A Yellow Horse

It has been almost two months since I last posted anything, and I’m sure you are all wondering how my new life and job have been going. I have only one word to describe it: overwhelming. My brain has been in serious overload just trying to process it all, hence the reason for my delayed posting. However, now that I am done with the classes for my internship (though I still have a few weeks of working with my preceptor), I have a little more time and brain energy to sit and write something.

I have definitely been going through some serious culture shock, both in my new life, and in the hospital. Although my neighborhood, thank the Lord, is quiet and peaceful, the rest of the world out there is not! For one accustomed to open spaces, it is quite a shock to the system to find no end to the streets, traffic, noise, people, buildings, and so on and so forth. Even shopping is difficult since it requires constantly bumping into people and rubbing elbows. There is inevitably someone in your way trying or competing to look at the same thing. Since taking the metro is not safe at the very late and very early hours that I’m required to travel, I must drive. Yet, this too, is a huge challenge since the roads are busy no matter what time of day or night one happens to be out. The streets often meet at the oddest of angles, leaving the signs and traffic lights likewise at odd and completely confusing angles. More often than not, left turns are strictly forbidden, so getting lost is a definite no-no, or one could spend forever trying to find the way back. Ask me how I know. Drivers here are just about as insane as the streets. Apparently red lights don’t exist, or at least not until it has been red for a second or two. Whether you happen to be letting a pedestrian cross through the cross walk or not driving DC fashion (which definitely precludes getting lost or taking things at an easy going pace), honking is la mode.

Other than the lack of communication endemic wherever human beings reside, the internship at my new hospital is overall, quite good. My lectures (yes, eight hours a day), were all excellent and quite helpful in preparing me for critical care nursing. Being a huge, prestigious, teaching hospital, I am definitely learning a ton. Although extremely fast moving, my preceptor is top-notch, one of the best nurses on the unit. However, I have been experiencing quite a bit of culture shock there too. There is great ethnic and linguistic diversity (not surprising and certainly not a bad thing), but the heavy accents makes communication and getting report very difficult since I don’t understand half of what is said. The hospital is also just as crowded, busy, and fast-paced as the rest of the city. No country-slow-poking it here. I have also found that everything is done completely differently so I must unlearn and relearn the many of the habits I had in place: no small task! As a result I feel that my progress is sluggish, but I am slowly beginning to adjust. Although they will go by very quickly, I fortunately still have a few weeks before I will be on my own. In any case, I know that this is definitely going to be a great place for me to work and develop my career in the ways that I hope.

The Lord is very generous to me in all things, truly He is. I certainly shouldn’t complain because my whole house seems to have been hit very hard since I moved in, and I know all three of my roommates have had plenty of their own troubles to deal with. However, He apparently thought that moving in with strangers in a strange land and a new job wasn’t enough. Karen over the last seven months had been having problems with spider bites. A week or two after taking up residence here, I too began to get bites, lots of them, which I assumed were also spiders. One day I counted eighteen bites on one arm, and that didn’t include my other arm or the rest of the body. Early one morning before dawn as I rose to go to work, I found the real culprit: a bedbug! A few days later, Karen found one too. Oh, no! We had bedbugs! Everyone has heard the ditty “Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite” and I had always wondered what a bedbug was. Now I knew far too well. Karen and I began to do research on the internet on how to deal with these vile blood-sucking creatures, and the more we read the worse it seemed. We had a veritable, and costly, nightmare on our hands! Meanwhile, as we got more and more wound up over the bedbugs, my car continued to have problems which required several visits to the mechanic (and it’s still not fixed). This ate up my savings and racked up a debt I couldn’t afford (car or grad school?). I won’t bore you with a list of every woe, but problems seemed to heap themselves upon us and nothing seemed to go right. One day, after my printer broke while trying to do my taxes, I sobbed to my roommate “The only thing I have that works is my phone!”

Drama, yes. I thank the Lord for the many wonderful people in my life who have helped pick me up and kept me on the straight and narrow. This time my mother, roommate, and friends reminded me that God is in charge and that He will deal with it, I only had to trust (and yes it took all of them for me to understand this!). How humbling. How true. I have learned that lesson over and over in my life, yet here I was failing it, again. I finally just accepted these trials as one more thing I had to deal with and get through. What was I worried about?? God is above money, He will provide everything we need. He is limited by nothing but our lack of faith. This reminded me of a significant episode in my early life.

When I was a child, probably around seven years old, I went to the birthday party of a friend. Each of the guests was given a little brown paper bag with goodies in it. Besides other treats, each bag contained a little toy horse which was either brown or black. Mine however was yellow. Yellow?? I looked at it. Who ever saw a yellow horse?? It wasn’t pretty and it looked unnatural. I didn’t like it and nobody else had one. I looked around and all the other kids playing happily with their black or brown horses. I wanted one of those. Apparently the other children disliked mine as much as I did since I tried in vain to trade. Why did I have to have the yellow one? And to make matters worse, my friend wasn’t paying any attention to me at all but was off playing with her other friends. As I stood there staring dejectedly at the odd looking plastic creature in my hands, she came bounding up.

“Do you like it?” she asked, beaming and evidently pleased with herself. “I gave you the special one.” Needless to say, I kept the horse that was given to me, and although it has long since been lost, it is a lesson I have never forgotten. “I gave you the special one.”

A yellow horse. That is what these days were for me. The special one, chosen just for me. Initially I did not recognize it. I only saw problems after problems that I didn’t want to deal with. This Lent, I, who have fine taste and love live well off and who most of the time feel divinely spoiled, gained a taste of poverty. Nothing worked, I had no money, everything was uncertain, I was struggling … and I had bedbugs. Now bedbugs are certainly not restricted to the impoverished, but they certainly seem associated with it. I began to wonder, as I got bit several time every night, how do the poor deal with it? It takes money to get rid of them. Is this what it feels like to be poor? But, really, it was only a taste.

Sure enough, true to His promise, the Lord took care of things. We finally located and settled on an exterminator and the treatment wasn’t nearly the ordeal nor as expensive as we had come to expect. My printer still doesn’t work, but my car is scheduled for an appointment and I have been accepted to the school of my dreams. Spring is coming, Lent is nearly over and things are slowly righting themselves.

Now that my shock is beginning to dissipate and my room drenched in poison, I am ready to begin to explore the city… after all, what do I have to worry about? I have the special one.