The House

 Here’s part two of the story: Arrival home.

 

We roll up to the gate at 1AM as the headlights glare off of the years of dust, rust, and brown paint. Fobbie honks the horn. No response. He honks again, nothing. 3, 4, 5 times before the gate opens to a bleary eyed Pa Brima. Fobbie jokes, “You sleeping Brima?” ‘No, no, no. I just had the radio on.’

 

We had heard that the lock was stiff and the rumors were true. It took 3 different people to get the door open. The house was immaculate. Our housekeeper, Abdul Jalloh, works so hard! His skill is obvious but boy does he work slow. I would imagine he spent at least 8 hours cleaning our house. Our first surprise came on changing the pillow cases. The pillows were covered in mold! They felt cool but not wet. Then the mattress cover had mold too! The book on the bed’s shelf didn’t show any water damage, the ceiling didn’t look like water damage. Weird. We put on clean sheets and collapse until noon the next day.

 

Inside the closet there were more surprises. My shirts were left hanging with the closet doors closed. The ones hanging with some space between them were fine. But where things became bunched there was mold between the shirts. Even inside our filing cabinet (our dresser) the folded clothes had some mildew looking stuff on them. The only thing we can figure is that we were absent during the rainy season. The humidity must be high for so long that even the air can cause things to mold. I haven’t been brave enough to try to use the laptop we left behind.

 

The most unfortunate thing to happen was the death of our backup fan. We have a battery that runs appliances on 110V so it will easily run the one 110V fan we brought. In our absence, somebody plugged the 110 fan into the 220V wall outlet. Dead. So for now, we don’t have a fan at night if the electricity goes out. Happily it’s super nice weather right now. There hasn’t been electricity for about 36 hours now and we aren’t missing the fans. Also, we haven’t bought any food that needs to be refrigerated yet. So that’s a blessing.

 

On the topic of food, Rachel has found some really exciting things in her pantry. We moved the majority of our food into totes for safekeeping in our absence. Inside the tote was a gallon ziplock bag, inside the gallon ziplock bag was an unopened brownie mix, inside the brownie mix was moving, living bugs! How do bugs find a tote, get inside the tote, then chew through two layers of sealed plastic to get our brownies‽ She had a mason jar with a screw lid and a few cashews in the bottom: mold city. A spaghetti dispensing tupperware with some dry spaghetti had a whole nest of bugs living inside. There was a tupperware with one of those buttons you push on the top that expands a rubber seal to secure the lid that was filled with nutritional yeast flakes: even a few bugs in there! Luckily they hadn’t set up a home yet, but this still seems crazy! Nature really is less tamed in Africa.

 

I know that all of this sounds miserable but we are truly happy to be back. We feel like we’ve returned home to our own space, something we (mostly) understand and feel comfortable with. We haven’t seen many people because of 2 weeks of quarantine, but it’s quite a blessing to reunite with the people here. God is good, even if he did make bugs and mold just a bit too aggressive.

The 2020 Return Trip

 We’ve made it back to Sierra Leone safely!

It was quite a trip and we’ve had some surprises on arriving home, so this will be split into two: travel and settling in at home.

 

It’s always a long journey, but COVID made it even longer this trip. It was relatively smooth, but long.

 

We left my folk’s house near Chattanooga at 6AM eastern standard time and drove to Atlanta International Airport. We were early because we had 4 checked bags all very close to 50lbs and I wanted to make sure we had time to rearrange if the gate agent was pedantic. He was actually very congenial and we breezed through and had a several hour wait for our flight to Chicago. In Chicago it was a 5 hour layover then an 8 hour red eye to Brussels in Belgium. In Brussels it was another 5 hour layover. Upon arrival we immediately found some chairs without arm rests, laid flat, and fell asleep. The next thing I know we are completely surrounded by people waiting for a flight. Of the roughly 30 terminals in our wing of the airport, we choose one of the two that had departing flights. Luckily, mandatory mask wearing means that you can sleep in public with your mouth open and not even be embarrassed! So I’m quite sure I looked totally cool while unconscious and draped over my luggage.

