Tiny Hearts and Language Barriers

Departing from the office work I have been doing since arriving here, this week I shadowed a pediatric cardiologist from the states, in Iraq on a medical mission. Receiving a crash course in medical scribing, I took patient histories, recorded all of Dr. Kirk’s notes, and observed countless ECHOs and heart exams. Despite being emotionally exhausting, the week proved incredible, giving faces and meaning to the statistics I’ve been typing up in the office, teaching me to hear different heart murmurs, and inspiring in me a new calling. Mom, Dad, I want to be a translator.

Don’t get me wrong, my limited Kurdish still consists of awkward introductory remarks and ordering one type of food. My brain truly is not wired for foreign language acquisition, but I witnessed two types of translation this week, and the latter requires no language skills. Let me explain. ..

I can’t think of anything that appears more terrifying than parenthood. This week I was scared to even consider putting myself in the shoes of the mothers and fathers of children with broken hearts. How can you love someone so very much, wanting to give everything you can to your child, and be so utterly helpless to translate that love into tangible change? The pain I saw overwhelmed me. I don’t doubt the incredible strength of a parent’s love, but it can’t physically close a hole in your daughter’s right ventricle, or correct your son’s transposed arteries.

Fortunately, a surgeon’s hands can.  A heart surgeon’s knowledge and passion and skill can translate parents’ loving desire for their child to have a long, healthy life into the reality of a strongly pumping heart. What if we all viewed our careers and friendships and families and lives as similar services for “translation”? 

God works in often frustratingly mysterious ways, but there’s quite a bit of evidence that his fatherly loving desire for his broken-hearted children includes the world being daily made right. Sometimes that means physical healing of a small heart, sometimes it means peace in a violent place, sometimes it means His children coming to know Him. And instead of accomplishing those desires on his own (which he could do much more cleanly and in a trillionth of a second, no sweat), he lets us in as partners on his work of daily Redeeming. As agents of His love communicated to this world, aren’t well all in essence  just translators of his plan?

I don’t yet have the skills to translate God’s love into a physically healed heart.  But no matter the career or stage of life any of us are in, we can daily translate his love into tangible actions that make the world a bit more right. Jesus interpreted Love into our language, so we can follow his example to not just translate that Love into words, but into action. “We know what real love is because Jesus gave up his life for us. So we also ought to give up our lives for our brothers and sisters.”  Later on in 1 John, we are reminded that “Such love has no fear.” If we can learn to trust each other and God to translate perfect love into the promised rightness of the world, maybe the helplessness I saw in so many parents’ eyes will be less of a reality.

Next week I’ll be back in the office, crunching numbers and writing drafts of reports. But viewing it as God’s work spoken in the language of a business, necessary for the service and love PLC provides, it is not mundane, and just as incredible a job to be able to perform as a heart surgery.

Interior Decorating

 

I do not expect to return home in two months with a tattoo in Kurdish, although the script is the most beautiful writing I’ve ever seen. I do not expect to return home with a deep passionate love for lemons or onions, although people have a habit of eating them straight before every meal. I definitely do not expect to return home with a complete, infallible understanding of life in the Middle East, or even my own personal life. (Let me know where to find that, if you’ve heard.)

But I can tell you one certain life-altering change Kurdistan will impress on me.

My future dining room will lack a table. It is not atypical here to eat dinner on cushions on the floor, surrounding a plastic “lazy tablecloth” and delicious spread of food. (The tablecloth gets its name from the end-of-dinner simplicity of throwing all trash and scraps in the center, rolling it up, and tossing it away. Brilliant.) We eat, talk, drink tea, and recline in the dimming light for hours. No stiff dining room chairs or manners mandating upright posture impede conversation, comfort, and company. So often in the habitual rush of life, the purpose of meals becomes only caloric nutrition. Fitting with the leisurely pace of life here, meals with guests provide much more important sustenance: rest and the time to allow company to turn into friendship.

In Kurdish culture, when you serve a guest tea, a saucer always accompanies the cup. Not for the sake of appearance, but because true hospitality means serving the tea overflowing. The nights here, sans internet, and within the walls of home after sunset likewise overflow with good conversation and friendship. In Kurdish culture, you are welcome to stay in someone’s company until the fruit is brought out. I look forward to the next few months until the ‘fruit’ will be brought and my time here will end. I am sure by then I will be overflowing with many carpet-level conversations, cups of tea, and interior decorating plans.

 

 

This picture is of typical Kurdish food, although at a table-d restaurant.

Everyday delights of life in Kurdistan

·         Multi-colored baby chicks in the bazaar. Genetic engineering?

