Meditation

During the Fall and Winter Terms faculty and staff are encouraged to share a bit of their story with the community here. (The students take a turn in the Spring.) If you are up for it, you can deliver a 20 minute meditation reflecting on any topic that you chose. Usually something personal, something you are learning about yourself, a part of your own life journey. It is an optional but rich time on Thursday mornings, sitting quietly and listening to others share, learning about each one through what they chose to divulge. Last week, Kev took his turn up front. I've hesitated to post it, remember it is a 20 minute talk so what follows is LONG. But for those of you who are interested...

Meditation: "My Knock-Down, Drag-Out Fight With God"
Delivered at Phillips Exeter Academy on February 18, 2010

For those of you who don't know me, my name is Kevin Bartkovich, and I am a new member of the math department this year. Prior to coming to Exeter, I was a missionary living in a remote village in Uganda. My family and I were there for 10 years building a secondary school from the ground up for the children of Bundibugyo District.

This was my dream job. Was this place a paradise? Not so much really. Much of the time it seemed we were taking one step forward, then one step back. When we first visited in 1995 we were captivated by both the beauty and the need. Bundibugyo is in a valley nestled between the snow-peaked Rwenzori Mountains and the border with Congo. Mangoes, pineapples and bananas are abundant. The countryside is lush, the soil fertile. Yet, this was a place with no electricity, no running water, no indoor plumbing, no phone service, no paved roads, and definitely no internet. Most people lived in mud and wattle huts with grass roofs. This is a polygamous culture; most men have more than one wife, and women are viewed as commodities. Maternal mortality is high. Women die in childbirth so often that the typical greeting to a mother with a baby is "Webale kwejuna," meaning, "Thank you for surviving." Malnutrition and disease are rampant. Malaria is endemic
and often fatal. Cholera is a frequent threat. It is a place where young adults desperately want to improve themselves and their communities, but the odds against them are overwhelming.

When we arrived nobody was passing their college entrance exams. Children were eager to learn but there was a decided lack of educational infrastructure and few teachers, and even fewer who taught in English, the national language of Uganda and thus the language of the exams. Corruption in the local government was widespread, which trapped the local people in a system whereby a few families got rich while the vast majority scraped by at a subsistence level. We realized that significant and lasting change could only come from the ground up, brought about by a new generation of educated leaders. The people wanted and needed someone to come and start a school that would give them a chance at a better future. How could I refuse?

Building a school, establishing a curriculum, mentoring a faculty, all this was both a delight and a challenge, full of blessing and hardship. I made a lot of mistakes along the way, oftentimes because I thought I already knew the answers, only later realizing that I didn't even know the right questions. I remember entering into my first math lesson with high hopes. We brought over with us 200 TI graphing calculators, and I was eager to put them into the hands of my students. First, though, I created a brilliant lesson on estimation with which to kick off that first year. I marched my students outside and over to a large mango tree. "Let's estimate how many leaves are on this big tree," I said hopefully and with great enthusiasm. Silence. Blank stares at both me and the tree. Hmmm. I tried to simplify things a bit. "Let's estimate how many leaves are on this bottom branch." Still there was silence. Over the ensuing weeks, I became
painfully aware of the extreme height of the mountain we would need to climb. I discovered the difficulty of teaching math to students who were unfamiliar with not only the names of but also the very concept of large numbers. In their experience, everything in the market was sold in heaps. Whether 5 big tomatoes or 8 small ones or 14 really small ones, for them the number was the same: A heap. To everyone's surprise, through long hours of study and instruction, by the time they graduated, all of our students were passing math on their national exams. No less steep was the humanities side of things. I learned that my students had heard of books. They had just never held one in their hands. This was a culture where stories were passed down orally, and until recently was without a written language. Even my faculty was shell-shocked. They came from all over Uganda, arriving by public transport over the mountains, perched atop bags of produce sitting
in the backs of pick-up trucks. They arrived battered and weary, covered in dust from head to foot, looking around wide-eyed at this place so clearly at the end of the road. Together we worked to bring our students up to standard. After 6 years our first students sat for their exams. For the first time students who went to school in Bundibugyo qualified for university.

