The other day a friend, who had recently left our floating home sent me an instant message asking how ship life was going for me. The tricky thing about instant messaging is that it forces you to summarize oceans of emotions together into brief, cohesive sentences. I had no problem.

“You know…..the same….amazingly wonderful and horribly challenging all at the same time”

It’s just how it is. The wonderful side tips the scales, obviously. I can think of nothing that I would rather be doing than living this life, doing what I am doing. It is overwhelmingly rewarding and downright incredible to spend the better part of all of my wakeful hours contributing to something in which I believe so strongly.

But, the challenge part of it all is just as existent, and I am beginning to think, just as important as the rest of it.

We are taught from such a young age that through trial, strength is developed. The preacher at church last Sunday morning reminded us that “…when troubles come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing” (James 1:2-3). His words came as an insightful conclusion to a challenging, yet entertaining morning. Rainy season has arrived in Togo. When we woke up and saw the massive amounts of water streaming from the sky with intense determination, we briefly considered bailing on our plans to go to church. But that would have meant we missed the important part – the part where our group, plus about 25 of the members of the congregation bailed a foot of water out of the church, so that church could happen. As I looked around at the group, in probably what is their only set of church clothes, soaked head to toe, using buckets and serving bowls and towels to defend their church home from water damage, I couldn’t help but be touched by the devotion and determination displayed.

When you care about something, you work for it….sacrifice for it….put your heart into it. And if you have to work, sacrifice, and put your heart into something, you can’t help but end up caring deeply about it.

Our approach to adversity is peculiar really: despite the fact that it is entirely inevitable and most often, completely out of our control, we dread its presence. And because we are in the habit of convincing ourselves to believe in a standard of utopia, we feel slighted when it shows its unfortunate face. The thing is - there is not a single one among us who has been promised a life free of trouble. The Bible doesn’t say if you face troubles, but when.

As I reflect on these last couple of months, I wonder what has changed me the most…where I learned the most….what will stick with me and define who I become. O’brien, Aissa, Tani, Abel, O’brien’s mama, fat baby Marius, bartering for hours with vendors in markets, being squished in taxis with seven others, working in areas that aren’t my comfort zone, having to make “bunk beds” in the wards to fit all the patients in, eating foods that I didn’t think I would like, trying and failing at walking across Togo, failing miserably at communicating in French – small trials that forced me to grow and learning from people who have encountered much greater trials than I have yet to face.

As much as the anticipation of adversity can be overwhelming, I would argue that we are completely dependant on it. A life of perfection on this earth is, at best, a falsehood. Trials will come. They will hurt. They might leave scars. But they will make us people of substance who are intensely purpose-driven in their passions.

Two years ago, Africa changed me. It changed the way I thought about what it means to be human. Perhaps at the time, I thought the change was like a one-time graduation from naivety to enlightenment. It seems however, that as so many before me have cautioned, learning really is a never-ending journey.

These last couple of weeks, one of our patients - an absolutely delightful little girl named Tani - has completely changed the way I think about beauty.

Physical beauty is one of those forces whose power over us we hate to admit. When you stop and think about it, basing our opinions of one another on a somewhat arbitrary criterion such as beauty seems not only superficial, but also simplistic and downright cruel. However, the unfortunate reality is that it does have a very significant impact on our interpersonal relations. We are innately attracted to beauty. It’s one of the reasons we do what we do here on the Africa Mercy….Because eliminating a feature that is grossly deforming means that a person can go from living a life of disgrace to living a life of acceptance.

Tani came to stay with us around the same time as Aissa was on the ward. I distinctly remember my first day with her. I came on for my charge shift and one of the first things Ali said to me was “Check out bed 8. She’s beautiful. You’re gonna love her!”

I turned my attention to the new little girl in bed 8. Tani didn’t look beautiful to me. Having been in West Africa for a little while now, and seeing what I hope are some of the most disfiguring cases out there, I credit myself with having some degree of tolerance for the worst of it. I would like to think it takes a lot to shock me at this point. But, Tani did.

Though nobody really knows the story of when or how, at some point in her 9-years of life, Tani’s face was burned off. She was left with bits of a mouth, and one eye. Though most of her little body was spared, one of her hands, which she probably used to catch herself when she fell into the fire, was left mangled. To be completely brutal, at first glance, Tani was hard to look at.

