Where the doctors are (and are not!)

Today, Matt and Kristi, friends of ours from college, posted the following image from worldmapper.org. It shows the relative number of doctors across nations of the world.  I thought it was worth sharing:

Territory size shows the proportion of all physicians (doctors) that work in that territory.

To quote Matt and Kristi, "Where are the doctors in Africa??"

If you ever needed some visual proof that people like Dr. Friberg are much needed - and that they need our ongoing support! - this map might just be the proof you were looking for.

Peace,
Melissa

The Blue Sweater

Driving to church this morning, I caught an interview on NPR with a woman name Jacqueline Novogratz. She is the author of the book The Blue Sweater and founder of the Acumen Fund, a philanthropic organization that invests in targeted, grass-roots entrepreneurial ventures that seek to battle poverty across the world from the ground-up rather than the top-down.

During our week at Mto wa Mbu, Matt had many good conversations with Bethany Friberg about poverty, economics, aid efforts, and technology. I thought of him while I listened to Jacqueline Novogratz talk about the ways that traditional aid, though well-intentioned, often fails to create sustainable results.

Jacqueline has given a number of different TED Talks about new ways of offering aid to poverty-stricken areas of our world, valuing integrity and sustainability in those efforts. (Visit her TED profile to learn more.) In the following TED Talk from 2009, she offers up her thoughts on a "third way" to offer aid, apart from traditional financial investments and traditional charitable giving.



She mentions the importance of relationships and patience, as well as real connections and partnerships. I think that Steve and Bethany Friberg have really internalized these values in their ministry. They build relationships, they listen carefully to the needs of those in their communities and address those needs in culturally-sensitive and appropriate ways, they choose to invest time and money in merchants and services that they know they can truly help, and they have the grace and patience to help their communities from the ground-up.

I'm excited to hunker down and watch Jacqueline's other TED Talks, and to keep learning what I can about how we can best offer aid to places like Tanzania, in significant, ground-up, sustainable ways.

Peace,
Melissa

Of Maasai and Mountains

Sometime this morning, in the half-sleep between snooze button smacks before truly waking, I had a dream about an old friend from college. An indecipherable dream. I remember none of it, other than waking up and wondering exactly how my brain and memory had colluded to unearth the face and name of someone from nearly a decade in my past.

Late this afternoon, curious and hitting a lull in my work, I decided to look him up on Facebook and send him a quick "thought of you this morning and hope you are well" message. No luck. He's not on Facebook. Admirable, really.

But still curious, and a tiny bit bored, I threw his name into Google to see if I could find out whether he was still teaching, still doing some of the same stuff he was doing the last time I had crossed paths with him.

Lo and behold, one of the first things that popped up (and the only link I bothered to follow) was a newsletter from the school where he used to teach, where he and a group of 20 students were highlighted for their travels to Tanzania!

I read through the snippets that he and the students wrote, and looked at the pictures of their travels. Any one of us could have written those snippets, our experiences were so similar. Singing together as a group in response to the Maasai choirs that sang for us, throwing frisbees with Maasai elders, standing up in the Land Rovers as we rode through endless land and sky...

And when I looked through the pictures, it was amazing to me that I recognized the Ngorongoro Crater before I had even read the caption.

One part of me easily could have interpreted all these similarities as discouraging, as if there were nothing unique to be experienced and felt in Tanzania, no matter how new and exciting our adventures were. But instead of feeling devalued or deflated, I felt excited and proud.

I felt privileged to be part of a small inner circle of people who have felt and experienced these things. I wanted to call up everybody in that newsletter and tell them, excitedly, that WE had just tossed frisbees and visited the Serengeti and poked our heads out of the tops of Land Rovers and slept in tents in the Tanzanian wilderness.

This past weekend was full of Tanzanian reflections for me. Three worship services, all dedicated to the telling of our travel stories. A visit from out-of-town relatives and the chance to share 800 pictures' worth of stories. Mini-reunions with members of our own traveling group as we sold beadwork and looked at each others' pictures.

But as fun as it is to tell all of our stories to new ears, I suspect that each of us, in our own way, wants to stumble across someone else who has been to Tanzania - someone who can see the landscape as we recount it, someone who understands our stories without any extra explanation, someone who has felt what we have felt, and someone who just knows what we're talking about.

It is the way of trips like this, I imagine. You experience something that can never be fully explained and described. I want to tell everyone that I know everything about the trip. But I get sad when I realize my words will never fully describe the pictures and thoughts in my head. I am slowly letting myself off the hook - giving myself permission to accept that there are things about this trip that will only ever be fully understood and appreciated by our traveling group, or perhaps by others who have also traveled there.

I will keep telling stories, most certainly. And I will do what I can to bring others into my experience. But I will also keep my membership card to this little secret club, this inner circle, and be grateful for the memories in my mind and heart that no words will ever communicate.

Peace,
Melissa

The gospel according to Crystal Light

God, in the silly little details.

I was cleaning up some clothes in the bedroom yesterday morning when I found a package of individual-serving drink mix packets. You know, the little packets like the one in the picture, that you can dump into a water bottle to turn water into lemonade, or orange drink, or iced tea, or a whole range of other flavors? The box had slid underneath the bed during our Tanzania packing, and for no apparent reason, when I saw it this morning, I threw it in my purse and brought it to work with me.

I went to put it in my desk drawer at work (the drawer I reserve for food and candy stuff), only to find that I already have a whole mug filled with little packets of drink mix. I'm set for a while. No one needs to buy me any, ok?  It was a hot and thirsty day, so I  filled up my water bottle twice (hydration is good!). Both times, since they were on my mind, I added in a packet of drink mix. First lemonade. Then orange.

As I was ripping the top of the second packet, I flashed back to Tanzania. We brought with an impressive amount of drink mix. Every fruit flavor imaginable. Iced tea. Packets of Starbucks Via instant coffee: the hot version, the iced version, AND flavored versions. And as soon as Dr. Friberg caught a glimpse of all of these packets, he made a special announcement to our group, asking us to save our used packets throughout the week, because he likes to use them to distribute pills. They work better than trying to fold paper around the pills, he told us.

We drank a lot during our work week in Mto wa Mbu. Via with breakfast, or maybe some chai. Filling our water bottles with treated water, and adding mix to make it fruity. Taking a late-morning break from work to drink more chai, or more Via, or more lemonade. Relaxing after dinner with more chai, more Via, hot chocolate, tea, and even more fruity water.

One photographic regret for me is that I never thought to take a picture of all of our used packets, nestled into a basket or a mug, waiting to do good in the world thanks to the resourcefulness of Dr. Friberg.

I'm not sure if this is a story of resourcefulness, of a strangely useful culture clash, or of a work crew that had to use the bathroom a lot.  But I DO know that this is a story of doing good in the world, and a story of how stupid simple things like little foil packets can be resurrected as useful, meaningful, and life-giving objects. And it's a story of being humbled. We thought we knew all the ways that we could blow through Mto wa Mbu and be useful. We thought we knew what gifts we had to offer. But who would have thought that one of the most practical ways we could help out was to simply drink our coffee and remember to throw our Via packet into the basket on the table rather than the garbage can in the corner. Humbling. Small things can make a world of difference.

At least for me, this was the sort of detail that elevated our experiences beyond what we expected a mission trip to Tanzania to feel like. It is in those silly but crucial everyday details that you really see God's love at work.

Peace,
Melissa