One of my best memories was hearing the national exam results over the radio and hopping on my mountain bike to deliver wonderful news to my best student. Here is a kid whose father was killed during the guerilla warfare of our first few years in Bundibugyo. School was his only chance. During the summer months he lived in a village far from the main road, and I just had to go and celebrate with him. He had achieved an impossibly good score on his math exam and thus had qualified for university. As I arrived, he was there greeting me with a huge smile on his face. With tears flowing freely we jumped up and down and cheered. Just last week this young man graduated from university in the capital city with a degree in finance and statistics. I couldn't be prouder.

In the midst of these success stories, we struggled to establish this institution, never sure if the school would survive from one year to the next. Our soccer team, which began with kids who had never played organized ball, was representative of the school's development as a whole. We resisted the common corrupt practice of hiring men to play for the school team, which was the normal strategy that schools used to win the district championship. Instead we relied on our own students and practiced every day, developing our boys into a team that competed year after year at the national level. Here were these boys, who at first were intimidated and afraid of playing men from the outside, learning discipline, the benefits of hard work and superior physical conditioning, and the power of believing in themselves and each other. While at first they were laughed at and ridiculed, they learned to play competitive soccer and to be such a presence on the field
that they began to be feared by other districts. The high point for me came the year they played with so much heart that the corporate sponsor, Coca-Cola, gave them two complete sets of uniforms at the National Tournament.

At the end of 10 years, we had 350 students and 26 faculty members. The school was ranked in the top 20% in the country and we were regularly sending our graduates on to university. Our soccer team was a force to be reckoned with and our focus on girls' education was turning heads as well. Getting this school established was the hardest work I had ever done, and the best work I had ever done. I had purpose, every day was focused, I felt I was making a difference. I knew I was where I was supposed to be. I was given this wonderful work to do, and I never wanted to leave.

After 10 years and four children, however, my wife JD was convinced that we needed to leave. She carefully considered the stage of life our family was entering as our oldest child was pushing 10, she weighed the effect of the accumulation of a decade's worth of stress and deprivation, but even more significantly, she prayed and felt the Lord telling her, "It's time to go." I was not amused. I couldn't imagine a scenario that would make me want to leave Uganda. Day after day we discussed and argued. She didn't back down, and I wouldn't give an inch. One night as I sat alone and prayed, surrounded by a dark cloud of anger – why have you spoken to JD and not me? – and, in the midst of this darkness there appeared a small ray of light that I can best describe as bringing peace and acceptance that leaving was the right thing to do, even as I was nearly consumed by anger and resentment. Immediately, a small quiet voice said to me, "Things
are going to get a lot worse." What did that mean? When I shared this with JD, neither one of us could figure out what it meant.

And so, two years ago, in February 2008, we returned to the US after living in Uganda for ten years. We immediately went out west and spent 10 weeks in a tent, one week for each year we lived in Uganda, me and JD and our 4 children, camping in national parks. It was a restorative time, but it did not touch what was going on deep inside of me. I knew this because when we got settled in North Carolina, every Sunday in church, week after week, I found myself weeping during the service and not knowing why. When JD and I went on a retreat to the mountains near Asheville, I finally had my knock-down, drag-out fight with God.

A friend there encouraged me that arguing with God was a legitimate thing to do, as outrageous as it sounds, so I went at Him. All the questions came pouring out as I sat by myself in a garden, shouting and sobbing as I voiced my accusations. "I followed you to Uganda and then you kicked me out. Why? Why couldn't I stay? Were you displeased with me? There was so much more to do. Why couldn't I be the one? Are you really looking out for me, or are you a capricious God who just uses people up and discards them when you've accomplished your purposes?" It was cathartic in the best sense of the word. I let it all out, I held nothing back, and I found that God is big enough to handle it. Something between me and God happened in that garden, a release and I'm not sure what else, perhaps a kind of reckoning, and afterwards I was no longer weeping in church on Sundays.

