Big News

I am coming home.

Don't worry, nothing terrible has happened.  In fact, this year has been one of the best years I can remember.  I wish I could go back and live it over again, just because I enjoyed it so much.  Life on this ship is beautiful and amazing, and I only see things getting better for this precious and powerful community next year.  But deep in my heart, in the place where I know things, I know that it's time for me to come home to the US and be there for a while.

Now, I imagine that you probably have one or two questions for me.  I have therefore created this handy-dandy list of "Frequently Asked Questions" for your personal satisfaction and further illumination.

Sarah's Going Home F.A.Q.s

1. When are you coming?
The current plan is for me to finish out the field service here in Tamatave, sail with the ship to Durban, South Africa, and then somehow wend my way to Geneva, Switzerland for one last hurrah with some ship friends (and my mom!).  After that, I'll fly back over the "pond" and be state-side some time around the 12th or 13th of July.

2. What are you going to do when you get here?
This is a very good question.  My first plan is to spend some good quality time with family and friends in California, Idaho, and Washington.  I'm talking like two or three weeks in each place (if you don't mind giving up your couch for that long).  I want to re-connect and to invest in these relationships, to make new memories, to just "be" for a while.
After that, I am not sure what I'm going to do.  I feel myself being drawn in a certain direction, but I haven't quite found the right words to say exactly what that is yet.

3. Where, exactly, is home now?
Honestly, I don't know.  At present, I find myself in the beautiful but heart-breaking position of saying goodbye to a place that has become my home, and to people who have become part of the everyday fabric of Me.  My life is beautiful here.  I love my students, and am so proud of the amazing people they are becoming.  I love my friends, who take such good care of me.  I love my community, this delicious variety of cultures and personalities all bound together for a common purpose.  I love what we stand for, the spiritual hope of Christ made real in the healing and deliverance of the blind, the lame and the outcast.  I wish everyone had a home like this.  I wish we all had the chance to give up a measure of independence and comfort so that we could work as communities to invest in the poor, to heal the broken, to be a living breathing manifestation of the hands and feet of Christ.  I am seriously hoping I can find some sort of community like that when I come back.  I guess when I do, that will be home for me.

4. What about money?
Currently, the money that is donated on my behalf goes into a crew account, from which my crew fees, insurance, and other costs are withdrawn.  When I leave, I would like to transfer any leftover funds into Mercy Ships' general fund, where it will be used to continue the good work that we do here.  Of course I am going to need to spend some money to travel to the states and to start over, and I have a little bit set aside in my own bank account for that purpose.  If you want to help out with that, please let me know so that I can transfer your gift from my crew account to my personal bank account.  Otherwise, any other funds that I receive between now and the end of the field service are going to be used to support Mercy Ships.

5. Is this the end for you and Mercy Ships?
No.  I will always be part of the Mercy Ships family, and I certainly hope that I find myself traveling back to the ship (or even checking out the new ship after it's finished) someday soon.  I just know that for now, I need to spend some time learning how to live in America again.

6. What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
African or European?  It doesn't matter because the answer is 42.

Crew Galley

Official Disclaimer:  these are not my muffins.  They are gluten-free peanut butter and chocolate chip muffins, baked by my friend Tracey.  And they are delicious.  


I am not much of a cook.  (Ask me sometime about the 'pickle soup' debacle.)  Oh, I know enough to get by.  I did successfully feed myself for several years before I came to live on this beautiful ship with its steady and sustaining 12-week menu, but I definitely fall into the category of single adult who can be counted on to bring the chips and salsa to pretty much every potluck dinner.  Sometimes I branch out and bring bean dip instead.

My lack of affinity for all things culinary notwithstanding, I want to tell you about one of my very favorite places on the Africa Mercy:  the Crew Galley.  (By the way, "galley" is sailor-speak for "kitchen."  Just so you know.)

All of our official meals are cooked by crew members who have been specially trained to handle massive amounts of food in a real and entirely legit Galley.  I have never been there, but I imagine that it is a miraculous place (making pancakes for a crew of 400 qualifies as a true miracle as far as I'm concerned).  Those of us who like to dabble are allowed to cook things in our own little specially set-aside kitchen, affectionately known as the Crew Galley.  It is a beautiful place.