 

We were about to grab something to eat when they started boarding our flight 2 hours before departure! But don’t worry, we had some snacks still on hand because Rachel is always prepared. The queue was long and as we approached we could see 4 different people checking the mandatory documents: boarding pass, passport, visa, residency cards, negative COVID test less than 72 hours old, and some Belgian public health paperwork that needed to be applied for prior to arriving in the airport. As one might expect, that took quite a bit of time and many people didn’t have their paperwork in order. As the woman 4 people in front of us presented her paperwork and US passport, the gate agent asked her reason for traveling to Sierra Leone.

“For my grandmother,” she said.

‘That’s not a good enough reason.’

“But she died and I’m going to the funeral”

‘Do you have a death certificate?’

“No, she’s in Sierra Leone and I’m a citizen of Sierra Leone”

‘Sorry, it’s not a good enough reason to travel.’

“But I was here in the airport last week and all the paperwork was OK except my COVID test was too old. So then I had to stay in Belgium for a week to get COVID testing. And now you’re telling me that all my paper work is not ok‽”

 

It was at this point that we were ushered, with much fear and trepidation, to another gate agent. She smiled nicely, reviewed our paperwork, and let us go without any questions. We were stunned. Why is it easier for white people to get into Sierra Leone than for citizens of Sierra Leone to get in? After sitting on the tarmac for 30 minutes, we see the woman board the plane. I guess she was persuasive enough.

 

 

 

The landing at the Lungi Airport in Freetown was impeccable. I took some pilot lessons years ago and landings are tricky. Even landings, like we had in Freetown, without any cross winds take skill. But I think the spontaneous round of applause from the passengers was more motivated by release of anxiety than from appreciation. We walked across the tarmac to the airport where anyone who didn’t use hand sanitizer was denied entry. The immigration queue was socially distanced and calm. The agent was happy to see foreigners returning. We walked down a small hall, handed in our contact tracing paper work (what was your origin airport, seat number, symptoms, etc.), had our temperature checked, all with reasonable social distance. At the next stage was the classic chaos I had expected up to this point.

 

 Everyone is arriving from internationally so there are just bags everywhere. The space is too small for all the people and bags. So it is literally impossible to walk without pushing into someone. Rachel stands off to the side with our carry on bags and I was only able to bring her things one at a time. First a cart for the luggage. Then I found our Away suitcase. Then I found one of our orange North Face Duffels. I waited and waited but never our trunk or other duffel going around on the belt. I eventually fought my way to the far side of the room and found they had been pulled off the belt by somebody else. Then I realized we had only done the easy part.

 

The queue to pay for the COVID tests (80 USD each) was, as they say in Krio, Choked Up. The line was made up with people and all their luggage carts and extended right into the middle of baggage claim. If I had to push people with my body to move through baggage claim, a cart seemed impossible. We ended up cutting the line with some nice Italian folks. That line was SLOW! From there we creeped through another line into another lobby where everyone was forced to abandon their luggage carts to join another two queues: one for free SIM cards and one to have the tests performed. The luggage carts really insured that there was no room to social distance. It was wall to wall. Our 3 hour disembarking ordeal came to a close with swabs up the nose. Happily, they were more gentle than the folks from Tennessee.

 

Now comes a 2 hour drive. Poor Mr. Fobbie had been waiting since 6 PM (our scheduled arrival which was delayed because of paperwork in Belgium) and we were just departing the airport at 10:30 PM. There’s a national COVID curfew from 11PM to 5AM. So at every checkpoint, the police officers are confused why we’re driving and it always takes some explanation. Only once did we have difficulty. There was a small village where the police weren’t letting anyone pass. My speculation is that so many people were forced to sleep in their cars by the side of the road that it helped the local businesses sell their goods. Two different police officers told us to just pull up to the gate and wait. Well, they never came to open the gate and I think they wanted us to wait till morning. But the third time’s the charm and we were able to get around.

We did the math, about 40 hours in transit. The next day we slept till noon.

 

Part two will be our adventures rediscovering our house.

