Since it’s an aspect of my life here, though not exactly glamorous or inspiring, I thought I’d share a little bit about my migraines.
When I stop to think about it (and when I’m not in the throes of one), migraines are pretty fascinating. If I didn’t have a label for what was happening to me and hadn’t learned anything about it, I’d think I was dying or going crazy.
It starts for me with what’s called a “prodrome”. This is like warning signs that let migraneurs know that an attack is coming. It seems to be different for everyone, but for me I will often get hot flashes, either depression or super high energy for about a day, sometimes sudden extreme fatigue. I usually just feel “off” and can’t explain why until I wonder “maybe I’m going to get a migraine…”
Then comes the aura phase. I’ve only had a handful of migraines preceded by visual aura, but they were quite disturbing each time. I will generally get a flashing line over one side of my line of sight, as if I had looked into a bright light and then looked away. Except it hangs on for about 15 minutes, growing, until eventually my vision goes completely dark on that one side. By this time I have probably swallowed a bunch of drugs because I know that some serious head pain is on its way.
Other times I will have a sense of mild vertigo, either hunger or nausea before the headache hits.
Then comes the pounding pain on one side (the ones on the right tend to be more painful, whereas the ones on the left make me feel more sick to my stomach). This often spreads to the whole head. If I’ve taken meds during the aura stage it usually is not too horrible or last terribly long (a few hours rather than a day or two). If I wake up with pain, though, I know I’m in for a rough day.
My absolute worst migraine of all time had me shivering, shaking, one hand gone weak and tingly, and in horrible pain. I really thought I was having a stroke. But I was able to form coherent sentences, so I figured I was okay. My blood pressure was so low when standing that I had to keep prostrate for most of the day. It was no fun.
After the headache is over (from a couple hours to 2-3 days later), then I go into “postdrome”, the recovery or “hangover” phase. This week that meant two days of fatigue, needing 10 hours of sleep each night, lack of energy or motivation to do anything. Again asking myself “what’s wrong with me?”, confused, until realizing “maybe I’m just recovering from the trauma my body just went through.”
The good news for me is that these attacks happen only about once a month rather than once a week, which was my experience at my worst, during my first term on the field. And I’ve gotten better at identifying the warning signs, the triggers (though some of these I can’t control, like weather changes), and how to best treat them. Unfortunately, I still get them far more often and more severe here in Bangkok than in the States. But I’ve done all I know to do to try to help myself and I think this is just something I have to deal with as part of my life here. It has definitely served to keep me humble, as Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” did, depending on God’s strength in the midst of my weakness.
… for my former slum community of Permsup. The long-threatened road construction that is evicting the community is now becoming a reality. As I walk from my community of Phothong to the bus stop every day I pass these bulldozers and am reminded to pray for the many inhabitants who do not have plans yet of where they will relocate to. At the pace I’m seeing the construction encroach on the sports park adjacent to the slum, Permsup has weeks left at best. Please keep them in your prayers.
In the back you can see one of Permsup’s houses and just how close the bulldozers are.
Below is my report after 3 months of being back in Bangkok since my furlough. Updates, photos, prayer requests!
The needs in the slums of Bangkok are immense. The questions about how to best serve in the slums are endless. It can feel overwhelming to try to discover what seem like the most pressing felt needs, what the roots of those problems are, how to best work toward solutions without creating dependency, how to balance addressing physical needs with the spiritual…. etc.
And in the midst of this I feel very small and kind of foolish. I have no advanced degree, very little training in urban work, my health is unpredictable at best, I am not charismatic and I’m not all that great with kids.
But I’m beginning to see that this is all not nearly as important as I tend to believe. My experience at our house church last week taught me this in a new way.
As usual, we had dozens of children in my house, eager to worship and learn about the Creation story (our theme for the month), and also bouncing off the walls. I felt particularly exhausted that evening (it turned out that I probably had mono, so no wonder) which made me feel even more ineffective than usual. Getting the kids to sit and be quiet enough that I could give instructions without screaming was nearly impossible, let alone teaching about God in a way that makes sense to them and is appealing, or addressing their many emotional and physical needs.
In the midst of the chaos, and my tiredness, I felt like God was bringing a couple of the children in particular to my attention. They were two of the smallest ones, more malnourished, dirtier, more often violent and out-of-control, clearly suffering emotional scars caused at home.
