Fee Mail

An Ivoirian doctor where we lived in Abidjan had diagnosed the possibility of a problem with my spleen and referred me to a surgeon. I had pains up under my rib cage on my left side for two weeks, and this doctor was the second opinion that I had received from Ivoirian doctors.

I was not ready to succumb to the knife of an Ivoirian surgeon, so we decided that we would travel up country to an American mission hospital in Ferkessédougou. It was a long journey for a doctor’s visit, but it was worth it for peace of mind about next steps for the pain I was experiencing. Ferké, which is the common shortened name for the town, is in the northernmost part of Ivory Coast.

The first four hours of driving was on a two-lane asphalt road with lots of donkey carts and pedestrians traveling along the side of the road. The last six plus hours of the road are unpaved, but there are fewer obstacles alongside the road and fewer police roadblocks which could take a lot of time to deal with.

The boys were four and five years of age, so everything was an adventure for them. However, there was not much to do in the hospital compound guest house, so we loaded their bicycles in the back of our Peugeot station wagon with a couple suitcases and a supply of food and water and headed to Ferké.

One of the American physicians saw me early the morning after our arrival and by noon he had a diagnosis: torn cartilage in my ribs and a case of malaria.

We had just taken this same trip the month before when we made a three-week trip from Abidjan to Niamey, Niger. We had a week-long meeting in Ouagadougou, and I had to deliver theological education by extension textbooks to Ouagadougou and Niamey, so we made it a long family trip.

Traveling at that time along West African roads provided little opportunity to stop for food along the way. Of course, there were always the vendors on the side of road who built a fire and cooked some stringy meat and killed the taste with ground dried hot peppers. So, picnics out of the back of our station wagon were frequent and popular with our family. Cheryl could always pack just the right foods for a tasty meal.

A problem with stopping on the side of the road for our picnics was that we would always attract a crowd of village kids. We would stop at what we thought was an isolated spot with no villages around, but then to our surprise, a gaggle of kids would soon converge on us. Many times, they were hungry, so our compassionate and generous sons wanted to share our food with them. We would have no garbage as the village kids would claim every scrap of paper, tin can or plastic container.

Traveling in rural areas of West Africa could get boring. After all, one village would look just like all the others, so the boys would quickly get bored. We would count mopeds or donkey carts or gendarme roadblocks or at more exciting but rarer times elephants or monkeys or other wildlife. So we had to come up with creative things for the boys to do in the car.

Once we were trying to teach the boys “Do-Re-Mi” from the Sound of Music. We would sing it over and over until the boys had learned the lyrics. But learning the words does not necessarily mean that they understood the meaning of the words. A couple weeks after we had been traveling and singing “Do-Re-Mi,” Jason asked his mom, “What is a fee?”

Puzzled, Cheryl tried to get some context and asked him where he had heard that word. He replied, “You know, like a fee-mail deer!” That took some explaining. She thought she had pretty well explained the meaning of male and female when Jeremy chimed in, “Yeah, like when we get letters, that’s mail.” So, Cheryl tried again going through the entire song and explaining every word of it.

It was a good lesson for us that words have meaning, and it was important that we take all the time we needed to teach our children the importance of using the right words at the right time.

The best lesson about the meaning of words that we tried to instill in our children was “What you say flows from what is in your heart.” That comes from Luke 6:45: “A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart. What you say flows from what is in your heart.” (NLT)