Jesse Zink, formerly of St. John’s, Northampton, is a missionary serving in Mthatha, South Africa.

He is writing about his experience on his blog at mthathamission.blogspot.com. Here is Jesse's latest e-mail letter back home.

Jesse Zink was raised in St. John's, Northampton and worked at Bement Camp and Conference Center for many years. He is now a missionary in Mthatha, South Africa through the Young Adult Service Corps, a program of the national church for young Episcopalians.

He works at the Itipini Community Project, a clinic, pre-school, feeding program, and community center that serves a shantytown outside Mthatha, the center of one of the poorest parts of South Africa. The Project is funded by the African Medical Mission, an organization started by two long-time Episcopal missionaries, Chris and Jenny McConnachie.

Jesse posts regular updates to his blog about his work and life in South Africa and he encourages you to check it out (and keep coming back) to learn more about what wonders God is working among our African brothers and sisters.

He says communication with home keeps him sane in South Africa. He loves getting your comments, questions, and feedback. Jessie can be reached at: c/o CCP McConnachie/P/Bag x5014/Mthatha 5100 South Africa or jessezink – at – gmail – dot – com.

Where is Mthatha?  Click here.

Back to Top

The Most Recent E-Mail from Jesse Zink in Mthatha

June 21, 2008

Dear friends,

After so much exposure here to situations that put people in degrading
and outrageous situations, my anger about things here has pretty well
been dulled and is now mainly evident as a persistence to keep working
despite the obstacles that will no doubt ensure my best efforts make
almost no difference. So when I do find myself angry, it comes almost
as a surprise.

A few weeks back, a terrifically drunk man tumbled down the hill
behind the clinic and landed right in front of one of our cars. He was
knocked out and bleeding from the head and Jenny and I decided he
should go to the ER, or, as it is called here "Accident and
Emergency." This being clearly an accident, we loaded him in the back
of the truck and off I drove.

When I showed up at A&E, not one of the many nurses and other
employees made any effort to help me unload him so I, with some
difficulty, and praying his neck wasn't already broken, plopped him on
one of the many empty beds in the ward. An unconscious and bleeding
patient in one of their beds usually gets the attention of the right
people. Meanwhile, I tried to get him registered at the desk obviously
labeled "registration" but the five women reading magazines there
apparently had no idea that that was one of their job duties and tried
to send me to another floor until I browbeat them into doing some
actual work.

When I returned to the A&E ward to drop off the paperwork and leave,
one of the young male nurses immediately began to yell at me, claiming
I had violated their policies, that they didn't take "this kind of
emergency," that I needed a referral from a general practitioner to
get my patient admitted (to an ER?), and that I'd have to take him to
another part of the hospital, the part that is always overwhelmingly
full when I take dying HIV patients there. I tried to be calm and
reply that as the patient had been formally admitted to the A&E
("those clerks don't know our policies!" he replied), he was no longer
my problem and this nurse couldn't just absolve himself of
responsibility. Plus, my shirt was covered in the patient's blood and
there was a long line of patients in Itipini I wanted to get back to.
That only set this nurse off more and he told me to "wait outside" so
I just got in the truck and left. The drunk patient returned the next
day with a few stitches in his head and no head injury so evidentially
a policy was violated somewhere along the line. (By the way, the
mission statement of this hospital, in bold letters all over, is
"committed to service delivery.")

I mention this story because it exemplifies the kind of buck-passing
and bureaucracy I run into all the time in my frequent interactions
with the government health system. Everywhere I turn, I seem to find
middle managers who are unempowered, incapable of independent thought,
and refuse to do anything even remotely original without express
instruction from their superiors. The superiors meantime seem
unresponsive and out of touch or too busy constructing "organograms"
(a word I've learned here) that show just where they are in the
hierarchy. The folks at the lowest levels busily focus on their
individual tasks with no sense of how it fits into the broader
picture. It is exactly opposite from the sort of free-flowing and open
work culture I've learned to value and manifests itself in all sorts
of ills, from necessary drugs that go unstocked in clinics because no
one complains when they are missing to patients who slip through the
cracks and go untreated because no one seems to care to advocate for
them to nurses like the one in this story.

I realize these sorts of issues are present all over the world and
that there may be many good reasons I don't understand that explain
why people might act the way they do here. But it continually strikes
me as so wildly unjust that a country suffering from such overwhelming
health crises as HIV/AIDS, TB, and all the rest, should be so
thoroughly hamstrung by the culture of their system. I regret I have
not met more health-care workers who are seized of the scope and
seriousness of the issues at hand.

It seems like just yesterday that I returned from my New Year's trip
to Uganda and we are now gearing up for our mid-year break and the
winter holiday from school over the first two weeks of July. I find
myself getting to the end of work days and thinking, "that was a
pretty quiet day." But when I check to see how many patients we've
seen, it's still the average 30 to 50 we see every day. Something is
changing, obviously, and I think it is my competence and comfort level
with the work here. Situations that once took much longer to decipher
and resolve are now routine and easily manageable. My Xhosa skills are
improving quite rapidly, the evidence of which I see in numerous
encounters I would have previously needed someone to translate for me
but can now handle alone. To be sure, language is still an incredible
barrier that frustrates me every day and limits me more than I'd like.
But I continue to surprise myself with what I can do with my Xhosa. In
this last month, I've held an impromptu lecture on the recent
xenophobic attacks here and the mewling response of President Thabo
Mbeki for a group of students working on a school project and led
mildly ironic prayers for more sun and less rain after several days of
overcast and dreary weather. Since I continue to attend church
services in Xhosa, the prayer was easy but explaining the word
xenophobia was pretty tough.