I held each one of them in my lap, and it was like all the turmoil in their little bodies melted away for awhile. Normally they cannot sit for more than a minute, but these two each spent a good ten minutes without moving as I held them, as if they were starved for this physical touch.
And I’ve recently noticed, more than I did before, how parents and older siblings often push away these little ones when they try to get close, or pretend to not even see them when they return home from work. The stress and despair their families live under leaves them with little ability to love their youngest members.
I’m beginning to realize that this is something I can give. I may feel overwhelmed by the extent of the brokenness in my slum, I may feel too tired to play high-energy games with the kids, but I can hold them sometimes. I can affirm them and pay attention to them and in that way help them to experience a kind of unconditional love that hopefully will lead them to the Source of that love.
And it reminds me this love and this Lover are the most valuable gifts I have to give to this slum. Something I know in my mind, but which God continues to gracefully teach my heart, with experiences like these.
Feeling very little control over my personal space is probably the difficulty I struggle the most with here.
For example. I love the kids in my slum, they have each found a special place in my heart, but when over a dozen of them make the main room in my house the public playroom, make as much noise as possible, and see anything in the refrigerator as obviously put there for their consumption… I start to go a little crazy.
So a major accomplishment I made before going on furlough was learning how to set boundaries with the kids. When the door is open, they can come in. When it’s closed, that means I want to be alone. If I’m disciplined to not give into their puppy-dog pouts when I really need my space, this system works well.
But children are only one imposition on my personal space. Three mornings in a row I awoke to discover rats had come into my bedroom and made off with random objects, of seemingly no use to a rodent. Mosquito coils, for instance. They swiped my stash right out of its box. Or a plastic bag from a grocery store. A visitor’s toothbrush. Come on! Sometimes I think they’re purely out to torment me.
In the States, it is a valid assumption that the things in your bedroom will be there in the morning. Not so here. You also don’t need to protect yourself from insects, or at least convince yourself that they won’t find their way into your bed tonight.
I sleep underneath a mosquito net, tucked tightly around my floor mat to keep out not just mosquitoes but bigger things too, like roaches or spiders or even rats. Well, that illusion of security was taken away as well, when I woke up the other day with a cockroach running across my hand. I proceeded to have to fight it out from under my net with a broom, and then convince my nerves to calm back down enough to go back to sleep.
I hear the details of my neighbors’ personal lives because our plywood walls do nothing to block out sound. A couple nights last week one of my neighbors was drunk and throwing up out his window into the swamp that separates his house from mine. My first week back one of the slum dogs had 7 puppies which yipped all night long, keeping me awake.
I often end up sharing more with my slum than I would like to.
In the midst of this, it struck me how truly amazing it is that Phothong has welcomed me in the way it has. Moving into a slum is more like joining a large family, moving into someone else’s living room, sharing in the joys and difficulties that family faces. I came not only as a stranger, but a complete foreigner, barely able to communicate, different not only in appearance but in mannerisms, values, lifestyle… I’ve tried to adapt as much of the culture and lifestyle as I can (and still honor God), but I will always be a foreigner.
I see and experience up close both the beauty and the shame in the slum, and yet my neighbors have welcomed me, a stranger, into that. As one of my Thai friends there said recently, I’m “part of the family now”. That is very humbling to me.
So I’m praying that I would continue to reflect Jesus in the midst of the stress this lifestyle places on me. In the ways Jesus was able to remain patient and loving while crowds pressed in on him, and at other times retreat to be alone with his Father, I long to also have that balance. Pray that I would be so tapped into God’s love and peace that the things most likely to bring out my worst would instead cause grace and compassion to flow.
Go to my photo album page to see photos from our May team retreat to Kanchanaburi. This is such a beautiful country.
One of the major works God has been doing in me over furlough is giving me peace over who he created me to be.
To me, the stereotypical (and ideal, I’ve believed for so long) missionary is narrowly defined. Extroverted, people-oriented, spontaneous, able to endure anything, endowed with the more “showy” gifts (e.g. healing, evangelism, leadership, etc.).
