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Velcro Shoes: Emily in Chad

 

 

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Text Box: Emily Wilkens is a student missionary serving at Bere Hospital in Chad, Africa. She is serving with several other American students, but lives in a hut with a native family. Her letters have all been an inspiration to us, and this one especially touched our hearts. This morning, I am 23.   I came home last night after a sweet birthday celebration of puffy chocolate cake (we were trying to make brownies..but TIA...this is Africa. ;) After some good laughs with the girls I unlocked my hut and started getting settled for bed.   As I climbed into my little bug-proof tent, I realized that I had done laundry earlier that day and that my sheets and blanket were hanging on a line over at the hospital.   Hmmm...no sheets.   No blankets.   I was too tired to walk over and get them.  Plus, the hot evening air tricked me into thinking that it would be hot all night long.  I was wearing my Indian pants/capris and so my ankles were quite cold.  I grabbed the Santa outfit that my mom had sent at Christmas (good times) and wrapped it around my feet.   Naively, I hoped I'd sleep all through the night without any blankets.   Wrong.  I woke up freezing.   Really freezing.  I pulled my arms inside the body portion of my shirt and tucked the sleeves behind my back so no drafts of freezingness would come in.  I just tried not to think about it and I made it to the morning.   I woke up with this bitter, bitter taste of Quinine (malaria pills) in my mouth.  Yes malaria has caught me.  I got up and thought,  "Emily, that was a rough night.   But hey!   You're 23!" I went outside and looked around.  I judged from the sun that it was about seven in the morning.   I went back into my hut and grabbed my running shoes.   I banged them on the ground to get all the scorpions out (ok, so none have ever fallen out but I have seen scorpions in my room and I can just imagine how much it would hurt if one stung my toe) and sat down in my doorway to pull them on.   I went over the middle house and brushed my teeth really good to get rid of the Quinine taste!  As I was putting my toothbrush back on my shelf I saw a bunch of the shoes which I still had not given out. So many of you sent shoes and it has been SO fun slowly distributing them to kids who I know are going to use them.  I want to tell you my thought process about the shoes right now and I'm a little ashamed of it but I think it's valuable to tell.  So don't think less of me. :) I got shoes of all kinds in the mail.   I got Nike, Polo Sport, Keds, all different, new and used.   Amazing!  Two of the pairs of shoes were Velcro and older.  They were navy blue and just old school; comfortable, but not sporty.  I kept thinking that I didn't know who to give those to because all the kids would be wanting the nice new running shoes and I thought they'd get upset if they were the ones who got the old school Velcro ones. (I had forgotten the appreciative and content attitude of the Africans.) My dad has always inspired me to not worry about what other people think.   He wears things that are so old and we laugh at him because his light blue work jacket is SO old...a complete wreck (sorry dad :)), and our cross country ski set is from the 70's and our helmets for biking are ancient...like mushroom style.  :)  But I love that about my parents.   It's not about having the nicest things..people will always have nicer things.   So this is why I am a bit shamed that I looked down on the blue Velcro shoes at all. Longwinded...I know that was longwinded...sorry. Anyway. This morning, when I saw the Velcro, something clicked and I thought:   Kousummia! Kousimmia led the pack the other evening.   Barefoot runners. We were running little trails on the flat, dry rice fields when Kousimmia said, "We are all birds!"   He threw his one arm out to the side birdishly in flight while the other, long ago amputated down to a knob, flapped under his shirt sleeve.  Everyone followed his lead and for the next 3 minutes straight we WERE like a stream of geese flying south, flapping our arms.  These kids didn't even THINK about how silly we looked.  They loved it.  So did I.

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