So this week has been full of little tests of patience, tolerance and understanding…here’s just one morning’s little hurdle of challenges…

The Night Before

22h30 – I call the base to see if there’s a vehicle available in the morning to go to 6.30am Mass (for those with a good memory from my former posts…I found another parish with better morning Mass times….yipee…). “Affirmative…there will be a vehicle available chez toi at 06h15….” Excellent, first step successful.

The Morning

06h00 – alarm goes off…I turn it off and make a mental note to think about getting out of bed.

06h22 – I surface from sub consciousness and realise it’ll be a bullet-train effort all round to get into Mass before the Gospel (no chance arriving on time at this rate). I rush to get ready, don’t brush my hair (oh what a prude, I know…ref to blog 18 Nov), grab my bag and run out the door. We have a particularly mental dog that is nothing of a guard dog and quite likes to bite when you walk down the driveway, so I wave good morning to the guardian and signal from afar for him to tie up said dog so I can walk to the car without ambush…that takes a good minute or so.

06h35 – No major traffic, we pull up to the parish and I tell the driver I should be done by 07h00…07h05 at the latest, which makes a difference at that hour of the day. I scoot into Mass to the last notes of the Alleluia…nicely done, thanks Lord. “Heaven and earth will pass away but my word will not pass away.” The priests homily feeds me (even if in this moment I can’t remember what…I remember a husband once comparing all the homilies he heard at Mass like all the meals his wife had ever cooked for him…for the life of him he couldn’t recall their details, but he did know that over the years they had so crucially nourished him…)…but the homily is also a bit longer than usual. I toss up whether to leave straight after communion in order to keep to my promise to be done by 07h05 and being that I end up receiving Jesus right on 07h05, I decide to take a moment in prayer with Him then head out.

07h06 – I get in the vehicle and the driver is just responding to something over the radio. I ask him who called. It was the base. Apparently my colleague wants to leave as soon as possible for the office. I realise that there was some providence in my decision to leave Mass early, but I’m also annoyed because we have a system, we all decided as a community that we’d have two departure slots in the morning… 07h45 and 08h45…that’s not fair, with the traffic the car will never get back to our house in time for 07h45…I call the colleague over the phone “Dude, why are wanting to leave now? First departure is 7h45, you know that. Come on, it’s not fair if you don’t respect the rules…” I say, without the utmost charity I admit. He doesn’t sound impress, hangs up pretty quickly.

07h20 – We arrive back at the house, and I jump out the car, my colleague is there waiting, he jumps in the car with some curt words for me. I find out minutes later from another colleague that there was some emergency for his programme and he needed to be at the base straight away, and admittedly on a good day without traffic it would be possible to go there and back before 07h45. I feel pretty stink. Excellent post-Mass effort …not even 15 mins after Mass and I’ve already managed lack tolerance, understanding and patience…

07h30 – I emerge at the breakfast table to find four other colleagues just finishing breakfast and ready to leave. Three of them are national staff (Congolese staff) who can go out and about anytime by any means of transport (unlike ex pats who confined to work vehicles for security reasons – we can be sent packing if we don’t respect security protocols). “You’re all going at 7h45?” I ask doing a mental count and realising we’ll be too many for one car. “When you’re ready…” one of them replies. “Ok, well, I’ll be ready at 7h45 as is the system here…” I reply curtly as I pour my coffee. An awkward silence falls over us as I feel like they’re sitting waiting while I eat my breakfast. Please, just give me some time to down a coffee and fruit and cereal…pleeeease…

07h44 – I rush to brush my teeth, get back out to the car to find two of the national staff not ready to go… I’m fuming. They had fifteen minutes to get ready…I start preaching on to the driver. “They don’t understand…if we don’t leave now…there’s a changeover of drivers at 8, the vehicle has to then do TWO other runs back to the house to drop others off between now and 8h45…aaaaargh…” Someone goes to get the national staff, to see why they’re not ready…apparently they had thought there wasn’t enough space for them in the car.

07h50 – Finally we get going a minute later and I preach on to the two national staff keeping us late about how essential it is to keep to time and respect the systems we have in place. “Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but…blah blah blah… Please…blah blah blah, we don’t have options like you do. I don’t mean to be mean but…blah blah…” No one speaks for the rest of the trip.

On route to the base, as a sense of contrition sets in I send a message to apologise to the colleague who’d had the emergency (which reminds me, check out the Five Languages of Apology)…I know I really stuffed up, I hadn’t bothered to ask why and I had accused of him of not respecting the rules that he himself had been party to creating.

I arrive at the base and realise that in my haste I forgot to change my shoes…I guess my dirty old Crocs will just have to do…sigh (I would have chosen my bright sparkly orange Hannah Montana platforms if I’d remembered… ref post 18 Nov). I go to put my snacks in the fridge in the kitchen and get trapped in the kitchen when the door handle breaks upon my trying to re-open the door. “Oh, could the morning get any more difficult” I mutter losing perspective…this must be what they mean by cumulative humanitarian stress…parp…the little tiny things that end up driving you mad…

Once I escape the kitchen, I’m really glad that relations in my office are particularly good this morning…as a result of some amicable moments shared the afternoon before. That helps me re-orient after feeling like such a witch on the way to work.

The colleague with the emergency texts back graciously accepting the apology…as a strong protestant from Burkina Faso, West Africa, he forgives me “as God forgives us…” he says. Ah, reconciliation, healing…and thankfully so, as I’m in his office half an hour later going over a file that we’re dealing with together.

I’m learning over and over again (hopefully bit by bit) the lessons of patience, tolerance and understanding…this is some serious community living, with some serious cross-cultural dynamics to spice it up. Everyday there are countless sources of frustrations – both from people and from things (broken down, delayed etc), and never enough time to all sit down and explain the details to each other – one has to give the other the benefit of the doubt that the other had the best of intentions. I’m doing a shoddy job at times, and indeed more often need others to be patient, tolerant and understanding with me. But equally then I do have moments of grace where I manage to turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, accept someone else’s forgetfulness or deal with a situation fairly, firmly and mercifully. There’s always hope in His mercy and grace.