days all I want to do is sit down and there are days when I complain about the other nurses leaving me with too much work when I'm not even paid. But there are days when I get to smile or pat the hand of a patient, have them actually thank me for giving them an injection, or whisper a prayer as I go about my work and I feel that I really am being a light on that ward.
Those are the good days. Those are the days I want to remember. Those are the days I want to replicate. Those are the days I want to live.

Hubris

I have learned a new word from my Ugandan friends. The word is hubris. Webster defines it as:: exaggerated pride or self-confidence
So amount my small group of friends we have a running game going of giving people points for things that they say that are overtly self confident. I would like to say that I'm not currently in the lead, but Aki and I wrote this poem for our friend Patrick for his birthday, so.... Well you be the judge...

''We were thinking just the other day
And we hope you realize how lucky you are to have us in your life
In fact the more we thought about it
We aren't even sure how you survived all these years without knowing us
It's hard to imagine a single day of yours without us in it
Just think how sad and dismal that would be.
Surely you must realize by now how rare it is to find
Two girls with such excellent character
And what a true privilege it is to call them friends.
Not to mention this deadly combination of style and beauty is not easily found on any catwalk
And you get to keep us here on your arm making YOU look good.
Some men would call that heaven,
You get to call it your life.
So it's understood that daily mention should be made of how generally awesome we are.

Oh yeah and vice versa.''

When I Fail to Write

So I realize that it has been exceptionally long since I've posted anything on here and in the interest of good authorship I thought I should correct this inexcusable mistake. This is therefore my attempt to rectify that situation and also to pull some meaning from the last several weeks of my life.
First of all I should let you know that I am still not an official Ugandan nurse much to my chagrin. However I know that God's timing and plans are much better than my own so I will wait on Him.
In the meantime I am still working with my friend Aki doing decoration work for kwajulas and weddings. This last weekend we had a very muddy kwajula in Jinja. So many things went wrong it was almost comical if it hadn't pushed our time frame back so far that we weren't sure we could complete the decor on time. Then I got a migraine and ended up having to lie down for a while. It appeared to have passed, but as soon as I got up I had to rush to the side of the bush and lost everything I had that day. Needless to say I felt much better after that, but was still weak into the next day. We slept on the floor that night waiting for the tents to be done so we could complete our work on the insides. The next day dawned bright and early with lots to get done and we tackled it with zest. We actually managed to complete everything, but Aki and I were so worm out that we didn't even have the energy to attend the function like we were originally planning. Needless to say, we were in need of the relaxing day we had planned for Sunday. It was a friend's birthday and since we were already in Jinja we figured that we would make it a long weekend and do some sightseeing.
We got to go to the source of the Nile river and learned about is discovery. It's sad actually, there used to be a beautiful waterfall at the head of the Nile where it flows from lake Victoria, but they put ina dam for hydroelectricity and raised the water level the whole 15 meters over the waterfall, covering it completely. This also disrupted the rapids downstream which used to be one of the top places in the world door destination white water tag rafting. Now I support, in general, hydroelectricity as a clean and renewable source of energy, but when it comes to changing the natural landscape in such a manner, I find it a bit sad and a teensy bit irresponsible.
Anyway we got to go and stand at the edge of where the falls were and you can tell from the current there where they were.
I'll try post some pictures as soon as my computer is out of the shop and hopefully you can all empty them. I had never been east in Uganda except to Mwiri so it was fun to see a little different side of the country.
I

Let's Write a Poem

Let's write a poem.

Let's make it say everything that we've been thinking and feeling

Let's put in all our disappointments and our joys

Let's spread am ample amount of fear for the future and regret for the past

Let's season it with the bliss of a first kiss and the excitement of a little one's arrival

Let's put in all the words we should have been saying to one another all along

Let's speak of noble things

Let's tell of change for our generation

Let's inspire hope of a better tomorrow

Let's be a voice for the one who has none and advocate for the downtrodden

Let's put all this down on paper

Let's give it a stunning title to make people think

Let's fill it full of alliterating prose and Oxford words

Let's fuse intelligence with eloquence

Let's blend the wisdom of the streets with the fullness of a library

Let's twist our thoughts into new written ideas

Let's empathize, emphasize, epigrammatize, enfranchise, equalize, essentialize, and epitomize 

Let's give them something so unique that they snap to their feet

Let's write a poem.