Until my experiences with this little one, I don’t know if I ever truly believed that beauty comes from within. It always sounded nice, and makes us all feel better about our imperfections, but then again, we make stuff up all the time to make ourselves feel better. But, Tani made it real for me, because my friend was right. Within 5 minutes of encountering Tani, I absolutely loved her. I like kids, as a rule, but Tani has a special quality within her that is unmatched. She makes it absolutely impossible to see anything but her inner beauty. Every day I spend with Tani, she grows more and more radiant. Her loving, joyful spirit can almost not be contained within her tiny little body.

Looking at her, you would expect that she would repulse others, but Tani cannot help but do exactly the opposite. Her presence is actually magnetic on the ship. Our head chef came up from the ward last night and announced:

“I just spent 10 minutes playing with Tani. It changed my life.”

It probably did. And it defies everything I used to think about beauty. Because Tani has a beauty that is legitimate, undeniable, and worth so much more than I could have ever realized without her.

In order for a weekend trip away from the ship to truly qualify as typical, there are several criteria that must be met. They are as follows*:

• Just minutes after your departure, the driver will need to stop at the station, where you will have to...

a) Renegotiate the fare (which will have inevitably gone up from what you originally agreed upon)

b) Pick up a wingman

c) Sit around in the vehicle with all the doors open while the driver and the wingman exchange pleasantries with everyone else at the station.

d) Get gas – which, as a side note, cannot be done in combination with any of the above tasks.

• You will begin the trip in a mildly uncomfortable seat, sitting relatively close to one of your friends, with some degree of leg / breathing room. You will conclude the road trip sitting on someone’s lap (in the most ideal scenario, this someone is a wet stranger that you picked up along the road), unable to feel your legs, and with your arms either directly out in front of you, straight up in the air, or wrapped around one of your other twenty travel-mates.

• Numerous times along the way, the driver will pull over to the side of the road. The wingman will hop out of his seat (which is always conveniently located next to the one sliding door) and disappear under the vehicle for about 20 seconds with a bottle of discoloured water. Immediately after he resurfaces, the vehicle starts in motion and he hops back in. Nobody has ever been able to come up with an explanation for this one.

• When you arrive at the hotel, the first staff member you encounter at the desk will respond to your attempts to explain who you are with complete bewilderment. After a couple of confused minutes, someone else (usually of higher power) emerges and provides you with some reassurance that you did, in fact, make reservations. These reservations will most likely not resemble what you intended them to, but they do usually exist.

• You will then carry on to have a fantastically entertaining, re-energizing weekend with your friends in a setting that makes you consider throwing it all away and living in the jungle, under a waterfall for the rest of your life.

Thankfully for us this weekend, every single one of these criteria was met. Although it is always nice when things play by the rules, it was of particular importance this weekend, since Ali’s parents are on the ship right now, and she was committed to giving them a truly African experience. We had an incredible weekend marketing, swimming, eating, hiking, and playing in the waterfall. And, it truly did represent all of the things we love about Africa. TIA baby!

*this list is not exhaustive.

Life on the Africa Mercy is different than life at home.

We sleep, eat, work, and play on the same 500-foot floating box – having very little contact with what many people consider the “real world”. This combination of factors, as you might imagine, leads to a wide variety of highly improbable and somewhat bizarre scenarios. Often times, I find it amusing to laugh at the prospect of a similar situation occurring at home. Like last week, we thought one of our friends might have a maggot infestation in his foot, so we all gathered in one of the hospital wards to hack at it in hopes of witnessing a live creature crawling out. (Disappointingly, it turned out to just be a regular old infection, so our efforts were in vain).

But then other times, things happen here that make you feel just like a regular person, with regular relationships, pastimes, family, and social habits. Sunday night gave me that special sort of feeling. I don’t remember where the idea came from, but somewhere along the line, our little group of friends - who, in all honesty feel much more like family at this point - decided that, in honour of either Christmas or Thanksgiving (it never really became clear to me which of the two we were trying to imitate), we would cook ourselves a proper dinner. It took about 2 weeks of gathering ingredients and the creativity displayed in the process was creative to say the least (we even considered having a day volunteer buy, kill, and pluck a turkey from the market for us) but, in the end, we were able to prepare for ourselves a full-course turkey dinner with everything that a turkey dinner should have, pumpkin pie and ice cream included. The boys transformed our Queen’s Lounge (aka, the one fancy room on the ship – reserved mostly for the important people that come to visit) into a beautiful dining area, set the mood with Frank Sinatra, and served us fluorescent blue mock wine. We ate until we couldn’t anymore, washed dishes together, and played cranium until 11:00 at night. And I walked away feeling less like a girl a million miles away from her family, friends, and the life she used to know, and more like a part of something that feels a lot like home.