James Judge - Unfamiliar Territory

UNFAMILIAR TERRITORY

UNFAMILIAR
TERRITORY

James Judge, M.D.

Copyright 2001 James Judge

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations used in this book are from The King James Version of the Bible (KJV).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Judge, James, 1953
Unfamiliar territory / James Judge.
p. cm.

ISBN 0-8499-1609-9

1. Judge, James, 1953- 2. Missions, MedicalKenya. 3. Medical missionariesKenyaBiography. 4. HospitalsKenya. I. Title

RA991.K4 J84 2001
601'.92dc21
[B]

2001026967

Printed in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 06 05 04 03 02 01

For Emily, Katie, and Jenny

Once upon a time there were three beautiful princesses,
and together, they went on a great adventure to a strange
and wondrous place that was far, far, away.

A place called Africa.

All that is gold does not glitter;
not all those that wander are lost.

J. R. R. TOLKIEN

CONTENTS

A note of thanks to the many people who contributed to our experience overseas and the book that grew out of it.

To all the people at W Publishing Group, for your support and encouragement. Especially to Ami McConnell for your gracious tolerance of my process, and to Bridgett OLannerghty for everything you did to make the book better.

To Cindy, for everything you did to enhance this book and for everything you do to enhance my life. Both would be severely diminished without you. For the room you created to make this book happen, for the sacrifices you make every day.

To Emily, Katie, and Jenny. My favorite audience, my heroes. For your commitment to His purposes in this world, for your loving hearts.

To Michael Buckley, for your review of the manuscript, which allowed me to see the stories through new eyes.

To all the people who were so gracious to us during this year away, a belated thank you. To Wes Farah, to Jack Zimmermann, to all the doctors at the clinic. To the people at World Medical Mission and Africa Inland Mission. To those who loved us while we were there in Africa. To the Faders and the Bowers and the Bransfords and the Bustrums and the Howards and to Bryan Hagerman. To the Snyders, who made the year even more precious. To the students of Moffatt Bible College and to all the staff at Kifabe Medical Center and Rift Valley Academy who allowed us the privilege of sharing a moment in their lives.

I t was only one year. From this side of it, it seems absurd to have wrestled with it as much as I did, but at the time, spending that year in that way seemed like a high-risk venture. It is only now, looking back ten years later, that I see just exactly what the risk really was. In reality, the greatest risk was that which comes of listening too carefully to common sense and making ordinary choices. A risk made all the more dangerous by the fact that it tends to masquerade as being no risk at all. The greatest risk we faced was that we might have said no and missed the year altogether.

It was a year of living out of context. A year of living in unfamiliar territory, and something about being there, without the familiar props of our personal culture, distilled us down to our simple selves. Evenings that before had been jammed full of perfectly good things like work and Brownies and gymnastics and church, would give way to evenings filled with something even betterone another. The year would become the line running through the middle of our familys life.

It was time outside of time. A time that stripped us of all things familiar, leaving us holding to nothing else except the unshakable essence of three things: our essential love for one another, our most basic faith, and our own unspoken hopes. It was our time, it was a gift, and by it we would measure the rest of our days.

VOCATUS

Vocatus atque non vocatus Deus aderit.
Bidden or unbidden, God is present.

CARL JUNG

I t was three in the morning, and our midnight flight was halfway between Amsterdam and Nairobi. We were suspended thirty thousand feet up, timeless, in a muted world somewhere between here and there. As the jet cut its way through the night sky, the hypnotic one-toned white noise of the 767 pulled me toward sleep. I scanned the darkened cabin. Mostly dimmed lights all around. The flight attendants had disappeared. The sleeping passengers were all curled in various interpretations of the fetal position, looking as if they were seeking some way of becoming smaller. With insufficient blankets pulled up tightly underneath their chins and tiny pillows just barely visible, they looked like a room full of oversized children, finally down for their naps.

I looked over at my family in the row beside me. There was Emily, our twelve-year-old, looking intense even as she slept. She was the passionate child, the gregarious one, the one not fearless but brave. The child who could turn anything into a marvelous adventure; who could Huck Finn us all into believing that selling pizzas for a school fund-raiser was the most exciting thing a person could possibly think to do, no one more convinced of it than she.

Next to her was Kate, our fourth-grader, as tenuous as Emily was unquestioning. She was the feeler, the one asking all the questions Emily had forgotten to ask. The child given to vacillating moods of brooding and hilarity, rarely providing any storm warning as to which was on the horizon. The child I had the hardest time getting close to. The one who frightened me, just a little, maybe because she reflected a part of me I kept tightly locked away. Sometimes small mirrors have a way of accentuating your flaws.

Then there was Jenny, age six, the child born happy. The child for whom today was enough. The child with the gift of being satisfied, dreaming her happy, contented dreams.

At the end of the row was Cindy, my wife. What was going through her head as she laid there? The small crows feet between her eyes that were always present as she struggled toward sleep were gone now. I was glad. Hopefully she had escaped the never-ending mothers list playing perpetually in her head. She and the girls seemed so innocent, sleeping as peaceful children, unaware they had any option except to trust.

I pushed my seat back and tried to let the drone and the vibration lull me to sleep, but instead I tacked back and forth across the line that separates waking from dreams. It was the first day and the first night of what would be a year in unfamiliar territory. Territory not bounded so much by lines on a map as by wonders and struggles and challenges we had never faced before. I was bobbing up and down in a fathers private world of thoughts; that gray, underground sea of questions and fears fathers keep mostly to themselves. What was I doing? I had uprooted my family and was taking them halfway around the world to Kenya, where I would fill in for a year as a volunteer doctor at a mission hospital. As I twisted in my seat, it wasnt long before I found myself slogging, one more time, through the all-too-familiar mire of second-guessing. How sure was I this was the right thing to do? What was at the bottom of it all, anyway? Was it the first step on a bigger journey? What was really driving me? Was it primarily a desire to help, or was there something else? Something a little less noble. Did it matter, one way or the other? Whoever said you got points taken off for mixed motivation? If I was wrong about all this, would there be a price to pay? And who besides me would be paying?