The kitchen, I think, is really the heart of any house.  You can learn more about a family from half an hour in the kitchen than you could from a whole evening in the living room.  People relax when they cook.  It's warm.  It smells good, and if the conversation slows you've still got something useful to do.  Well, the same is true of our Crew Galley, only our 'family' is a little unusual.  On any given Saturday, you'll find people from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas all cooking their favorite recipes, the ones that remind them of home.  A warm cloud of curry flavored air clashes with the scent of baking brownies and cooling pancakes, all tinged with the metallic essence of the ever-present boiling fish sauce.  Overlapping conversations blend with the counterpoint of Garth Brooks and West African gospel songs, all over the reassuring clatter of pots, pans, oven doors, whisks, blenders, knives, and plastic measuring cups.  People hover around ovens and sinks like bees performing a complicated dance.  I don't have to be part of it, really, but peeking in occasionally to watch makes me feel all contented and steady inside.  I just know that things are going to be okay. If you're ever in the neighborhood, you really ought to stop by and spend a minute or two in our Crew Galley yourself.  It's well worth the time.

The best part?  Sometimes they let you taste the muffins.

Christmas Greetings from a B.A. Elf

Merry Christmas, everybody!

You know your students love you when they turn you into an elf with a really cool bow.  It's kind of hard to make out, but those big red patches are part of a giant Santa.  Apparently I'm about to fill his leg with arrows and bring him down like a great red woolly mammoth.  I confess that I'm equal parts proud and appalled.

Well, it's Christmas afternoon and I am sitting in my classroom listening to Michael Buble wonder whether he has told me lately that he loves me.  He hasn't, but that's alright.  I mean, we barely know each other.

Christmas on the Africa Mercy is a bittersweet time.  It's not often you get to celebrate such a well-loved holiday with such a tight-knit community.  Last night, the halls were filled with crew members flitting to and fro like overgrown elves as we filled each other's shoes with little gifts and goodies.  There are cookies and chocolates everywhere.  I had some for breakfast this morning as I opened Christmas presents with a few close friends.  (I got a set of magnets called 'Magnetic Monarchs'--portraits of all the kings and queens of England from William the Conqueror to the current Queen mum with her trusty corgy.  Esther, you know me so well!)  Then we all lazed around until it was time for Christmas Brunch, a true Christmas Feast, after which I felt the sudden urge to clean my cabin and do some laundry.  That last bit might seem a little out of place, but the truth is that in the midst of our celebrations we all have little currents of sadness woven in among the waves of joy that are flowing in and out of our hearts today.  At least, most of us grown-ups do.  And doing laundry can be comforting in a practical, getting-something-accomplished sort of way.  So can blogging, now that I think of it.

I guess I'd just like to say Merry Christmas (again) to everyone.  Because Christmas is a beautiful reminder of the heart of God.  Jesus, who had all the power and glory of God before time began, was so moved by love that he gave it all away on a crazy gamble for our hearts.  He looked at the fiery destruction of all our sins and, instead of turning away, ran straight into the flames to burn with us, and for us, and ultimately, to put the fire out.  He was willing to suffer so that he could draw us up to God.  I will spend my whole life trying to understand it.  

But today, I am just glad that he came.  

Life is hard... and other thoughts

Have you ever gone through a season when you'd wake up in the morning and look at yourself and think, Who am I?  Is this even my face anymore?  Heavy stuff to be dealing with at 6:30 in the morning.  This is why I run so often.  When I'm running, all I can really think is, right foot/left foot/right foot/lef...somebody's breakfast smells good.  But my little ole body can't run every morning, and existential crises are no respecters of persons.  In any case, that's what's been going on in my head for the last few weeks.  And it's not a good time to be losing your grip.  I don't know about you, but I feel like this year has brought some particularly tough challenges for everyone.  Ebola, school shootings, ISIS nastiness, droughts, mudslides, separations, rejections, failures... Good thing I'm not the type who worries about everything.  Oh, wait, I am that type.  Rats.

The trouble in the middle east is particularly worrying to me because my brother has been deployed to that area.  This is a picture of him with his daughter Zoe.  He's been out there a month, with six months left to go.  While I realize that this is what he's been trained for, that he made the choice to put his life at risk with open eyes and a willing heart, and while I realize further that if he'd chosen instead to pursue a career in accounting he could still get run over by a bread truck walking home from the office, I still feel like my beating heart is being dangled over a pit full of ravenous wolves.  And I get to watch my sister-in-law and my parents suffer the same worry (and worse) from practically the other side of the world.