Bless the Lord Oh My Soul

I encountered a number of setbacks related to getting my nursing license. It started with the fact that I came to Uganda on the date that they would have done the interviews for the license transfer. This meant that I had to wait an entire month to be able to go to the next interview.
I had tried to research qualifications and requirements for obtaining my license while I was still in the US, but unfortunately due to a very unstable website, I wasn't able to access the page that I needed to look at for what to bring as far as paperwork. As a result I only brought copies of a few documents that they wanted the originals to compare to.
Frantically I messaged my sister to see if she could get the documents from my Grandma's house and send them to me. Come to find out that was much easier said than done. (Have you ever tried to ship anything to Africa? Its not cheap!) So instead, my Dad emailed me the originals so I could print them out here.
This would have worked but I needed to get some nice resume paper to print it on.
In the heart of Kampala there is an entire street (Nassa Rd.) which houses basically a massive "Staples" broken up in different little shops. (Now those of you who know me realize this is way more tempting than the entire road that is a massive Hobby Lobby. I love office supplies, I just do!) However, I only needed 2-3 sheets of resume paper, and almost all the shops sold them by the ream. So after running all over looking for a shop that would let me buy only a few sheets, I finally found a place, even though I had to buy 16 sheets to get what I wanted.
Finally I was off to the printers. The friend that I was with had to run to another errand and had to leave me there in the good hands of the copy shop people. So I pull out my flash drive to print the files, and every single one is corrupted. Every. Single. One. And I had just put them on the flash drive that morning, so I'll never understand what happened.
The copy shop lady was really nice though, and helped me get a boda boda back all the way across town to Kitintale to get my laptop which still contained the original files. He would take me there, wait for me, and then bring me back, since I wasn't really sure how to get to where I was at the moment
We had almost reached Bugolobi, which is about 15 min walking distance from Kitintale when something goes thump on the boda boda. I look down and our tire has completely popped. So we limp off to the side of the road to find someone to fix the tire.
Thankfully we weren't far from a boda stage and there was a guy there who could easily fix the flat. Come to find out it wasn't the tire itself, but the inner tube which had popped, which was the good news. They told me it would probably be about 7 minutes to fix (which I took with a grain of salt, knowing about African time.)
The boda guy was really nice though and above that, he knew where I needed to go back to, so I was a little more than hesitant to part with him and get another boda the rest of the way. Instead I plopped down to wait it out and watch the proceedings.
Naturally a small band of bodas grouped around offering their friendly (but not terribly constructive) advice to the guy fixing the tire, and the boda driver. There was also some obvious amusement regarding the "mzungu" who had chosen to wait at the side of the road instead of rushing on to where ever she was bound.
Its one of those surreal moments when you look around at your situation and just have to laugh. That is exactly what I did. I sat on the base of a sign post at the boda stage and just laughed quietly to myself amid the growing confusion. I watched the taxis and bodas whiz past me stirring up clouds of red dust and sat there with my legs crossed wishing I had someone to take a picture of the whole absurd scene.

As I'm sitting there contemplating my fate, another friend (the one I'm staying with) swept past me on a boda. She did a double take wondering if that was me sitting there, then decided that there weren't any other white women in Kampala with braids like mine (she put them in herself.) She called me to find out if I was okay, but by that time I was safely back on the road.
The story gets better from there, as I was able to get everything printed after finagling the images a bit to get everything ready. I journeyed back home using the same boda guy for part of the way. (He gave me a good rate, saying I was now an old customer.)

I set off for the conference the next day feeling that everything was in order for the interview on Wednesday. I planned to catch a ride back to Kampala on Tues night and make sure everything was set for the next day.
Half way through the day on Monday, the guy from the nursing council calls me to make sure that I have everything ready to go and tells me that I also need to come with 20 US dollars for the interview fee.
**LONG SIGH**
I have $13 in my wallet left over from the US. I don't have $20. This means I have to leave the conference early on Tuesday to go to a Forex and get the money I need in US dollars.
I've had issues with my phone since I got here. Its one that I brought from the states, so it objects at times to doing anything in an expedient or convenient manner. In order to call anyone, I have to manually type in their phone numbers instead of pull them from the phone memory, and I can text the US, but for some reason my phone refuses to text locally. Add to this variable battery efficiency and highly questionable performance in all areas of general function. All evening at the conference I was unable to reach anyone in Kampala to tell them I was coming back early. So Tuesday morning, after a rather harrowing drive through the pouring rain, and a sprinkling wet boda ride, I found myself sitting outside the flat between the hours of 8-9 until I could raise someone from within from their slumber with my knocking. I tried calling, but my dependable blessed phone blacked out. I don't think I have ever been more tremendously cold in all my times in Africa as I was that morning. Even after snuggling under the covers with my housemate, my toes didn't thaw out until mid afternoon.
But there was no rest for the weary, as since I was there Aki dragged me off to help her babysit for a birthday party for her 1 year old nephew. Now personally I love kids so it really kills my soul when some of the kids in Africa get scared of me because I look funny to them. This is true for 1 of Aki's 3 neices/nephews. It just so happens that one is the 1 year old, so I was a bit apprehensive about meeting more kids of the same age that might have the same reaction to my presence. Luckily, all of the kids who came to spend the day at the house playing were older than him, so I was pretty much accepted.
Aki shares Janalee's idea that "sugar is good for kids". I saw soda, and a bouncy house and my heart dropped out of my chest with sheer panic! All in all though, I only made one kid cry so I'll consider the day a success in African babysitting.
That evening I was able to get the extra few dollars that I needed from a friend who came to the house and I was all set for the morning.

Wednesday morning dawned bright and early (and I mean early!). I had to be at the Nursing Council by 0800 hours, so I left my house around 0700 just to be on the safe side. Caught a boda to Wandegeya on the other side of town... and then I was lost. I had been to the nursing council once before, but where I thought it should be I wasn't seeing it. By the time we hit the second round-about that I didn't remember my boda guy had less and less confidence in me as well. He pulled over and waited for me to get my wits about me to remember which way to go.
Do you all know what flare pra'ers are? Cause I sent one of those up right then and there. Suddenly one of the roads looked familiar. We set off and less than a block down was the road that I needed. God is good!
Well after waiting for over 2 hours, they called me in to the interview.
Somehow they are confused about what I am going to do at the clinic since I am not a midwife, so they want to talk to Akiki before they agree to give me my license. We are supposed to go back this week together, so hopefully that goes well and I can give you a joyous report that I am finally a nurse in Uganda!
All in all, it has been an eventful week. Ridiculously exhausting. Fabulously worshipful. Incredibly comic. Rather long.
I am glad it's over, but very thankful for everything that God has brought me through. He continues to give me new strength every day, and to surround me with caring friends to encourage me.