1. My carepoint kids

I’ve never felt love like I have from these kids. And I’ve never felt love like I have for these kids. They are so precious to me. Any day I felt like crap I knew I could go to Moneni and receive a rock-star reception. They would crawl into my lap one at a time and touch my hair, smile at me, kiss my cheek, snuggle up against me, sing to me, or just chat away in Siswati, oblivious to the fact that I didn’t understand a word they said.
They are the one thing I will miss the most. They will have a special place in my heart until the day I die.
I’m so honored to have spent 18 months of my life here with the children of Children’s Cup. Like the slogan says, “it’s about the children.”

2. Lauren, Ross, and Abby Mackie

Who’d think that 2 women from such different backgrounds would become such great friends? Lauren, originally from Zimbabwe has made my African Experience what it was. I met her as a newlywed and was able to be witness to her growth as a married woman and now a new mommy. She brings grace, elegance, and a fresh perspective to every situation. Her faith and relationship with Jesus are profound, yet somehow she makes it look easy,- it’s encouraging… it makes me hope I can achieve it too someday. LOL.
Ross, her husband, is a true SA Gentleman,- until you get him playing a game of RISK. He makes an honest attempt to screen potential suitors, as well doing “brotherly” tasks,- like finding a tarp from my truck.
Abby is their beautiful baby girl. While I have many friends with children, she was the first baby that I got to be with from the announcement, through the pregnancy, to the birth, and now watching her grow. That is so special to me.

3. Susan Rodgers

I met Susan on my first trip here in ’06. I knew we would be friends. 2 days after arriving this time, she knocked on my door with a pair of slippers. “I thought you might need these.” I wore them until there were holes in them. I’ve never met a woman with her generosity, or sensitivity to the Holy Spirit.
She’s made time for me on several occasions, just to vent, and cry over the difficulties of missionary life. She’s talked me off of the ledge, and pried my return ticket from my fingers more than once. :0)
When my dad died this past April, she was at my house in PJ’s within minutes.
She has been there to support me every time that I’ve needed it. Her ministry of missionary support made life in Swaziland possible for 18 months.

4. Ron and Mary Beth Courier

Pastor Ron and Mary Beth were “parents” to all of us. From the last 18 months I’ve studied in Pastor Ron’s class, learning so much more than I thought was possible. Their lives are great testimonies to the faithfulness of God. They encourage me to come up to the next level.

5. The office staff

The pictures say it all. This is a fun bunch.
My partner Queeneth made it all possible for me. She took me to the carepoints so I wouldn’t get lost. She helped me pronounce the names. She taught me those words in Siswati that I won’t repeat here.
Fikile greets me everyday with a smile.
Nathie welcomes me everytime with “Good morning Miss Merrill”… even if it’s the afternoon.
Gugu is the Make Dala (mother in law) of the whole office. She is also the only Swazi woman who has made me laugh until I cry.

6.My teachers

Okay they are the reason for my joy and frustration every day. But that’s love huh? I have such a respect for what they do and accomplish each term. As a former teacher I know the challenges of classroom life. But when you add the challenges of poverty, HIV, and death of parents into the mix…well you can see what they face. Yet the come to work everyday with love and compassion for the kids. Simply put, Children’s Cup could not do the things we do without them. They are the absolute backbone to what we do every day.

7. Nomtie and Nomdumiso

These two beauties made my office days bearable. What could have been boring cubicle experiences were always parties with music, dancing, and unprofessional amounts laughter.
Nomtie loves like no one I’ve ever met, giving me a pet name “my baby” and daily hugs and kisses.
Nomdumiso is newer to the staff, and newer to the faith, but I see such strength and potential in her. We had some great discussions of faith and life, and she’s one I intend to follow up on through the years. I expect great things from her.

8. Patrick and Jordan

This “odd couple” duo added a lot of humor to my African experience. You could not find two more opposite personalities and yet they made a great team. They’ve rescued me from roof rats, chilled in Mozambique with me, and sometime just came to eat cake. But I’ve developed a unique love for each of them, would adopt either of them as my baby brother if it was legally possible.

9. Game parks

A regular park of working with Children’s Cup is hosting teams. And a regular part of hosting teams is going to Game parks. There was just something amazing about sleeping in the bush, and watching the sun rise as you drink coffee in a land rover. God’s creation is so beautiful and the animals are amazing.
I’ve seen 4 of the “big 5” and have seen just about every African animal known to man, except a giraffe.
So many times as I was watching elephant herds roam, or hearing rhinos grunt, I’d think “Is this really my life? Am I really this blessed?” Most people never get to go on an African safari.
I’ve been on several.

