Kaci Hickox doesn’t belong. She looks enough like an IBCer, wearing flip-flops and a warm smile. You can find her sipping coffee at the Mo trying to catch up on her reading before the next Chick Lit meeting.
But she doesn’t belong here.
Kaci loves IBC—has sung its praises from the streets of London to the beaches of Indonesia—but she’s not at home here because there’s something lacking at IBC that is essential for Kaci Hickox to feel at home.
Suffering.
Certainly, IBCers suffer every day, just not in the way that Kaci is used to—under thatched roofs and government oppression.
Just returned from a two-year assignment in Myanmar with Doctors Without Borders, Kaci is quick with the pictures and names of impoverished patients. But ask her why she went or what she misses most and you’ll likely get stories that involve pain, even tragedy.
“There was one girl, about 20 years old, who had diabetes. She developed gangrene in a finger and there was nothing we could do to help her. She went to the hospital where they amputated it and when she came back, I asked her if they had explained to her about high blood sugar and the reason they had to amputate. She said, ‘They didn’t tell me anything. They just cut off my finger.’
“So I gave her some health education about eating less sugar. Before she left, she shook my hand and said, ‘Thank you so much for taking time to talk to me.’
“There was nothing we could give her medically. No insulin. She will still go blind before she’s 40 and probably have something else amputated in the next few years. There was nothing I could do but sit and listen to her fears and complaints. You feel completely helpless, but sometimes just being there is enough.”
“Being there” is Kaci’s passion. She likes to quote John Eldridge: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and go do that because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
“There”—wherever there is suffering, wherever she can comfort or heal in Jesus’ name—is where Kaci belongs.
Pained Enough to Comfort
“This was always the plan,” Kaci said flatly. “I always knew I wanted to do something with health care. I wanted to give something real and tangible to people while I was loving them. That’s why I chose nursing.”
Raised in tiny Rio Vista south of Cleburne, Kaci attended the University of Texas at Arlington where she completed her nursing degree. She worked at Parkland, at the VA Hospital in Dallas, and at Las Colinas Medical Center. She had been attending IBC for two years when a tsunami struck Southeast Asia in 2004 and she felt compelled to go.
“The heart of this church had started working on me and when the tsunami happened God said, ‘OK Kaci. Now you’re ready. This is it.’”
She was in Indonesia for a month—eight weeks after the waves had come ashore—treating broken bones and internal organ damage that would have been treated immediately in the States.
And she was hooked.
“Once I got there, it was a whole other level. It felt like home—exactly where I needed to be.”
A year later she was standing in a bamboo hut in a village called Maungdaw looking over a series of wooden planks with holes in the center used as beds for diarrhea patients. Elephants grazed nearby. The Mo was 9,107 miles away. And Kaci was right at home.
Strong Enough to Be Weak
Maungdaw is in Myanmar, formerly called Burma, a country that occupies 261,970 square miles between Thailand and Bangladesh. The Rohingya are a Muslim tribe of about 723,000 people in Western Myanmar. Though they have lived there for 13 centuries, the Rohingyas are stateless. They are a religious minority in the predominantly Buddhist country, their compatriots essentially pushing them out through discrimination, forced labor, land and assets confiscation, violence, and arbitrary arrest. Many Rohingyas flee across the border to Bangladesh, a Muslim country who welcomes them no better. Bangladeshi authorities regularly enforce mass repatriations. Neither country wants them and both deny them health care.
Known to most of the world as MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières), Doctors Without Borders runs seven clinics in Rakhine State where most Rohingyas live. Kaci managed 48 national staff at three primary health centers in rural areas. There is no hospital in the area. The most common diseases are diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria. Each year, MSF treats 300,000 patients for malaria there. MSF also runs a malnutrition program there. Most of the year, the clinics care for 500 malnourished children under the age of five. During the rainy season, that number almost triples.
Many of the Rohingya’s dramatic health problems are cultural. The people speak their own dialect and many can’t communicate with staff at state-run clinics. Plus, such clinics are notoriously antagonistic, making treatment difficult (and sometimes denying it altogether) for Muslim patients.
But much of the Rohingya situation could be helped with education, which was also part of Kaci’s job. From sanitation and healthy eating to sex education for prevention of HIV, Kaci and her MSF team of five did it all, spurred on by tragedies of ignorance, some even more wrenching than those of religious hostility.
“A woman came in burning with fever,” Kaci remembered. “She said she was in labor. I asked how long she had been in labor and she said three days. She had been delivering at home with a traditional birth attendant. Everything was fine—a healthy mom and baby—but the arm delivered first. The birth attendant only knew she couldn’t deliver a baby that way. So she cut the arm off.
“I couldn’t believe it when she said that. I asked the translator, ‘Are you sure?’”
“It was three days later and the baby still hadn’t come out.”
Muzzled Enough to Speak
In a setting with such grief, Kaci found herself keenly aware of another
mission field. Even more than the thousands of patients she treated, she prayed for her team.
“I had other expatriates ask me, ‘How could God allow this?’” Kaci said. “You can’t answer that. There’s nothing you can say. Isaiah 55:8 is something I have held onto.”
Kaci’s team comprised a Swede, an Italian, a Frenchman, a Filipino, a Nepali, a Brit, and a French Canadian named Fred. All five of the westerners were raised Catholic and seemed to have a negative view of the church.
“It broke my heart the way they saw church—like another government, another entity for judging and blame,” Kaci said. “I see them as an even more amazing mission field because they will travel to other countries and impact others, and they’re already seen as experts. If they have a heart for God as well, how much more powerful could they be?”
When Kaci spoke about churches serving in inner city schools and fixing neighbors’ cars, they were impressed. When she talked about open discussion and even debate among laymen and clergy, they were shocked.
“There was an Australian girl who worked for the U.N.,” Kaci remembered. “We had all been having this discussion about reincarnation, I think, and she said, ‘Man, I wanna know the kind of Christianity that Kaci lives because that’s the kind I think I could buy into.’”
“I wish I could say that I knew a lot of people that believed because I was there, but he doesn’t always work that way.”
A fiercely secular organization, MSF has a reputation for removing itself from ideology. Kaci knew that if she was too overt in her evangelism, she might never get another assignment.
But Fred, the French Canadian, seemed especially ripe. He asked questions about her faith and expressed interest in the Bible. The day she left, Kaci left her Bible with a little Texas postcard in his room. “I hope this will help you continue your search,” she wrote.
Five days later, Fred sent an e-mail: “Thank you so much. I’ve started reading it.”
Eclipsed Enough to Shine
Kaci returned to North Texas in March, but she won’t stay long. She doesn’t belong here. She’ll go to Sudan this month, or Ethiopia. Then maybe more school—she’s hoping for a dual degree in Public Health and International Nursing from Johns Hopkins. And then there will be another MSF assignment, probably not Myanmar, but someplace people need comfort. Someplace she can escape the relative safety of mocha lattes and reruns. Someplace she can find obscurity and darkness and the eyes of her Lord in the faces of the suffering.
One of Kaci’s favorite songs is “Faith Enough” by Jars of Clay.
The storm is wild enough for sailing
The bridge is weak enough to cross
This body frail enough for fighting
I’m home enough to know I’m lost
Home enough to know I’m lost
“I don’t know how many times people say, ‘It’s so great the work you do.’” Kaci said. “I just do it because I love it. I know aid workers who do it because they think they ought to, but they don’t do it with passion and love because it’s not what they’re supposed to be doing. I just happen to be one of the lucky ones who can’t think of doing anything else.”