Returning in 2020

It’s time again to return to Sierra Leone.

The borders were reopened recently and the protocols have been put in place for us to return: Negative COVID PCR less than 72 hours before departure. On arrival we get two tests, both a rapid and a more time intensive test. If the rapid is negative, we leave the airport and are allowed to travel as long as public health can contact us at a moment’s notice. If we test positive on the rapid test, we are forced to stay at the airport hotel until the confirmatory test comes back. We booked tickets a few weeks ago and have had the dates and the times changed multiple times. But for now, we depart the US on the 13th. 

It was obviously emotional leaving home last time to move to Sierra Leone, but I’m surprised how complex the emotions are this time. 

There were two weeks this trip when all 3 of my parent’s biologic children were living in their house with their spouses. We joked that my mother had given us a checklist growing up (Get good grades, go to college, find and marry the right person, find careers you’re happy with), but now that all of us have completed these checklists we don’t know what to do! So we all came home and moved back in. Seriously though, with 3 children who each have a spouse, 4 out of 6 of us have driver’s licenses with Mom and Dad’s address on it.

It has been both wonderful and lacking all at the same time. Weddings we couldn’t attend. Trips we couldn’t take. Friends and colleagues we couldn’t see. All due to COVID.

It’s like we had something great and unique, but we still want more.

On the other hand, I am so anxious to get back to Sierra Leone. Apparently I’m not a classic workaholic day to day, but months without seeing patients just feels too long. Sometimes we feel like this has been the most selfish 3 months of our lives. We buy stuff. We see family. We eat fantastic food. All of our time is for us and family. Especially without church, it’s easy to misconstrue our necessary rejuvenation as selfish or bad.

I’ve also faced something I’ve not needed to put words to before: self worth. It’s been revealing to me how much of my self worth is wrapped up in my identity and work. The western ideologic framework easily ties ones ‘worth’ to their productivity. What’s my worth when I’m a missionary doctor who ‘abandoned’ their post during the worst pandemic in 100 years? What kind of missionary spends 3 months with all their time focused on themselves? I feel far from being the ‘perfect’ missionary.

It sounds so easy to say ‘Your identity should be in Christ.’ Or ‘It’s Jesus who gives you your worth.’ I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about these trite things we say as Christians. Honestly I have no answers. And I can only imagine the pain that others are going through. I still have a job; I have a loving family that can house me for 3 months. I can only imagine the existential crisis that people are going through during this coronavirus time. I worry that the usual and easy trite Christian reassurances are going to look even more inadequate to a hurting world.

And this is just about the US. As I have been communicating with Dr. Kabba (the medical director) and Mr. Fobbie (the business manager) things are even harder for the hospital than I expected. 

In late May and early June, the government of Sierra Leone approached the hospital and requested that we collaborate. They could use our facilities and they would provide salaries, supplies, and COVID patients. The Waterloo Adventist Hospital would become the local Community Treatment Center (CTC) for the coronavirus. 

But because the situation is so dire for the government, they are completely unable to adequately supply the hospital with enough PPE, medicines, fuel, or equipment to take care of the patients. There has been basically no money for salaries. And because all of the hospital was taken to treat coronavirus, there have been no facilities to see or treat the medical patients for revenues to pay the staff.

By mid July, there was only $500 in the bank which is no where near what’s needed to buy fuel, medicines, or even pay a portion of salaries. God always provides and we’ve received enough donations to pay the staff a fraction of their salary and provide a bag of rice. The SDA Mission has also offered the hospital a building to use as a small medical clinic in the interim. However, this building is so rudimentary it doesn’t even have electricity. God has continued to bless and a donor came forward to help us with partial renovations to at least make the space usable. And this is just a sampling of July's challenges.

Because things have been so difficult recently, we’ve updated the website to include a COVID donation section. If you’d like to donate please visit:

https://adventisthealthsystem.sl/donations/

Haiku 1619

Ideas rarely come to me fully formed. Even as I’m telling the patient what I'm thinking and recommending, the thoughts are still being born. Yesterday we drove through the Georgia countryside while listening to 1619 and arrived in my sister's friendly and kind neighborhood with 15 kids playing together on the street from different houses at 9:30 PM. Everyone we saw in this community on our evening 2 mile walk is black. It felt like home.

