Moving Mountains

Suzanne took this beauty during our trip to Limbe - what faith
this team has, such an inspiration!

I think this is the first time I knew what the title of my post would be before I wrote it. The last couple of weeks have been such an amazing testimony to the greatness and faithfulness of God. The lyrics of this song have been running over and over in my head, I’ve seen you move, You move the mountains, and I believe, I’ll see You do it again. I don’t think I had ever seen such tangible examples of God moving mountains until I came to Advance. Months of meetings about a particular issue, lots of paperwork and red tape, one persons' belief that God would move this mountain, intense frustration when it seemed like this is an insurmountable obstacle, going through the necessary motions but hoping it won’t be needed, a whole teams' prayer, one critical meeting – and the mountain has been thrown into the sea. I had a discussion with someone recently about how sometimes the Advance team gets put on a pedestal but in all honesty, we have no idea what we’re doing, God is doing every single thing. It’s an incredibly humbling experience. For every task on your list, it’s the first time you’ve ever done such a thing, there is an intense learning curve, by the time you finally master it or figure it out, it’s done and onto the next task and you most likely will never have to do that task ever again. 

Trying to sort out TB tests...

That’s what HR has felt like at least. When I felt like we finally had a grasp on interviews and the flow of things, they were over and we moved onto training. Training was quite an experience. First we had our Day Crew call everyone and tell them we would like to offer them a job, could they please come to training on such and such date at 8:00am. Please do not be late. Well guess what? Day 1, 8:00am, less than 1/3 of the people are there. 8:15am, it’s starting to fill up, about 2/3. 8:30am, I’m starting, most people are there but we’re still missing 5-6 people. In the end, all those people made their way to the interview site (some at 11:00am), and we told them we would call them later that day. We must have really scared them because they were so relieved when we actually called and asked if they would like to come to the training the next day at 8:00am SHARP. None of those people were late the next day. This happened almost every day. It would be 8:20am and people were just strolling along, make their way over. The best image was when Joan would stand outside waiting for people and at 8:01am, she saw someone coming and said, let’s go, hurry up, everyone is waiting for you! The person started running until she smiled and said, I’m just kidding, you’re okay. Once I explained that the ship uses a Western idea of time and that if your shift starts at 8:00am, you should probably be there at 7:45am, I think they all understood. It’s just a culturally different idea of time.

Manda took this awesome panorama of all our Day Crew gathered on Friday. Get excited, these people are amazing!

We asked them all to come back on Friday afternoon at 1:00pm for a special presentation from the Ministry of Youth and Civic Education about Volunteerism, and I would say 3/4 of them were there by 1:00pm, which made me smile. It was at this meeting that I realized how in over my head I was. After the Ministry representative had spoken, I had some final housekeeping/paperwork things to take care of with everyone. I got up and essentially set up stations, saying if you still needed this, go see Joan, if you needed this thing, go see Jacquino, etc. Well, let me tell you, it was pure pandemonium. I honestly didn’t realize how many people we’d hired until they were all in one room together. And they were all rushing towards me, asking for further clarifications, or having questions, or needing a special exemption, etc. In my head, time is precious, and I didn’t want to keep them waiting longer than they needed to be. That is not how things are here. My day crew explained this to me afterwards. People are fine to wait, they are used to waiting. What they need is very clear instructions, repeated several times. What I should have done was pick one thing that needed to be done, read out each name, have them complete the task and then move onto the next task. But my cultural bias towards speed and efficiency made me blind towards all of this. I hope I’ve learned my lesson for next time. 

I'll have to get the boys to teach me the art of remaining clean
while working.

It’s interesting because you think it would get easier over time, but I think I’ve actually found it more difficult this last two weeks. At first, everything is new and interesting, but I reached a point where being constantly confronted with different cultural and societal norms really got to me. At home, I’m not forced to wrestle with these things multiple times a day. One example: when we went to pick up the chairs we were renting for training, we went with two cars and all six of us on the HR team. Getting the bill was taking a while so I went in to check in on the boys, and was offered a chair by every single man in that room. I politely declined multiple times, I was happy standing. Finally the oldest gentleman looked at me and told me that it was unacceptable that I was standing. I just smiled at him and walked away. Then we went outside to load the chairs onto the cars. I went to reach for some chairs to help and one man stopped me and said absolutely not, this is not for women (or something along those lines). At this point, I had to walk far, far away and give myself a long time out before I said something I would regret. I understand that most of it comes from a place of being gentleman, and taking care of women, etc. but that fact that what I want, my preference to stand or help, doesn’t matter at all, is infuriating. I know I don’t have to help, I wouldn’t if I didn’t want to – I want to help, doing work together builds team morale and camaraderie. I think the reason this particular incident got to me so much was that it was a build up of weeks of being treated like this and I really couldn’t handle one more thing. Jacquino and Nicolas are amazing though because they could tell I was upset, even if they didn’t know exactly why, and when we got to the interview site to unload the chairs, they said, hey boss, want to climb up and pass the chairs down to us? So I did. [As a side note, when we had to return to get more chairs, I hopped up before anyone could stop me and loaded all the chairs up, and when one man protested, I just smiled and continued working, and heard his friend say, les femmes sont fortes! Women are strong. That’s all I have to say about that]. 

I think Manda would have loved to double the chair stack...

Over the last few weeks we’ve had more and more people arriving, to the point where I am working downstairs some mornings and then new people come down the stairs! We now have 13 people in the house and I think it will be 17 by the end of the week. It’s really getting to crunch time (the joke is that the Ship arriving is like a baby being born), and most of the non-work time is spent going to our weekly team dinner or going to the gym (but lately not even time for that…). It was a nice feeling last week when a few of us went to the gym on the weekend and afterwards KJ remarked, Renee, everyone knows you there. You walk in and they all come greet you, it’s like your little community! I loved that observation. Lifting crosses all cultural barriers apparently. Beyond that, most time is spent staying in touch with people at home and on the Ship. I’m glad I’ve been able to spend time talking with the new Comms team because it makes me really excited for the Ship to come and helps me get ready to do this for a whole new field service. I’m so excited for the Crew to meet the Day Crew – I feel privileged to have been given all this responsibility and I feel really invested in the Day Crew and their success. I can’t wait to see all the ways that they will impact and change the Crew and patients, and all the ways we will transform them. God is ready to do a big thing here in Cameroon and to use every person who is ready to be used. So thankful to be a small part of that!

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus ~Romans 3:23-24

A late night picture taken in memory of an amazing man who loved deeply and impacted everyone around him.