“Brother! Brother! Brother, please wake up!”
“Ohhh,” I groaned. “What’s wrong?”
“Brother, Tito is awfully sick.”
It was still dark, and it took a minute for my groggy brain to register that someone was howling across the village, the sound starting and stopping as regular as the ticking of a clock.
“Okay, take him to the clinic,” I mumbled as I dragged myself out of bed.
People frequently ask me what a typical day is like here on the Tawbuid Project. I find the question almost impossible to answer. In fact, the term “typical day” is almost an oxymoron here. To illustrate, I will attempt to record the events of a few recent days.
By the time I got to the clinic, Tito was being carried across the village in a hammock, escorted by no fewer than 20 of Balangabong’s finest young men. Every couple of seconds he pierced the night with a hair-raising shriek.
I find that in such situations it is absolutely imperative that I remain calm, and even bring a little humor. Upon assessing Tito, I felt certain that he was blowing the whole affair way out of proportion. There didn’t seem to be anything physically wrong with him. When I asked him questions, he would pause his screaming and answer me intelligently. His only complaint was that he felt dizzy and nauseated. “I think I’ve been poisoned!” he insisted. “Two days ago I poisoned rats at my farm. I must have swallowed some.”
The type of rat poison he used would have killed him in minutes if he had ingested any, so that cause was ruled out. At one point I needed to listen to his lungs, so I asked him to please stop screaming for a minute. He grudgingly complied. “Okay,” I told him when I was done, “you can start screaming again.” Everyone chuckled, and he looked a little sheepish. But within thirty seconds he was at it again.
Not coming up with a diagnosis, I loaded him up with charcoal and anti-nausea drugs. His screaming was making everyone nervous, though, and they weren’t willing to allow time for the medicines to take effect. When they asked me to take him to the hospital, I agreed. After all, better safe than sorry.
By the time the village men had carried the shrieking Tito to where my truck was parked, he was almost well, but we decided to continue on with the trip. At the hospital, Tito jumped out of the truck and told me that he was healed. I sat him down at the nurse’s station anyway and told him to describe his ailments to the nurse.
An hour later, while waiting for labs to come back, Tito blithely asked me what the effects of overdosing on painkillers might be. It turns out that he had been taking nearly three times the maximum dose of a dangerous painkiller, one that is now banned in the U.S. I groaned and went off to tell the doctor. Upon hearing this, she grumpily told Tito to stop medicating himself and summarily discharged him.
We are currently in the middle of drilling a well for the village. As I wearily returned to the village at about noon, I heard the drill engine die and went to check on the operation. A weld had broken, and the heavy gearbox would have to be dismantled and taken to the nearest welding shop in the lowlands. Someone had swiped our buffalo sledge, so we had to carry the gearbox down to the truck on our backs.
We returned from the welding shop and got the drill running again just before dark. It had been a productive day. We had actually gotten something done.
The next morning I started off with a truck full of people to build a hut for our newest missionary. She had just moved to a village on the edge of the highlands and had asked for our help getting set up. We drove as far as we could and then started walking. Before we had even gotten up the first hill, we met a group of people carrying a dangerously ill patient out. Some of them knew me, and they begged me to drive them to the nearest health center.
The rest of my group continued on while I started off on another grand adventure. The first health center we came to turned out to be a beautiful building with no one but a secretary inside. Continuing on to the nearest town, we finally came to a small hospital. The staff had no intention of hurrying, so we sat down to wait.
Two hours later, I was starving. I had sent my bag on ahead and had forgotten that all of my money was in it. All I had with me were my keys. One of my Tawbuid companions, guessing my predicament, graciously took me to a nearby hole-in-the wall restaurant. We were just about to sit down when the owner ran up, took the cracked stool that I was about to sit down on, and traded it for the new stool that my companion was about to use. I could read her thoughts: “He’s just Tawbuid. He doesn’t need nice things.”
I was instantly boiling mad at this insult to my people. Unfortunately, in this culture, reprimanding the owner in front of the whole restaurant would have nullified my point. Choosing the next best option, and one that made the same statement, I silently took back the broken stool and gave my Tawbuid companion the new one as the owner watched.
After we waited most of the day, the hospital told our patient to come back the next day. We got back to our missionary’s village just before dark.
For the next two days I pulled teeth and saw patients all day while my companions built our missionary’s house. Early on the morning that we were to return to Balangabong, a village elder came walking purposefully into the house that we were borrowing. In a gesture that was almost rude for a Tawbuid, he immediately sat down and began interrogating us. “What are you really doing here?” he asked. “Treating patients and pulling teeth is fine, but what are you really doing? Are you trying to convert my people? What are you hiding?”
We had known that tensions were building in the village. Several already wanted to be baptized while others were violently opposed to our planting a church there. Our missionary was the first to answer. “I moved back to this village to reclaim the land that is rightfully mine and to be close to my family that I have been away from for so long. You know that I am a Christian, however, and that I worship God every Sabbath.”
Picking up where she left off, I continued, “Jesus treated patients wherever He went. Many of them rejected Him in the end. Others accepted Him. Jesus never forced anyone to follow Him, though, even after He had helped them. If someone comes to me for help, I will help them as I am able. If that person wants to become a Christian, I will gladly accept him or her. However, like Jesus, I will never force anyone to be baptized, even if they have accepted my help.”
Seemingly satisfied with our answer, the village elder called one of his children over and asked me to treat him. Thank God, we had evaded getting kicked out of the village for another day.
We arrived home in Balangabong just before dusk. I learned that the well drill had broken again earlier that afternoon and would have to be taken back to town to be welded again. I was physically and emotionally exhausted, but several people were waiting on my porch to talk to me. I knew they wouldn’t leave until late that night. I would have precious few hours to sleep and pray before another “typical” day started at or before the crack of dawn.
“Please Lord,” I begged as I drifted off to sleep that night. “Please, I’ve had enough typical days lately. I could really use a full night’s sleep without another emergency patient.” But as I drifted off into blissful sleep, it seemed like I heard a howling in the night, and someone calling, “Brother! Brother! Wake up Brother!”