The Top 10

Okay with less than one month left in Swaziland I've begun to reflect and process. I think this will help me to transition. So over the next few days for all of you trusty blog readers, I will post the top 10 things I will miss most when I go home next month.

10. Everything in bloom:
From August ‘til May everything that stands still blooms in the most amazing colors. Jacaranda trees, frangipani, plumaria, orchids, poinsettias, African tulips, and on and on. For months on end I would shoot photos and email them to my dad who loved gardens.

“We might be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.”
-Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu
I can accept this statement from an African Anglican Archbishop. However as an American, I wonder if we might be surprised at the people we don’t find in heaven. How low do we think His standards are?

Miss America

Well your prayers worked
You know I’ve been struggling with the idea of coming home.
I woke up this morning soooo over Africa. (You can stop praying now.)
Maybe it was the humidity in Maphaveni.
Maybe it was one too many crazy drivers on the road.
Maybe it was the 9th day of rain, or my power going out for the umpteenth million time.
Maybe it was realizing I need to make my Thanksgiving shopping list today so I’ll be able to get all of the ingredients I need over the next 2 weeks.
I’m just tired of it all. (More likely I’m just tired. I get cranky/whiny when I’m tired.)
Now I’m at the other end of the spectrum.
I have 5 weeks left here,- 35 days. And today it seems like 34 ½ too many!
I long to see my mom.
I want to buy new mascara with options other than outrageously priced Maybelline.
I want to go perfume shopping.
I want to feel carpeting on my feet.
I want to turn on a furnace when I’m cold.
I want to see the new James Bond movie.
I want to sit on a comfortable couch and watch a tv show.
I want to go for a jog without carrying mace.
I want come home from work and not have to wash my feet.
I want to throw away my long skirts.
I miss America.

I’m trying to psyche myself up! I’m making mental lists of things in America that I enjoy, that way I can be excited about leaving Africa next month.
These are the things I’m excited about:
Sweet tea, starbucks, Christmas, my mom, cable phone calls for one monthly price, the Today show, high speed internet, pizza hut/mcdonalds, drinking water from the tap, my house, a truck with a working cd player, talking to Heidi on the phone, my nieces, seeing snow, a real winter, furnaces/air conditioners, free chips and salsa at Mexican resturaunts, maybe getting a dog, Target, movie theatres ,and Ann Taylor Loft.
It worked!...for about 30 minutes.
Then I looked at the list. Yes I love all of these things. But I realize all of these things (with the exception of my mom) are superficial things that really make no difference after you experience them. Are any of these things going to give me purpose, or value?
So I’m back where I began,- feeling blah about returning without know really what the next step. I know the next step will be awesome, but it’s hard to get excited about it if I can’t see it unfolding. You know?
**** Note to readers. It's been a few says since I wrote this. And the more I pray about it, the more I realize that this is His plan unfolding. Therefore, it's filled with good things. As Natalie says, "when you are following the Lord, change is always in your favor." So I'm starting to get excited,- even if I can't see what is ahead. This time I know it's for the right reason, not just because I miss Starbucks.

My new husband

We thought it would be a funny joke. (At least I think he was joking. Lately, it’s hard to tell with him.)
“We can be facebook married.”
“Okay that will be fun. Everyone will freak out. You change your status first, and then I will.”
Typetypetype. Click click
Christy is now Married to Rick Y-----.
Oh my goodness! Within minutes our notice boards lit up.
24 messages total, including my mother.
“Congratulations! May God bless you.” (that was the only nice one)
“Congrats… I never thought my eyes would see it.” (I would have been insulted by this one had it been to me and not him.)
“What’s this all about? He’s just marrying you for your fireplaces” (as if that’s all I have to offer a man)
"Again?... how many is that now?" (RED FLAG!!!)
“Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later.” (oh okay, I guess the sun even shines on a dog’s rear somedays.)
“Just who did you marry? Where are your registered?” (I shoulda played this one out long enough to get that tea set I put on my wish list at target.com)
“I thought I would be in your wedding.” (okay fair enough Jenn)
My word! I can’t wait to hear the comments when we get divorced next week. (Facebook isn’t legally
binding is it?)

I've had lots of challenges while I've lived here.
Today was the biggest
I attempted to buy foundation in Africa.
What a joke.
I did finally find a bottle that was close to my shade.
It was in clearance, $15Rand off.