Life is hard.

Did I tell you I've been made Head of High School?  Technically, I started learning the ropes last year, but this year is when the rubber began hitting the road for reals.  And you know what?  This whole 'leadership' thing is not easy.  Suddenly, all the problems that I used to quite happily let other people take care of have become mine.  It's not that I have to do all the jobs, but I do have to see that they get done, and the mental burden of it all is surprisingly heavy.  Plus, after all the meetings and emails I still have my own teaching responsibilities, and I am not a fast worker, which sometimes puts me in the awkward position of not having finished the things I've been asking my fellow teachers to do on time.  Also, there's that pesky learning curve to consider, and being in leadership means necessarily that other people will suffer when I mess up(!).  I'm not complaining.  Okay, maybe I am.  I don't regret taking on the job, though.  It is an honor and a blessing, and I just know it must be doing some sort of good.  I'm sure we're all building a lot of character, right?

And then there's facebook.  Gaah!  Facebook! I search my feed hungrily for morsels of home, pictures of family, news of friends, anything that will help me feel connected.  But inevitably, I end up looking at a long line of wedding announcements and baby pictures.  Heck, my friends' babies aren't even babies anymore!  Suddenly, I'm crying all over my lesson plans.  Pull it together, woman!  How many of these same friends are feeling just as small because they don't get to live on a ship in Madagascar?  How can I, in good conscience, complain about ANYTHING when not a hundred meters from where I sit, people who have not had one tenth of the opportunities I've been given are just hoping to be able to walk normally, etc.?  Still, I won't deny that it stings.  After all the Huffington Post articles and mom blogs, I feel like a dead tree in a forgotten garden.  But that's how it is, isn't it?  We none of us know what our own paths are leading to, but we're absolutely sure we can see all the good things on other people's paths, just lying there like ripe apples for them to pick up and enjoy.  Never mind that we have no idea how hard it is for them to keep walking.

I don't want my own petty disappointment to get in the way of any of my relationships.  You are all far too valuable, friends, for me to let go of you.  That's why envy is a sin, you know.  It separates people.  As soon as you start comparing someone else's life to your own, you put them on the other side of a sort of mental see-saw, and the higher they get lifted, the lower you sink.  "She doesn't know what it's like," you say to yourself. "She won't understand, so why bother talking about it?"  Before we know it, we're either worshiping them or hating them, probably both.  Isn't that awful?

Listen, there is enough Beauty in this world for every single one of us to lead breath-taking lives. Beauty and Goodness are eternal things, because they are characteristics of an eternal God.  We are not competing for some finite commodity.  The see-saw is a lie.  Lighting a candle doesn't take away the brightness of those that have already been lit.  In the same way, your gifts and blessings, your triumphs and successes, your moments of love and delight can only add to the brightness of my own life, because I know you, and I love you, and that means that the things that bless you also bless me (just as your hurts also become mine).

So bring it on, Facebook!  Show me all your adorable Instagram pics.  Tell me all about those little angels with their sticky faces and quote-worthy sayings.  I love it.

And I love you, dear friends.  All of you.  Thank you for being part of my beautiful life.

PS- I got a haircut!  You can see it here in this photo of us teachers at the Academy's recent Science Fair. (Just for you, Mom.)

Out to Sea (at last)!

So here we are sticking our toes out over the rolling Atlantic while our ship sways back and forth, vibrating like one of those massage chairs from Costco.  There's nothing like putting out to sea for slowing the heart and clearing the mind.  I think we're all so very relieved to be finally going somewhere that even those who don't like sailing are breathing a sigh of relief.  The Africa Mercy has spread her wings and flown the coop, so to speak, and the sweet scent of freedom and saltwater permeates the whole ship.  The experienced sailors among us have lined their camp chairs up on deck seven port side and, propping their tired feet on the protective white railing, promptly fallen asleep, while the newbies flit about like giddy kids on Christmas morning.  And it's from here, placidly ensconced in my heavy duty camp chair, that I shall endeavor to outline for you, dear reader, the more salient points of the past six weeks.

