There's No Time Like The Present

By Leah Tang

I’m struck by how time moves here. The sun rises around 6 and sets around 6, every day, every night. There really isn’t anything like an appointment schedule in the clinic, or a sense of highly scheduled days. A few anchors in time exist, but everything else is “tentative and flexible,” just like our mission team’s itinerary.

Some of our team members are meeting with various individuals from outside of HEAL Africa. They have to coordinate their schedule, confirm their meetings, and arrange travel and/or translator availability. Things have to be pretty punctual. Others of us are working with HEAL Africa staff. I am working with the Hospital’s and the Outreach Programs’ accounting groups. Their needs are similar, but different, so I generally don’t try to meet with both groups together. I try to schedule times to work with each of them, but because their workload is so dynamic, our meetings are rarely confirmable. I will find myself juggling the tentative availability of different groups, having 90-120 minute meetings spontaneously, or having afternoon sessions suddenly cancelled. If this was back in the states, I’d be frustrated and fit to be tied. But this is the Goma-Leah and I’m just going with the flow, working things in, adapting, and accommodating to changes.

I’m astounded by the flexibility of the HEAL Africa staff. My initial concern during our first few days here was how much of an impact and inconvenience we were creating for both patients and staff. The staff would drop everything they were doing to tell us about their area, their work, and their challenges. I’d squirm to move on so that they could return their focus onto the patient. Now I see things a little differently. They work things in, they adapt and they accommodate. Patients do get seen and cared for; work does get done.

What do I take away from this reflection? Maybe we are too structured back home. I think that if we could schedule when Jesus returns, we’d probably schedule our activities around it. Maybe things get done when things are “ready” to get done, and not always in accordance with our mortal schedules. Maybe, in a world so fraught with political and logistical changes, the only way to get things done is to be flexible and to let things happen in God’s time. The HEAL Africa staff here seem to have faith that things would get done. As Ryan reminded us in his sermon this morning, “God is always on time.”