Beautiful Feet

Let it not go unsaid that miracles still happen in many obvious ways. 

Friday night before my friend Jessica and I set out for our grand adventure, we stayed with my sister, Rose in Omaha. We talked a bunch about the power of prayer and how silly it is that we don't pray for the things we need, however great or small. And even when we do pray, we sometimes explain it away as if it were going to happen that way anyways. 

Wouldn't it be just the Lord to remind us the importance of prayer just before we would need to practice it most?

The first big miracle that we witnessed was water.

Our sweet little village has been in a drought for three years. The fields are dried up and they walk their cattle to a water source twice a day to keep them alive. 

The village water gets turned on every 15 days and they are required to ration their water. Whenst we arrived on Sunday morning, there was no water in our shower barrels and we were told there would be no water until Tuesday. We could have survived without water. We were dirty, yes, but we could have survived. 

But, in our pray-over-the-compound moments, a group of the team gathered around the water barrels and prayed for water. Our local missionary made a final phone call, and there was water coming out of the pipes within minutes. MINUTES, guys. 

As I said in the previous post, our first Sunday in the village was pretty busy..especially for dentistry. I handled the blood better than I expected and was rather relieved when our last patient left a little after 6pm. 

We then had supper and were told that church would be at 7pm across the way. I had not explored our church tent during the day time and it gets dark right at 6pm everyday. With flashlights in hand, the group of us left the compound and found ourselves marching across a dried field, trying not to catch our skirts on the dried plants along the way. It was a little bit of jaunt but we made it. 

In the past I've met our first church service with such excitement and high energy, but this one I found myself collapsing into my chair telling myself to stay awake a little longer. I had no voice so I could not sing, but I was rather content to listen and clap along. It, again, made me to be thankful for times I did have a voice and was able to participate in worship. You don't realize how much you enjoy being able to partake with your voice until you aren't able.

We trudged on back to our little compound around 9pm and gathered our shower things and began did what we could to rinse the dirt out of our hair. I think I was tucked into my bed sometime around 10pm.

Devotions began at 6:45am Monday morning, and in my mind I thought I might sleep in til 6:30 in attempt to be fully rested for the first full day of clinics. But, the sun is well up in the air by 5am and it was around that time that most of my roommates were moving about readying for the day anyways. I suppose the only difficult thing about waking around5am is that the kitchen and access to coffee was not available until 7am. So it took a little effort to partake in human interaction in the hours before that. My voice was slowly coming back.. I sounded like a man..especially in the morning, but I was at least able to say words.

Our patients for Dentistry began to trickle in sometime around 8am. Now familiar with the process of prepping 
the surgical basket with tools and holding the light for the dentists, it was easy to find a rhythm. We were on our feet the whole time, but I didn't notice being tired until I was given a chance to sit down at lunch time.It was a good sort of tired. The kind one is extremely proud of and would wish for every day if it were possible.

There was only one very bad tooth extraction that I had to step out of.The top of the tooth had broken off when the doctor grasped it and the roots were very deep into her gum. The digging and the chiseling and the amount of blood and puss I watched our patient swallow got to me after a while. As there was no one to take over, I gagged and kept holding the light as that is all the situation would allow. By God's good graces, the part where I felt myself beginning to vomit was the exact moment one of our nurses came in to take pictures. When she noticed the tears streaming down my face from dry heaving, she immediately took over the light and allowed me to sit and drink water for a bit. 

And that is how our days in dentistry went. 122 patients, and over 130 teeth pulled. The hardest ones were the little children who screamed and wailed and cried and had to be sat on by their parents. But our conversations to distract us from the blood and tears were rich and wonderful.

On Monday we finished our last patient close to 6:45pm. The sun set at 6pm and that is also when supper was to have started as well. Since church was at 7pm, we hustled out of there quickly to freshen ourselves a little before heading to church. 

I think it must have been monday afternoon at some point that I sneaked out of the dentistry and practiced a little ukulele with the worship band. In church that night I got to play "allabre" with the band and it was wonderful. Like all of my dreams coming true. People were clapping along and it was wonderful! It was funny also, because I have sung with the band in the past and the pastor announced to everyone that I would be singing.. and  I had no voice. But the translator corrected him to let him know I'd simply be playing my ukulele. So much fun!

Showering at night time was also wonderful. It was after monday night's shower that I realized that my feet were just as bad coming out of the shower as when I'd gone in.. and then worse because my wet feet collected more dirt. But we gathered our feet together and thought of the Bible verse that goes " How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion "Your God Reigns!"" (Isaiah 52:7) 

We proudly admired our Nicaraguan tan lines... which were really just dirt lines from the constant blowing of dust all day. It became our theme verse in a way.. at least among those I conversed with and compared feet with..we kept telling each other, "Your feet are beautiful!" If water wasn't such a scarce commodity, I think I would have loved to do a foot washing at some point.. perhaps in a future trip we could offer that just for the sake of being literal as Jesus was. I washed my feet with a rag on Tuesday nigh and the rag wasn't the color it started. The rag became a dark brown and the dark brown did not come out when rinsed with water and rung out. I loved it, though. I loved to have dirty feet. I loved that my feet were blistered and bleeding and sore and tired. It was beautiful to me.