By February 2006 more than five million children had died from HIV/AIDS, and another 2.3 million children were infected. (UNICEF)
85% of them lived and died in sub-Saharan Africa.
Two- months later I arrived on my first trip to Swaziland.
I was so naïve.
For years I’d heard about HIV treatments, -ARVs and cocktails that added quality and quantity of years and drugs that would prevent the transmission of the virus from mother to unborn or nursing babies.
I thought they were everywhere.
In my lifetime we’ve seen a rapid decrease in the US infection rate.
But at the same time, there’s an outrageous increase of infection and death throughout the rest of the world.
Why?
In the year 2003 the number of childhood infections from mother to baby:
United States: 59
Ethiopia: 60,000
80% of those Ethiopian children died before the age of two.
How is that possible?
No access to these life saving drugs.
I asked my teachers the other day, “Do you remember when I came in 2006 to visit? I know the people had ARVs then… how long had you had access to them?”
“Oh, not long… I don’t remember, but not very long… they are new to Swaziland… just a short time.”
How is it that we Americans have watched a healthy happy Magic Johnson talk about his ARV since the early 90’s, and yet tens of millions of Africans have only recently received them?
I’ve recently read there’s no me without you by Melissa Fay Greene, a wonderful biography of a woman who has cared for orphans in Ethiopia. It’s a touching story filled with history of the country, but also history of the pandemic and its spread.
The role that our pharmaceutical companies played (or refused to play) was shocking. This is just a tiny, tiny, tiny excerpt, but enough for you to understand what I didn’t. Perhaps you are just as naïve as I was.




“Exclusivity is the lifeblood of the industry, “ writes Dr. Marcia Angell in her best-selling book, The truth about drug companies, “Because it means that no other company may sell the same drug for a set period. After exclusive marketing rights expire, copies (called generic drugs) enter the market and the price usually falls to as little as twenty percent of what it was.”
“But,” writes Angell, “Industry lawyers have manipulated some of its provisions to extend patents far longer than the lawmakers intended…
“Drug companies now employ small armies of lawyers to milk these laws for all they’re worth,- and their worth a lot.
“The result is that the effective patent life of rand-new drugs increased from 8 years in 1980 to about 14 years in 2000. For block-busters-usually defined as a drug with sales of over a billion dollars a year (like Lipitor, or Celebrex, or Zoloft)-those six years of additional exclusivity are golden. They can add billions of dollars to sales.”


…The big drug makers weren’t focused on keeping lifesaving medicines away from the poor; the millions of people dying of AIDS (6.4 million by 1994; and 22 million were HIV-infected) were not of specific interest. What the drug companies wanted to avoid was seeing a generic drug-identical to a pricy brand name drug-sold at rock-bottom prices. There were two big problems with this. The first was that the comparison could prove uncomfortable if a person in Brazil or India could purchase an exact copy of AZT for $1,000 a year a customer in Sweden, France or the Us might question why he was paying $10,000 or $15,000 for the branded version…
...The second problem was that if generic-drug companies began churning out knockoffs, the cheap versions of the drugs would surely make their way in to the rich markets of the northern hemisphere…
…So global patent protection was the new frontier…
…The cost of fighting the AIDS pandemic in the 1990 with brand-name drugs was estimated at $3 billion a year. The US government subsidized the cost for some Americans. African governments were too poor. And their AIDS sufferers were too numerous, to contemplate doing the same. The drugs were not expensive; the patents were. The patented drugs cost $15,000 per patient per year, although the production costs might have been closer to $200. This led to sticker shock among the world’s governments: universal treatment would not be an option for Africans..
…By the mid-1990s it was evident that South Africa was the hardest-hit country in the HIV/AIDS pandemic 4.3 million South Africans were infected with HIV; a quarter of a million South Africans would die of it by 2000; and it was estimated that , by 2010, life expectancy in SA would have fallen by more than twenty years…
…In 1997, taking advantage of a legal exception in Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) the South African government passed the Medicines and Related Substance Control Amendment Act. Theoretically, under TRIPS, in a public health emergency, a government was permitted to suspend the patent protection on a brand-name drug within the country (this was called “compulsory-licensing”) and was permitted to shop for the cheapest versions available of brand-name drugs, rather than buying them directly from their manufactures. (This was called “parallel importing”) Less than three months after Nelson Mandela signed the “medicine Act” into law, the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers’ Association of South Africa, representing 39 pharmaceutical companies, filed suit in South Africa’s Constitutional Court, barring the amendment from taking effect. Plaintiffs included Alcon, Bayer, Bristiol-Myers Squibb, Boehringer-Ingelheim, Eli Lilly, Glaxosmith-Kline, Merck, and SmithKlein Beechem…
“…what drug companies are concerned about ,” James Love, executive director of the Consumer Project on Technology, testified before the US Congress Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Human Resources and Drug Policy, Committee on Government Reform, “is the embarrassment of seeing a drug like Fluconazole selling for $23.50 in Italy but only $.95 in India. In this sense it is a public relations issue. But how many millions should literally die of this embarrassment?”…
…But the US government …pressured SA to repeal the Medicines Act. Congress temporarily cut off foreign aid…US trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky denied SA certain tariff breaks and place the country on a “Watch list”…
…The big drug companies took a thorough drubbing in the press over their lawsuit against SA, which had to be one of the worst public relations missteps of all time. Two years later still sheepish about the poor judgment, and industry representative addressed a health and human rights conference. He opened with a joke: “People ask me how we could have been so stupid as to sue Nelson Mandela.
I tell them we had to. Mother Teresa was already dead.”…
…At the waning of the 20th century, the major drug makers were presented with a historic opportunity. Crisis beckoned to them to recast the industry along ethical as well as profitable lines, to bring their medicines to the front lines of humanity’s gravest health emergency.
Instead they sued South Africa….
…In 2005 GlaxoSmithKline (formerly Burroughs Wellcome) saw the expiration of it patent on zidovudine (AZT) Generic drugmakers in China, India, and Africa applied to the US Food and Drug Administration with requests to manufacture generic versions and four American drug makers applied as well. GSK’s Retrovir cost $3,893.64 for a year’s supply; between 1987 and 2005, Retrovir generated $4billion in sales.
The generic version costs $105 for a year’s supply…