So I have tried hard to be that person. But in reality, I am task-oriented, practical, introverted, have a weak immune system, and am likely gifted in things like teaching, administration, and maybe prayer. If you are familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality inventory, I am an ISTJ.
In my “class” at the Servant Partners training last year, after taking a personality test, I was the sole person out the ten of us to fall into the “task-oriented, introverted” category. The gifted woman leading us told me that my personality type is seen as stereotypically male as well, and can be subtly (or not-so-subtly) undervalued in society when a woman possesses it. I would say that in my campus ministry chapter this personality type was underrepresented, and the people on whom the spotlight fell were mostly the extroverted, evangelistic type. For these reasons and others, I have felt like I needed to be more like that type of person to be more greatly used by God.
But during this furlough God has been showing me ways that my particular makeup is really a blessing to my team, and to the Thais, in Bangkok. There are tasks and projects these past two years that would not have gotten done or would have been done less efficiently if I had not been there. There are Thais who I am particularly able to connect with on a deep level because I tend to focus on a few and invest a lot in them, and because my personality type meshes well with them. I am able to analyze plans and systems and spot potential challenges or problems that others may not have anticipated. Computers come naturally to me, I enjoy poring over books on Buddhist philosophy, Thai grammar, the roots of poverty. And these are all good things.
Where I previously saw this type of person, or these characteristics in me, as less valuable “parts of the body,” I now firmly believe “God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be?” (1 Corinthians 12:18-19)
So I’m learning to embrace who I am and invite God to use those parts of me. I believe he longs to have not a crippled Body as his witness, or one where feet are trying to act like hands (creates a funny mental image, though). I am being much more faithful living out of who God actually made me to be, rather than as someone I would prefer to be. And he is even helping me to enjoy my particular makeup and gifts, and to be glad that I am this way.
As I head back to the field, my role will look different. I will be taking on more managerial tasks with our foundation, working on much needed efforts such as budget, promotions, grant-writing, procedural methods. I will be working with the new business we are starting, a temp agency to both employ and train slum-dwellers to advance in the formal economy. I will continue as our team’s webmaster, and also help with a new media project the Servant Partners’ founder is pioneering. I will help with teaching in settings such as our leaders trainings and house church meetings. I will still live in a slum, seek to love and serve my neighbors, but will leave most of the spontaneous evangelism and community organizing to those Thais and team members who are gifted in those areas.
I am excited to see how God will use me as I submit my gifts to him.
I just stumbled across this website today. They’ve got a pretty amazing selection of new and used books, ship anywhere in the US for free, and worldwide for $2.97 per book. Better yet, profits from sales go toward literacy programs around the world and in the States. They’re also taking steps to support renewable energy, reforestation, and other environmentally-friendly practices.
I mostly just love that I found a place that will send me cheap English-language books to Bangkok!
Here are some more thoughts that have been accumulating since returning to the States after two+ years in Bangkok:
1. We are so isolated here in America. It is not difficult at all to go from bedroom to car to cubicle back to car and home again without really connecting with anyone. In Bangkok I could barely walk two houses down without having a conversation with someone. The food venders I frequented all knew my name, lots of the hospital employees know me (well, I might be special case in that area…), taxi drivers love to talk, I shared most of my meals with neighbors, friends or at least friendly market frequenters. Here you can even check yourself out at the grocery store without saying a word to anyone. I sometimes feel like I’m living in a bubble, breaking through it only on previously-scheduled coffee dates or movie nights.
2. Why are there 50 different types of toothpaste??
3. Maybe this is also true in Bangkok and I didn’t notice it as much, but clothing fashion here is pretty crazy. I mean, I was only gone for two years, but already I feel like someone truly catering to popular fashion would have pitched my entire wardrobe by now.
4. Thanks to genetic engineering, preservatives, and lots of other artificial devices, the grapes here have no seeds, produce doesn’t go bad in three days, certain foods taste better, and I don’t have to stick my bread in the refrigerator. I have mixed feelings about all that…
5. What is it exactly that has caused my health and energy level to improve so much in the past few months? Lots of sleep, less pollution, no mosquitos, changes in medication? Or is part of it the distance I have here from the immense suffering in the world? “…wanting to alleviate pain without sharing it is like wanting to save a child from a burning house without the risk of being hurt.”– Henri Nouwen
Feeds