·         The freedom to eat apricots with any course of a meal

·         Simple joy of the water arrival! Announced by a man in the back of a pick up, yelling through a bullhorn. Excitement over assurance of something as taken for granted as showers and dish washing

·         Attending a Kurdish university graduation while wearing Jili Kurdi, the bright red and gold traditional Kurdish formal garb. And the more impressive feat, managing to not trip for the entire afternoon.

·         Internet-free evenings to sit around the living room in good company for hours on end

·         Worshipping Jesus with His followers far across the world…although a bit closer to where He actually walked

·         Loquats fresh off the tree

·         New friends/role models/superheroes

·         Currency that gives the false impression you have thousands in your pocket

·         The concoction of smells in the bazaar. It can’t be described entirely accurately as a delight…

·         Feeling adult enough to work in a real grown-up, 9:00-5:00 office

·         Mandated bare feet in said office

·         Park benches shaped like half eaten fruit, complete with bite marks

·         Even the frustrations of adapting to existence in a completely foreign context; they are welcome and delightful in their strange own way

Back to kindergarten?

Yesterday my 5 year old friend Micah (secret aliases: Buzz Lightyear, imaginary jungle explorer, and Acadia’s personal Kurdish tutor) laughed at me as I painfully attempted to learn to count to ten, informing me that Kurdish kindergarteners are smarter than me!  I eventually succeeded, but today was again humbled by the realization of another kindergarten lesson I may need to relearn, this one a bit more significant.

Respect. It’s sung about, plastered on every corny middle school instructive poster, and trumpeted as our most basic right. I arrived in Iraq gung-ho on respecting and appreciating new culture. I’m a responsible traveler and world citizen, right?!  But guess what, counting to ten (or a million) in Kurdish may be the easier task.

Operating under a different system of “rules” concerning everything from when it’s permissible to drink water or put on chapstick, to how to hand money to a shopkeeper, to what to wear is exhausting! Only a short time into my stay here, and I had decided halfway through our bazaar adventure today that I’d rather to believe that other kindergarten lesson, “it doesn’t matter what other people think.”

In this case, it does matter. It matters because the compassionate and right thing to do considers how my actions affect those around me, even via what they think. Our conduct matters to the future of PLC, affecting their ability to continue to operate here. It matters because it has the power to either reinforce or redefine stereotypes of Americans, and the resultant equivalent, all Christians. It matters because if I don’t make an active effort to understand a people I know nothing about, I will never understand.

So instead of frustration at double standards I see, or uncomfortable situations in which I want to revert to familiar, easy American manners, I am working on being thankful for this reminder to not live by my own “rules.” If only I consciously considered how my actions affect those around me EVERY DAY of my life; under that definition, respect means much more than not stealing your neighbor’s crayons and Goldfish crackers.

6185 miles later

6185 miles: 3 hours of driving, 15 of flying, and 13 in layovers, (including many samples of Turkish Delight in the Istanbul airport) later, my summer in Iraq begins! Correction: it is not “my” summer, but I would love to share with all of you the predicaments and praises, surprises and struggles that I may encounter. More importantly, the story of the organization I am interning with, Preemptive Love Coalition, deserves to be heard; here are some other websites that will have information about this summer. More on that to come.

 http://preemptivelove.org/misc/blog/

https://www.facebook.com/preemptivelove

I’d rather not write too many jet-lagged first impressions, as I’m sure they will become more representative when they’re no longer firsts. Stay tuned for maybe the 4^th round. One important first though, Kurdish words! I can now successfully say “bash” (good) and “spas” (thank you). Sticking with the one syllables for now, and good polite words at that. I realized quickly today how much I relied on the ‘universal language of smiles’ to avoid offense or uncomfortable interactions in Argentina, despite the fact that I could at least attempt communication in Spanish. That doesn’t apply so much here, as cross-gender smiling is not an accepted sort of behavior. Walking through the streets, you see many women holding hands with other women, and men with men, and the atmosphere isn’t at all cold or unfriendly. Suppose that means that most days I should learn more than two words!

One more thought before I attempt to sleep off the jet lag. Last Sunday in church we discussed the merits of “blooming where you’re planted.”  After 31 hours in transit, I have to say I fully recognize that few places on the planet situate themselves further from my familiar garden than Iraq. Although this summer appears in opposition to that worthwhile advice, in some ways it still applies. I remain speechlessly thankful that I remain “rooted and established in love,” planted in a faithful God and many kinds of family that don’t depend on continent.  I see this love in the lack of fear in my incredibly supportive family, in the interest and prayers from all of you, and in a God who is big enough to garden in Minnesota and Iraq. And I look forward to ”blooming” here,  by learning and experiencing and hopefully acting out His Preemptive Love, growing into a better understanding and expression of how “wide, how long, how high, and how deep” it is. More than 6185 miles in all directions, I can tell you that much so far…