The rest of the year we spent resting, recovering, and looking for what was next. And I did what I always did – I exercised. After 10 years of daily soccer practice on the equator, now I was once again running the streets of Durham. Ten years previous I was a much stronger runner, able to run a 3-mile loop any day of the week. Now I was committed to regaining that form and fighting the decline in my aging body. But when I found that I was doing worse even as I worked harder and I could no longer run even a single mile, I took to running sprints interspersed with walking. Throughout most of the school year it was my normal custom to run alone.

Then came this day last summer, June 11th 2009. I don't remember what happened that day; I only have what others have told me. I would like to share what my 11-year-old son Joe has written.

It can be very sad when someone you care about dies or comes close to death. Something like that happened to me. Last summer, when I was training for soccer camp, I jogged with my dad almost every day. One day we jogged to a nearby park and jogged all around it. We took a break at the water fountain. Then we ran some sets of stairs. As we jogged home, he complained that he was very tired. I was pretty tired too, so I didn't think that much of it. When we were close to our home, Dad suggested that we sprint to the corner. I sprinted to the corner. I was too caught up in the great feeling of sprinting so fast to notice that he was falling behind. When I turned around he stumbled a few feet and then just collapsed. At first I thought he was joking around, because he was making weird breathing noises. It was almost like when a horse breathes out heavily through its mouth and the lips shake. Some people came over and asked if he
was okay. In a panicked voice, I said that I didn't know. Fortunately one of them had a cell phone. He dialed 911. Someone told me to go get Mom. I raced to the house. I ran in and screamed for Mom. I said that Dad fell down and was not getting up. When we got back someone was giving him CPR. He was doing the chest compressions. I saw Mom go over and help. She gave him mouth to mouth. We lived three blocks away from the fire department, so the paramedics arrived soon and then the ambulance. As the sirens blared my mom told me to go get my little brother and sister. I went back to my house. My hands numbly worked the keys to lock the door behind us. When I got back the ambulance was giving Dad shocks. Nothing was working. My mom asked if they could shock him again and asked them not to give up. They told her that they couldn't shock him anymore and that they needed to get to the hospital. A girl who lived
nearby told me that he had had a heart attack. Later I learned that one of his heart valves had grown smaller and harder. This caused his heart to stop beating. They took Dad to the hospital. I went back home and e-mailed our friends in Uganda and South Sudan. I told them what had happened and asked them to pray. So many people stopped what they were doing to pray for my dad. The school in Africa, where my dad was the headmaster for 10 years was about to riot. As they were meeting to discuss their demands, they learned what had happened to my dad. It immediately turned into a prayer meeting. Miraculously, my dad survived with no serious side effects. He had flat-lined for 15 minutes. He was in a medically induced coma for 2 days. After his open heart surgery, his doctors told him they had never seen someone survive what he went through. A few days later I went to see him. He told me that I had been very brave. He said that I
was his hero, and that I had done the exact right thing, even though I was scared. He thanked me for helping to save his life. A month or so later we all went back home. Sadly, it will be a long time before things are normal. For awhile, when I didn't know if he would be okay, I felt like a part of me was just gone, that some part of me was dying, too. Fortunately, he survived.

My fight with God was real. Did He answer? Yes.

Unbeknownst to any of us, I had been in heart failure for 5 years. As I laid in the cardiac intensive care unit in Duke Hospital, it all began to come together. If I had had my way, JD would have flown home from Uganda a widow. As for the word I had received about things getting worse, there I was on our 15th wedding anniversary, flat-lined on the street, my wife giving me CPR.

There is a story that Vincent Donovan, a missionary to the Masai of Kenya, tells – a parable of faith from a tribal elder. The Masai elder told Vincent, "For a man really to believe is like a lion going after its prey. His nose and eyes and ears pick up the prey. His legs give him the speed to catch it. All the power of his body is involved in the terrible death leap and single blow to the neck with the front paw, the blow that actually kills. And as the animal goes down the lion envelops it in his arms, pulls it to himself, and makes it part of himself. This is the way a lion kills. This is the way a man believes. This is what faith is. You told us of the High God, how we must search for him …. We have not searched for him. He has searched for us. He has searched us out and found us. All the time we think we are the lion. In the end, the lion is God."

As for me, I chased God all the way to Uganda and back, and then He caught me.