I woke up early this morning with a haiku fully formed in my head.

What is a human
Work, love, art, build. Robots can
How can we enslave?

Powerlessness and Power

We want to believe that we have control and autonomy over our lives.

I’m slowly learning the lessons of how little control we have over our lives. First we were evacuated from Sierra Leone by the Embassy. Then last weekend, I dove into some cold water to chase some sunglasses and came up with atrial fibrillation with RVR. This is a common disease, but only in old people. My heart rhythm didn’t return to normal for 2 hours, so I went to the hospital and was admitted overnight. No visitors allowed due to COVID.

Consistently, the podcast I listen to that most changes the way I view the world is Everything Happens for a reason by Kate Bowler. She’s a young woman and theologian who studied the Prosperity Gospel, has small children, and was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. Her podcast deals with how to find hope in desperate situations and how to provide strength to those in need. In her episode interviewing Ari Johnson, he discusses how pressing the need is for us to improve the lives of those around us. It’s a great episode, partly because he’s a doctor in Africa: https://katebowler.com/podcasts/ari-johnson-more-than-enough/

They wrestle with a topic that I think both individuals and our nation are struggling with. It’s so easy to feel like we have no control: heart arrhythmia, stage 4 cancer, systemic racism, crushing poverty, distrust of science and medicine, portrayal of Christianity as a right wing racist homophobic group. And this hopelessness is compounded by how invisible our individual power is. We have tremendous ability to influence the health and spiritual well being of those around us. Our individual actions form our communities and shape our society.

Ari Johnson said this:

“We vastly overestimate our own control over our own lives. We are not in control of our own lives. We can not control the outcome. I also believe that we vastly underestimate our power. We vastly underestimate our power. I believe we even hide from our power, because our own power is terrifying. We are terrified of how powerful we are, particularly our power in the lives of others. Our power to cause harm. Our power to cause harm and to hurt those around us.  And our power to heal. Both of those are terrifying.

The resonance of our actions both to hurt and to heal are so much bigger than we see and so much bigger than when we estimate, and it is terrifying for us to look at that because if we look at it… it takes so much courage to look at that because once we look at it, once we embrace how powerful we are, then we are responsible. And there’s no letting ourselves off the hook. We have to take action. There’s no other way.”

It's quite a dichotomy to feel our own powerlessness, but still be responsible for all those around us. But I believe it’s what Christ calls us to. Servants don’t have any control over their own lives, but are designed to benefit all those around them.

Now I don’t know exactly how to hold these ideals together: self powerlessness with power and responsibility over others. Regardless if it’s our global community, it’s the plight of the African American, my peers and community in Sierra Leone, people with different political beliefs, or my family and church family, I have a part to play either to heal or to harm. And I also know that regardless how little control I have in my life, in either health or geography, God will guide my next steps.

Quarantine

Well, we finally made it out of quarantine.

Our repatriation flight landed us in Dulles at 3AM. We went to the hotel and had an amazing hot shower and 2 hours of sleep before we went back to the airport to catch a plane to Detroit, then Atlanta, then Chattanooga. My parents drove to the airport with two cars and met us at the airport with a car loaded with food. We drove home by ourselves, waved to my sister who stayed on the porch with her 4 week old, picked up the dog, and drove to a cabin in the woods with no cell service or internet.

It was a both a blessing and difficult to be so isolated. Alone in the woods, in a beautiful cabin, with wonderful food, and a loving spouse is quite wonderful. But even though we are thousands of miles closer to home, we were even more isolated from our family than when in Africa.

COVID makes it easy to be paranoid. On our arrival we started to have worsening runny nose, small cough, but no fever. We stayed cooped up for a week and a half, during which time Rachel read 8 books. We called the health department, which is now doing screening for all who want it, and got tested. It felt like I was getting my brain tickled by that swab. After a few days, our tests both came back negative. All our symptoms were just allergies and we praise God for that.