On Tuesday, the 29th of July, I said the last of many wrenching goodbyes to friends and family in the US and set my face toward the Canary Islands where my ship home waited to take me on my next African adventure, field service in Benin.  That was six weeks ago.  Four weeks ago, two things happened:  we started school (hooray!), and we realized that we probably weren't going to go to Benin (sigh).  It's a long story, and I certainly don't know all of it, but basically the outbreak of ebola that began in Guinea last winter has turned into a much bigger problem than anyone thought it would be.  Whereas all the previous outbreaks rose and fell relatively quickly, this one has only gained momentum, spreading from Guinea to Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria, and Senegal.  It is difficult for a ship full of people who have committed their present lives to providing medical relief for the poor in West Africa to sit by and watch the countries we love and sacrifice for face so much fear and death.  But what could we do?  We are not fitted out to deal with infectious diseases.  We do surgeries and education.  If even one person with ebola came to our normally very crowded screening sites, we would actually be responsible for making things much worse.  While there were no confirmed cases in Benin, how easy would it have been for someone from Nigeria, desperate for help, and willing to try anything, to make the journey across the border and bring ebola with them?  It presented a risk both to us and to the Beninois we wanted to help, and it was a risk our leaders were not willing to take.  So we waited.  People made plans.  Plans changed.  We took our students on field trips to the Science Museum (very interesting--all in Spanish) and the beach (definitely a cultural experience).  We waited some more.  Nurses and doctors got tired of cleaning empty wards and moonlighted as cooks, plumbers, and deck hands.  Some people felt called to go home.  Departments shuffled themselves around, put finishing touches on their chain-of-command flowcharts, and generally cleaned house.  I learned how to negotiate taxi fares in Spanish.  Friends returned.  Birthdays were planned and celebrated.  And still, we waited.

Then a possibility began to emerge, an opportunity that had never occurred to me...

And so we're off.  I can't tell you where we're headed yet, as it hasn't been officially announced.  But I can tell you that the excitement here is palpable.  It's a new road for us, and I'm sure it will have its challenges (like anything worth doing), though at the moment we can't help but smile.  We are so ready to be out about our Father's business again.

Update:  It has been announced, so I can tell you after all.  We are headed to

Madagascar!!!!

Isn't that exciting?  We'll be sailing all the way around the tip of South Africa, with a stop-off in Cape Town.

Here is the official statement that went out this week.

Everyone is just buzzing with anticipation to see what our next chapter holds.
As for me, well, I am going outside to stare at the sea and enjoy the delicious feeling of finally being on the road again.

Summer Days

I guess I would be stating the obvious to say I've been 'off the grid' for a while. I went from being Ms. Dunn, Africa Mercy Teacher Extraordinaire, to being plain old Sarah, traveling companion, cousin, daughter, granddaughter, cherished friend, sister, aunt, one of a million unremarkable faces milling around the West. It has been beautiful. All the parched little corners of my heart that thirsted so long for the people and places I call home have received a generous soaking.  Like a cat in the sun, my tired brain has been snoozing luxuriously, while the world spins on without my help.  I read War and Peace.


I know that these summer days are numbered.  Soon I will be boarding a plane headed back across the ocean. I'll have to let go of the people who have made me who I am so I can go and be that person. I don't want to, but I will. Because that's the way I honor all the love they've poured into me. That is what love means. It means filling each other with everything we can, so that they can't help growing into themselves.

So thanks, everyone. I love you, too.

The month of Good Bye...

Well, we made it!  The last day of school has come and gone (at least, for the students it has) and I feel a little like Rip Van Winkle, emerging from the enchanted woods to find that twenty years have gone by while I was mired in the strange fog that teachers inhabit between the end of the third quarter and the end of the year.  I sincerely hope I haven't aged beyond recognition.

While my students and I were going on Retreat, studying for/writing Finals, and just generally counting down the days until 'freedom,' the Africa Mercy has been experiencing her own change of seasons.  Our last surgeries have been performed, and our last few patients have walked down the gangway.  The tents that were such a comforting and dependable feature of our dock space have been taken down and packed away, and pretty soon our trusty fleet of Land Rovers will be hoisted up to deck 8 and tied down.  The Goodbye Season is upon us.