From the other side...

This election has been interesting over here.
Wednesday morning I woke up in Mozambique and watched CNN international. We are 7 hours ahead here so I watched all of the things y'all stayed up late to watch.
So now we have a new president.
It's funny to see the international reaction. The whole world is excited that we have an "black president" (I think that expression is funny in itself. He's bi-racial right? So if he lived here the Africans wouldn't even call him black they would call him 'coloured.' And he would probably be discriminated against. But I guess if you are the new American president you are 'black'.)
That morning I went into a gas station to buy a bottle of water. On the counter was a newspaper with the entire front page filled with Obama's picture and big headlines in Portuguese.
Then I pulled out a metici to pay for my water and looked at the picture on it. I laughed to myself, "They have a black president,- I don't know what all the fuss is about"
But I'm realizing the hope that people are putting in him. In all of the newspapers and radio shows here they are talking about "What does this mean to Africa now?" There were news clips and articles with his "family" in Kenya dancing and shouting "We're going to the white house!"
And I guess that makes seance to them. "Family" is a very different concept here than in the US. So now that their cousin's brother's wife was once married to Obama's grandpa's sister's niece, they probably do think they are going to the White House to help him rule. After all, when you come into power the first thing you do assign high paying jobs to all of your family.
I don't know what kind of international promises he made in his campaign, but I'm pretty sure he will focus on fixing our country first, and then other countries later.

What?!!!!

I can't beleive it! I've lost a follower! I don't know who, but it went from 12 to 11. Dang it!
(This must be how Jesus felt)
But it was bound to happen. With a mouth like this you are bound to offend someone.

Lamenting

I'm very conflicted. Some days I hate the fact that I'm leaving. Other days I can't wait to get home.

My days here are so limited.
I'll miss the way children undiscrimiately run to hug me/ play with me/ sing my praises.
I'll miss the daily feeling that I'm serving a greater purpose here, and that my life is making a difference.
I'll miss the way that I hear God so clearly on foreign soil.
I'll hate that "home" doesn't feel like home anymore.
I'll resent that no one will know what I mean when I say "don't give that to the blind one," or "shame," or "how" or "Eish."
I'll be annoyed that there is no one to share the joy plumarias,frangipani, roibos, or pavlova with.

It's not that I won't have great experiences back in the states. It's not that there's no cool stuff there. After all there is target, and sweet tea, and my mom.
But it just bothers me, that I've had such a wonderful experience here, and once I go home it will be permanantly over. My experience here will be left here because there is no one there that has shared it with me. It will be tied up into a nice little package labeled "africa" and will sit on a shelf. And once in a while I'll enjoy it by myself.

I feel as though I'm restarting my life completely, the third time in 7 years and there is no one and nothing of this life that will overlap with the next. They are completely 100% severed from one another.