It's wonderful to be back home and reunited with family. But after only 7 months, it still seems like we left some of our heart back in Salone.

Repatriation Flight

It’s been a chaotic week both emotionally and for our plans. After our decision to leave, we went to Freetown and paid $7000 cash to a travel agency. Less than 4 days later, the embassy says that there’s another flight that is completely different. They recommend we go and get a refund. “Money business” is always hard in Sierra Leone and I expected quite a fuss to get a refund. After all, this business had at least $315,000 come in and they were about to lose it all because the embassy changed its mind. However, it was surprisingly easy! I walked in, my hand written ticket was sufficient, and they took me to a small back room to count out the cash. The only thing they tried to pull on me was giving me some 20 dollar bills and not all 100 dollar bills. There is quite a drop in exchange rate between the bills, but I put up a fuss. After he acquiesced, I said “Thank you.” In the African style of directness he responded, “Why are you thanking me? You’re not helping me at all.”

We do all the paperwork to sign up for the flight and then begins the preparations to leave. Decide who to give our office keys to, increase security to 24/7, arrange for someone to intermittently sleep in our guest room, put all the important items under bed sheets to protect from dust, eat everything in fridge and freezer, and leave money with the appropriate people in case we need to arrange for something.

Friday comes along and we had arranged for the driver to pick us up at 6 AM. He arrives at 5:30. While driving to the airport there were multiple checkpoints where everyone was forced to either use hand sanitizer or to disembark to wash hands. The airport had 2x mandatory hand washing stations and temperature checks. We were literally the first passengers to arrive. I’ve never been so early for a flight before: 8:30 AM for a 1 PM departure.

During the check in process I spoke with a woman from the Embassy. She described the logistical nightmare of a repatriation flight as there are never direct flights from Freetown to the US. So the Sierra Leonean government had to discuss with the US Government, who had to get specific FAA approval. After lots of paperwork we arrived at the departure terminal and hunkered down with the Herreras and their 3 boys. We played cards, Minecraft, group games, ate lunch, shared our homemade snacks. The hours ticked by to 1 PM, no plane. 2 PM no plane. The plane had two other stops prior to us to pick up other Americans from other West African countries and it finally arrived by 3 PM. No one was allowed to disembark and they began fueling. Over many hours we would queue to board, then a delay; sit down for a few hours then queue again.

Based on rumors from staff overhead in the bathroom, initially there wasn’t enough fuel. After the fuel situation resolved, then the fuel door couldn’t be properly closed. It was decided that the plane was unsafe and that the local staff couldn’t be trusted to verify the repair was done properly. An announcement was made that we were stuck for several more hours while another plane was sent. Less than 10 minutes after this announcement, at roughly 8pm, it was announced that the plane was safe and we were leaving.

Our waiting time in the airport far exceeded our flight time to cross the Atlantic.

We arrived in Washington DC slightly before 3 AM. Everyone was wearing masks, but there were no handwashing stations and no temperature check. Just driving in Sierra Leone had more hand wash check stations than the major transit hub of the US capital. Due to our late hour, we didn’t see anyone from customs. The man at immigration asked us, “Have you been in contact with anyone with fever and cough?”
I replied, “Well, I’m a doctor.”
We stared at each other for a few seconds before he inquired, “Anyone in the last two weeks?”
I stared silently back as both of our discomfort was become more and more visible. I offered, “We’ve been screening people for Coronavirus and we never had any cases that needed testing.”
He looked relieved, shrugged and quickly waived us on without another word.

We arrived in our hotel with enough time for a shower and 2 hours of sleep before needing to return.

Due to being underpopulated, our original flight from DC to Atlanta to Chattanooga was canceled. Our trip now is DC, to Detroit, to Atlanta, to Chatt. All the airports are like ghost towns. It’s quiet and peaceful. Currently we’re sitting in Detroit and we’re happy to be back in the US. But we keep thinking about the welfare of Sierra Leone and we’re going to be very happy when our 36 hours of travel is over.




The Fernandos and Herreras in Freetown's Lungi International Airport