Reprise: Sleeping on the Danube

“There aren’t many Americans who can say they’ve slept on the Danube,” laughed my new friend Catherine Sevier. Catherine is an R.N., PhD, and former vice-president of the Diabetes Foundation. Catherine, along with her husband David, was in charge of the Health Consultation track for the Hope for Europe Congress II. Our little group of 42 folk (out of the larger 1000-plus attendees) were rooming in a “botel”—a ship-turned-hotel docked at Quay 21 on the Danube River in Budapest, Hungary.

Catherine was right. There aren’t many Americans who can say they’ve slept on the Danube. I was beginning to form a life principle. That principle is this: When we say “yes” to life, even when we feel insecure and unformed and not sure what we’re committing ourselves to doing, that “yes” most often leads us into territories and experiences we wouldn’t trade away, into relationships with fascinating and sometimes terrifying personalities that change and form us for the better and into personal growth we hadn’t expected and didn’t know we really, really needed.

The 42 of us on that botel were tasked with discussing the relationship of the church to health issues. We represented some 18 countries, most of them European. Leaders represented health-related ministries such as Ukraine Medical Outreach, Global Hope Network International, Healthcare Christian Fellowship, International Christian Medical and Dental Association, YWAM (Youth With a Mission) Budapest, various ministries for drug addicts, etc.

So what was Karen Mains, with no medical training in her background, doing in this esteemed crowd? What was I, having dropped out of college after my freshman year to get married and a year later to start having children—what was I doing strategizing health/church issues with this highly educated constituency? Actually, my role was to represent Medical Ambassadors International, a faith-based global development agency. I was in year two in what became an eight-year stint on that board of directors. My basic qualification was that I had demonstrated the capability of creating cohesive collaboration out of a group of strangers. I was urged to go to Budapest on behalf of MAI, my travel and expenses all paid.

A dear friend, Dr. John Payne, had become the CEO of MAI, and he asked my husband and me to serve on their board of directors. “But particularly, Karen,” he emphasized, “we don’t really have outspoken women on the board.” (This wasn’t my only claim to fame, although I will admit I do not clam up when faced with a roomful of powerful men.) When I was asked to visit the Medical Ambassadors board for a “check-one-another-out” routine, I announced to the roomful of males, “Maybe you can’t see it, but I am on my knees begging you, begging you, to let me serve on this board!”

“That was pretty unusual,” reported one of my new board colleagues a couple months later (after they had unanimously approved my acceptance). “Usually it is we who are begging people to work with us.”

Traveling to my first International Council meeting for MAI, I found myself sitting at the board table with a group of wonderful men. As I scrambled to get my mind around an international health-development organization serving in 104 countries, I discovered a series of lesson plans titled Women’s Cycle of Life and met Charlene McWilliams. A former public-health nurse, she had designed the 19-lesson series, adapting material from her community work. The lessons dealt with conception, birth, menstruation, nutrition, sexual relationships, menopause and everything in between—everything that marks the passage of earthly femininity.

Because of MAI’s philosophy of health, which starts with an emphasis on prevention, its international health outreach was impacting literary hundreds of thousands of nationals worldwide. This emphasis included the concept of training nationals to train other nationals; a holistic approach that integrated health principles spiritually, intellectually, physically and psychologically; and community-based health plans, not dependent on the far-distant clinic or on medical professionals.

Storytelling seamlessly integrated Scripture into what is now some 3000 open-sourced lesson plans on all aspects of health. Charlene’s Women’s Cycle of Life scheme was designed in the MAI learner-participatory fashion that enabled even illiterate or semi-literate woman to understand the health principles and begin to teach others. This approach is called Community Health Education, or CHE, and has now been adapted by groups worldwide. At the time I was on the board, however, this growth was just a possibility in the mind of MAI staff. Somewhat in the shadows, Charlene had developed the Women’s Cycle of Life—just doing what she knew how to do after years as a public-health nurse and adapting it into a formula she suspected could be used worldwide through the MAI international structure. Yet no one on the board had become a WCL advocate—perhaps because they were all men dealing with the heavy demands of raising funds for an international ministry. Or perhaps because Charlene was hesitant about advocating for her own plans, no one at the director level was aware of her work.

Naturally, I, being female, immediately sensed the potential of the WCL as a way to initiate invaluable impact worldwide. The Women’s Cycle of Life, which dealt with every aspect of being a woman, from giving birth (or being born), through the horrendous practice of female circumcision, to the onset of menses and the development of a woman’s body, to the cause of conception and the implications of sexual activity, to the rhythms of fertility and natural means for contraception, to the necessary practices of cleanliness—all of these essential female activities were explained in WCL.

Of course, across the world, it is the women who walk miles to draw water and use the water to clean and cook. It is the women who prepare the meals. The CHE model helped them understand how important cleanliness was to being healthy—washing hands, separating fly-infested garbage dumps away from the village, planting gardens for abundant food supplies, keeping the livestock penned so that barefoot children would not track across fecal refuse.