The clinic in Itipini is like a stage, I've decided, and each person
who comes through the door is like a character in an ongoing play.
Some are regulars, some "guest star" for short intervals before fading
off, and some pop up unexpectedly and then disappear forever. It's
kind of like a soap opera, I guess, and I've developed the same
attachment to and deeply-held feelings about some of our characters
that long-time watchers of "The Bold and the Beautiful" have about
theirs. As soon as we resolve one drama, another is waiting in the
wings to come forth. Unlike a soap opera where the difficulties lie in
how the situation is resolved, here the difficulty is figuring out
just what the drama is, given the language and culture barriers.
Often, the solution is fairly straightforward, if difficult to achieve
in practice.

I've been blessed this month to get to know a woman named Pakama, who
has both HIV and TB. Her health history is pretty complicated and
illustrates a lot of those same bureaucratic obstacles with which I
began this e-mail. She almost fell through the cracks of the system,
and may yet still, until we started wheedling and cajoling the right
people to actually examine her, rather than just pass her from doctor
to nurse to doctor. What has been remarkable about her - and the
reason I say I've been blessed to know her - is that she has a
remarkable will to live and is deeply interested in and, quite
frankly, demanding about her health. (These are not characteristics I
associate with everyone here, unfortunately.) Usually when I take
people to their appointments, I'm the one supplying the drive and
determination to get them there. She has plenty of that herself,
though, and her will to live was the only thing keeping her alive for
a few weeks. That she retains that will despite a huge pile of truly
significant obstacles facing her every day has made her a real model
of perseverance for me. Pakama's name means "get up" or "stand up" and
so I am often reminded of both the Bob Marley song and the time when
Jesus healed the paralytic in Matthew 9 by saying "stand up."
Unfortunately, I must have missed the how-to-perform-a-miracle session
at our mission training because my best efforts to get Pakama to walk
on her own have so far been for naught.

Another young woman, a ninth-grade student I've been looking forward
to adding to my high-school English class, had a positive pregnancy
test a week or so ago. She has always stood out to me as quite
talented and promising (she first understood what xenophobia was) and
I was crushed by the news. While she can still continue in school, I
look at my current high-school students who are also mothers and think
about the ways in which their school work has been undeniably affected
by their new duties. Of course, their children are also absolute
delights and bring great joy into our lives. It's forced me to think
about the ways in which the gift of life can be a mixed blessing,
depending on its timing and one's perspective.

Perhaps unusually for a missionary, I don't often think of my time
here in explicitly religious terms - religion is rather the implicit
foundation of what I do - but I've found myself thinking a lot lately
about the Incarnation and "incarnational theology," an phrase I've
never understood. The significance of Jesus' ministry, I've finally
truly realized, lies in part in what he said and did but equally that
he said and did those things as a human, among a bunch of fallen and
sinful people. That decision to choose to share an existence with a
group of people different than himself was a profound one and was the
necessary first step in his reconciling ministry. In some small way, I
think I've been blessed with a deeper insight into this aspect of the
Gospel because of my time here.

While describing my work in Itipini to a visitor a few weeks back, I
found myself tailing off into laughter in the midst of telling the sad
story of one of the many characters I had met that week. The visitor
looked slightly horrified I should be laughing in such a situation but
I just shrugged and said, "Sometimes all you can do is laugh." I
wasn't laughing at any particular person so much as I was laughing at
the absurdity of the situation I find myself in: one where people can
suffer so much with so little help; one where the inequality and
stupidity and politics of the world are on full display; one where I
can drive a woman like Pakama, who doesn't speak a single word of
English, to the hospital and be so delighted she bosses me around
about where to park the car, how to push her wheelchair, and where to
wait in line; one where I can be so affected by the results of a
pregnancy test of a young woman I hardly know; and one where my
contribution seems so minor and all I have at the end of day is the
vague comfort of some idea about "presence." I don't think my idealism
or commitment to the ideas of reconciliation and development have
lessened any but they have been tempered by a helpful dose of reality,
for which which I'm grateful.

Before my prolixity gets the better of me and I ramble on, let me
remind you of my blog - http://mthathamission.blogspot.com - where not
only is my prolixity on full display but so too are stories and
pictures of many more of the characters I daily encounter here.

It feels completely natural to be staying in Mthatha beyond my initial
year commitment but it also feels completely natural to be taking a
break in just a few months. I am looking forward to sharing some of
these stories in person so I can begin to communicate what I can't in
writing. Until then, I remain

Your man in Mthatha,
Jesse

Jesse Zink
Episcopal missionary in Mthatha, South Africa

c/o CCP McConnachie
P/Bag x5014
Mthatha 5100 South Africa

jessezink@gmail.com
http://mthathamission.blogspot.com
mobile: 079-840-7683

If you received this message in error, if you would prefer it be sent
to another address, or if you know someone who should get it and
doesn't, please let me know. Please feel free to forward as widely as
you would like.

Back to Top