This post is in honor of my friend, Dr. Ronald Paul Baker, who passed from this life on March 10, 2023. He was joyful, kind, and wise. I wrote this essay years ago, after my first trip to Sierra Leone in 2017 with him. I will miss him.

“The nihonga process, a Japanese form of art… flows out of a thousand-year refinement …malachite and azurite are strikingly beautiful in the form of rock, but to use them for nihonga one must pulverize them, shatter them into small prismatic pieces. They are to be layered, sometimes over sixty layers, to create a refractive surface—a laborious and slow process…The layers take time to dry and in the act of waiting an image is revealed.” Makoto Fujimura, Silence and Beauty,

In 2017 I began following the liturgical calendar in my scripture reading. My church homes have never been liturgical, so though I pay attention to Lent and Advent, terms like Ordinary Time were new to me. I intended to focus on healthy rhythms. In the neat rectangles of my planner, I jotted down hopes and plans—things like regular family meals, exercise, and paying more attention to my prayer life.

But the regular meals and workouts would begin after a trip to Sierra Leone, West Africa. Through my job, I was to accompany a team of medical personnel to a hospital in Mattru Jong. The hospital began as dispensary in the 1950s. With both Western and Sierra Leonean staff, it developed into an important center for health until the Sierra Leonean Civil War in the 90s when rebels took it over, ransacking and looting. The hospital is still rebuilding.

The medical team flew out of Detroit on January second, with a layover in Europe and arrival in Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, in the evening of the third. We took a small bus to the dock to the ferry and crossed into Freetown.where we stayed the night in a Western-style hotel.

The inside of at the ferry on a trip to Sierra Leone in 2018

The next day we drove seven hours, then boarded a ferry to cross the Jong River and were pulled across by muscular men using a pulley system with a thick metal cord. And so we arrived in the town of Mattru Jong.

One of the vehicles about to drive onto the ferry on another trip

We stayed a guesthouse with running water but limited electricity. The hospital’s generator was only fired up for surgeries, so we started and ended most days in darkness, using kerosene lamps and flashlights to find our way.

On the first morning after our arrival, the call to prayer and the too-early crowing of roosters combined with jetlag to wake me up way too early. After fumbling my way out of the lower bunk bed and through the mosquito net, I felt my way to the door and emerged to complete darkness. The night before we had arranged dishes, paper towels, granola bars, and flashlights on a table by my door, but after locating all the other objects by touch, I finally gave up on the flashlight and made my way to the couch. The night before, water had pooled around the toilet, and I chose wait for light to navigate the situation. So, there I sat, bladder full, my eyes searching for dawn for what seemed like hours before someone else got up, someone who had the good sense to have a flashlight beside their bed.

Most mornings during our stay, I awoke well before daylight and read Scripture with the light of a flashlight.

Psalm 72.12 For he delivers the needy when he calls. The poor and him who has no helper. He has pity on the weak and the needy and saves the lives of the needy. From oppression and violence, he redeems their life. And precious is their blood in his sight.

I have no medical training, but because my work involved sending personnel who would join the local staff, I sometimes shadowed the doctors to see what medical treatment entailed in this place with limited material resources.

Sometimes I held hands.

I held the hand of a woman as the anesthesiologist found the right spot in her spinal cord for the epidural before a C-section.

I held Mabel’s hand and sat on her bed as she winced and held my hand tight when a doctor on our team carefully lifted the dressing from her flesh. Her spinal hadn’t taken during a surgery before our arrival, so her uterus had been removed with limited anesthesia. She said she would rather have her life than her uterus. But still. She was in her teens, and it is hard to be infertile in Africa.

I held the hand of a woman as tears streamed down her face during a painful rectal exam which confirmed advanced cancer, a death sentence.

I held any hand I was directed to by the medical staff as that was really all I could do.

Surgery performed with visiting team members and Sierra Leonean hospital staff.

Dr. Baker with his friend Joe French, who had worked in the surgery as an assistant since the early seventies. Dr. Baker said when he and his wife arrived in Mattru to work at the hospital in the early seventies, Joe taught him many things. By the time I visited in 2017, Joe was referred to as Pa French and was still assisting in surgery. He finally retired a few years later.

A visit and dinner at the Beah family’s home in Mattru Jong. Mrs. Beah had been Dr. Baker’s babysitter when his parents were missionaries there. Later, Dr. Baker and his wife would come and raise their family, working at the hospital. The Beah’s had worked in education throughout their careers. Mr. Beah’s sight was failing, and Dr. Baker insisted that we were fine without more light as night fell.

The doorway into Mr. and Mrs. Beah’s home.

I prayed for Michael, who had needed to wait for days for needed surgery. When we arrived and the doctors opened him up, pus fountained from his belly. The stench permeated the room, and a first-year nursing student on the team had to leave to catch her breath for a few minutes. I wasn’t there for the surgery or the next day when he grinned and claimed that he was at 75%, but I met him later as our doctors were still worried about the amount of pus flowing into the tubes coming from his abdomen and as he bartered with a wide smile for a visiting doctor’s iPhone.

I heard a sermon recently on Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. The pastor pointed out that the procedure for making olive oil involves a great pressing, and that what Jesus was enduring as he prayed and bled sweat like blood among the olive trees was a pressing like that of the olives.

I came home. During the week when I was orienting our team of four people who were preparing to work at the hospital, I heard that Michael wasn’t doing well, and then, on a day where we were having lunch at Applebee’s, he died. I wept.

Days in February were unseasonably warm that year, far from the heat of Sierra Leone, but not ordinary for Indiana. And then events in my family twisted and turned until I sat on the edge of another hospital bed, holding my daughter’s hand. And prayers that I had whispered in the dark early hours for the sick in Mattru became my prayers my daughter and for myself, prayers distilled down to what was essential and small.

Have mercy.

As Lent began, the neat rectangles in my planning notebook stayed blank, empty. The days were dark and difficult enough without adding a practice of lenten denial.

And in those days of spare prayers, I thought of the pulverizing and shattering of malachite and azurite into tiny slivers in the Japanese art of nihonga. If the shattering and pulverizing, the sickness and injustices, are to be withstood and resisted without the hope of some kind of beauty at the end, I am simply lost.

I must hope that scars can be healed and made beautiful, that trauma can be redeemed. I must believe that the resurrected Jesus, made perfect through suffering, a high priest king who knows and understands pain and abandonment and betrayal, whose suffering led to ultimate redemption, redeems our pain as well.

In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 1 Peter 1:6-7

I confess that I am impatient. I want to leap to the end of the process. I want to skip to the last page and know the end of the story. I want what is broken around me to be put back together and made shiny and new and whole.

Here the nihonga process instructs me. It is slow and laborious. The layers, sometimes over sixty, placed one at a time and allowed to dry. And it is only in the waiting that the end result, one of glorious reflection, shines.

Nihonga

Looking Up