Before one of my first MAI board meetings, Charlene motioned to me (after serving and preparing lunch to the whole board, in addition to providing beds for several trustees in order to cut the cost of housing folks in motels). She had something she wanted to show me. Standing in the corner of her dining room, she took me to her computer and unveiled her plans for the Women’s Cycle of Life. Needless to say, I was wowed!

“Gentlemen,” I announced at my first MAI board meeting. “Do you have any idea what we are sitting on?”

What a group of guys! They didn’t have any idea, but in short order, every board member had read Nicholas Kristoff and Cheryl WuDunn’s recently published book Half the Sky. Charlene and I conducted a bunch of focus groups designed to develop small home presentations of WCL to raise awareness and funds. After the focus groups, we finalized a home-presentation format and requested and received a $16,700 development grant from the MAI grant committee. In addition, I was asked to interview a local nurse with a PhD in community-based public health-care. I found her to be delightful, and she was quickly hired as the International Resource Director for the Women’s Cycle of Life. The pace of all this left me breathless.

Now, let me repeat. I have no background in public health and no medical training. In fact, I don’t even have a college degree (though I would classify myself as a lifelong learner), and I have had no previous experience in launching international programs of any kind.

But I said “Yes!” and found myself sleeping on the Danube in a botel and dialoguing with health-care experts and specialists from around the world. Without this leap of agreement, I would have missed meeting people who practice a form of uncommon goodness that can heal the heart of the most confirmed skeptic and soothe the soul of the most jaded critic.

During my novice days as a director with MAI after WCL had been launched, across the world in Ethiopia, Sharon Abebe—a Medical Ambassadors worker and an Ethiopian—trained 42 women for a week in a conference setting. Many of these African women had never been out of their villages. They were lodged in a dormitory. None of them had ever had someone else do the cooking for them. They spent five days in intensive WCL training and spent most of their nights chatting together like college girls on retreat. Sharon stressed to them that the purpose of this training was to train other women.

Three months later, during verbal interviews conducted on video, Sharon discovered these 42 women had trained some 1680 other women regarding portions of the Women’s Cycle of Life.

At home in the States, in rapid succession and now with a full-time director, kits for home presentations were prepared and ready. Video footage was filmed and edited for a DVD that walked the hostess through the home event, the purpose of which was to expose others to the worldwide potential of this outreach.

The Women’s Cycle of Life lesson plans were finalized and printed in a spiral-bound booklet. Forty WCL teaching toolkits were prepared and shipped around the world. (Toolkits include a cloth baby doll, sewn and assembled by teams of volunteers, and fabric placentas and uteri—knitted by an 83-year-old California woman—and cloth breasts to demonstrate self-examination with paper patterns for replication by local seamstresses.) Training began worldwide using the unique methodology of Community Health Education—again, a participatory learning approach based on orality training. In Africa, some 26,000 volunteers had already been trained to train others in the CHE method, and they adapted quickly to distributing the Women’s Cycle of Life emphasis. In Kenya, Winnie and Tirus Githaka, Directors of MAI East Africa, told of holding a WCL training where the husbands of the women who attended began to lobby that men should also receive the exposure to the cycles of women’s physicality. This eventually morphed into what became the Family Cycle of Life.

So, who knows…? Who knows when you say “yes” to God in whatever way—who knows where that will take you? You might find yourself sleeping on the Danube, or attending a Lamaze class taught in Swahili in Nakuru, Kenya—as I did in with about 15 young women in various stages of pregnancy.

This is one of the proudest moments in my life. I neither conceived of this program, nor did I have anything to do with the labor of designing it or testing it. But at age 68, I said “yes.” Through no effort of my own, I was the right woman, in the right place at the right time. I got to ask, “Gentlemen, do you have any idea what we are sitting on?” I had the privilege of being the advocate and cheerleader for what is now a worldwide program that empowers, brings health to and introduces a Christian worldview of health—for the body, for the mind, for the psyche and for the spirit—to literally hundreds of thousands of women worldwide.

You never know what will happen when you say “yes.”

Karen Mains

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Karen Mains

BOOK CORNER
Where the Crawdads Sing
by Delia Owens

I’ve been trying to dip into secular fiction, just to see what is being written, how it’s being written, and, if I can determine, why it is being written. If you have some terrific samples of fiction that you would recommend, please do so. So much of my reading is research-driven that I’ve fallen woefully behind on current authors and what they are creatively imagining.

Where the Crawdads Sing is a poignantly rendered piece, set in the desolate marshlands of the North Carolina coast as seen through the eyes of an abandoned child. The nature writing is exquisite, but the aloneness, and the misunderstanding that often construes itself around people who seem and are different than ourselves is distressing. My empathetic nerve-endings were palpitating at the alienation of Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl.

Book-flap copy explains: “Where the Crawdads Sing is at once an exquisite ode to the natural world, a heartbreaking tale of possible murder. Owens reminds us that we are forever shaped by the children we once were, and that we are all subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.”

PLEASE: If you have any great reads to recommend from the non-religious secular novel section of any bookstore, let me know. Or, if you know of any fiction books that beautifully integrate faith and fiction without being didactic or propagandist, let me know about that also.