This is what it's like.  It's like someone has opened up your chest, exposing your beating heart, and, slowly, over the course of about a month, fibers of that precious muscle are being ripped out one by one.  Every time, you bleed.  Every time, it hurts.  Your eyes leak.  There's snot all over your sleeves because even though this is the billionth time you've come down to the dock to watch yet another friend and partner in Christ drive away for the last time, you still can't manage to remember to bring kleenex to these morose little shindigs.

Saying goodbye is hard.  This morning, I said goodbye to my Birthday Buddy.  His name's Matthew, and he's just finished 2nd grade.  One of my first clear memories of coming to the ship was racing Matthew and his two brothers down the incredibly long dock in Tenerife.  That was almost two years ago.  It took me a good 6 months to make it onto Matthew's "teachers I hug" list, but my status as friend was cemented when we discovered that we share the same birthday.  (I tried to convince him that we were actually born on the same day, and that I look older because I was born in space whereas he was born in Texas.  It didn't fly.  He knows too much about space travel.)  Matthew and his family were a part of the fabric of my life on this ship.  And now their threads have been ripped out.  I don't know when (or if) I'll ever see them again.  And they're not the only ones.  Every friend we wave out of the port leaves another wound in our hearts.

This year, I am also saying goodbye to several of my students.  This hurts even more.  My students are the closest thing I have to children, and I love them.  A few weeks ago, I wrote this for a friend who wanted to put together a sort of book of memories before she herself went home:

Sarah Dunn (Academy Teacher)

2^nd May, 2014

It’s the last night of Junior High/High School Retreat, and we are all waiting for the dinner bell to ring.  We’ve been staying at a Catholic retreat center somewhere on the road between Pointe Noire and Dolisie, about half a mile from some lake.  After a hot, sticky, sleepless night in the dorms, and a full day of running around, I don’t know why we haven’t started snapping at each other.  Instead, there’s a sweet, restful spirit in the common room, where we’ve met to wait.  The sun went down long ago, and the power’s out, so the room’s lit up with tea lights and the long, elegant dinner candles that our hosts brought out.  In one corner, Jordan has got Nick Cash’s guitar, and he’s playing all the worship songs he knows, one after the other.  A little knot of students has formed around him, and their voices echo across the room as they pick up melody after melody.  Other students are quietly writing notes of encouragement that they’ll slip into each other’s “blessing bags” (little paper bags with our names on them, all lined up against the back wall).  There’s a Schwebel boy writing in his journal by candle-light.  Jack Dunne has convinced Robert to go outside with him to try to catch some fireflies. Suddenly, I come face to face with the thought I’ve successfully avoided for months:  things are changing—my kids, a whole lot of them, are leaving the ship.  I won’t be seeing them again in the fall, a little taller, a little more grown up, but essentially their crazy, wonderful selves.  I don’t know when I’ll see them again.  It’s like a punch to the gut.  It’s hard to explain to people, but I didn’t fly all the way out to West Africa to minister to West Africans, at least not directly.  I came to teach a handful of awkward, intelligent, isolated, creative, beautiful, amazing teenagers.  These kids have been mine for so long.  I’ve prayed for them, shed tears for them, laughed with them (sometimes at them—I’m not going to lie—they’re hilarious), and worried over them.  All my best stories are about them.   I don’t want that dinner bell to ever ring!  I just want to freeze time and stay in this moment for a while longer.  Maybe a year or two.  I don’t want to face letting go yet.

But here’s the thing about community:  the people we share our lives with never really leave us.  These precious teenagers and I shared life together for two years.  We’ve picked up each other’s sense of humor and habits of speech.  We shared a lot of moments, comfortable and uncomfortable, awesome and mundane, and there is nothing in the world that can change that.  I will carry these years with me for the rest of my life, and so will they.  And when we meet again in heaven, we’ll have some great stories to share.  

And that really sums up how I feel about this whole Goodbye Season.  Yes, it stinks to have little pieces of your heart ripped out and spread to every corner of the Earth, but you know what would be a whole lot worse?  Feeling nothing.  How blessed am I to have loved and been loved by so many people?  

Sometimes I wonder if all our efforts to eliminate suffering from our lives is really effort well spent, because the only way to really avoid having to say so many goodbyes would be to never say hello.  Much better to embrace the beauty of sharing life, with the heartache that comes with letting go.  This is a hard season, but it is not the last word.  There will be ever so many more hellos for us all.

So here's to the next hello.