A letter from Jan Heckler in the U.S., on Interpretation Assignment from Madagascar
Autumn 2014 - Two Worlds
It is very early morning. I walk over the tarmac at Ivato International Airport in Antananarivo, Madagascar, with the other passengers to the huge, wide-bodied airbus. I am painfully aware of my friends and colleagues I am leaving for the next six months, especially Pastor Mamisoa and her husband, who brought me to the airport late Thursday night. It is with Mamisoa that I have partnered on just about every element of my ministry that I’ve worked on in the past 15 months. But I am also filled with anticipation since I have not been home to the United States since early April in 2012, more than two years and five months ago.
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Mamisoa at Jan's home in Antananarivo
This is the longest I have ever been away "from home," and the longest I’ve ever lived and worked in a majority world country. I have coped with my homesickness in part by not allowing myself to think a very great deal about all that my heart and palate have longed for. But now, with the Air France flight just steps away, my mind is exploding with thoughts of being home once more.
We are stopped short of the portable ramp, however, the stairway to all industrialized life on our planet, because a person-by-person inspection of our carry-on luggage has been instituted. They are searching for a bomb—a stark reminder that though I have faced some dangers while in Madagascar these past two and a half years, there are threats to one’s safety just about everywhere one travels.
The searchers find nothing in my carry-on, so like everyone else, I am permitted to board the plane. In just the time it takes to walk up the gangplank, I get measurably closer to the life conditions of my country whose development index ranks 145 places apart from the one I am leaving. This huge difference in the quality of life experienced by most people in both places staggers me.
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Pastor Lala speaks at Akany Gazela
These days you must leave the Western Hemisphere entirely to experience this kind of change—a shift in the quality of life you might experience that is this profound. From the nature and number of available alternatives, whether planning a picnic or a career, all the way to the number of years you typically might expect to live, these differences in how the two worlds are ordered have profound influence on who you are, what you do, and probably how you feel about God.
Almost daily I pray in thanksgiving for when, where and to whom I was born, for I know I won the lottery when you consider the consequences of the favor these factors have resulted in during my life. So, as I step onto a cutting-edge air fleet carrier capable of lifting 400 people from the earth and moving them at 600 mph thousands of miles away, my head is spinning even before the huge engines whirl.
I try to grasp the "distance" that my last few steps have taken me. From the world of Madagascar—where a plague of locusts has just arrived in the city of Antananarivo a few days before; a country where the bubonic plague was active just one year ago. Madagascar is a nation without working traffic lights in its major cities and where visitors cannot drink water from the faucet without becoming quite ill. It is a nation where 92 percent of the population survives on $2/day or less.
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Pastor Lala Rasendrahasina, FJKM President
As I buckle myself in and begin trying to understand the many entertainment options of the console embedded in the back of the seat in front of me (one offering more than 50 movie possibilities!) I am trying to get my mind wrapped around the enormous differences in my two worlds. I consider that my senior friend Neny, who died just a few months ago from a post-operative infection, might have survived had she had her operation in the U.S. or Western Europe. I wonder at the amount of re-orientation I am going to need this time.
Thirty hours or so later, Susan and Bill Castle meet me at Hartsfield Airport, Atlanta. Susan and Bill are members of my church, North Decatur Presbyterian Church, and have volunteered to fetch me tonight. They are so wonderful to behold, my knees become a bit shaky. They are so stable. So educated. So healthy and able. So established in their church, family and community. I am blessed to worship next to them on Sundays and to call them friends. I think of the dozens of others who have done or will do something material for me in the next few days. How blessed can a person be?
I feel like that person at the college football game who is passed down the arena held up by everyone else’s extended arms. Who I am, what I do, simply is not possible without the church and the people in it, people like Susan and Bill. By their extended hands, I am held up to serve God again.
Yvette, Lala and Mamisoa do the same for me on the other side in Madagascar. When you first arrive in a foreign land, you know no more than a little baby about how to get anything done for yourself, about the church you will be partnering with, about the streets that are dangerous to walk alone. My Malagasy colleagues who were born and raised in Madagascar hold me up with their strong arms of prayer and encouragement to do the work of God’s mission.
Here are people in two entirely different cultures, a third of the world apart in physical distance and 145 places on the Human Development Index. People so different yet who work together and serve the one triune God. In Christ, we are one.
And somehow, I get to be loved by both. Can it get any better than this, I wonder.
As I enter the apartment at Mission Haven in Decatur, where I will be staying, I am again overwhelmed by how nice everything is. Clean towels and linens await me. A huge bed beckons to begin erasing the seven-time-zone jet lag I’ve accrued during the trip home. As my toes dig into the first wall-to-wall carpet they’ve felt in 29 months, tears finally come to my eyes as wave after wave of the many good things that are "home," that are these United States, that are the PC(USA) and North Decatur Presbyterian, wash over me.
I weep and I pray. How can a person be so blessed to know and love God and to experience the vastness of this earth that exists in distance and in life and yet also to discern how very much alike we all are at the same time? I am thanking God once more as sleep finally overcomes me and I slip into a very deep slumber.
Stories full of the joy of returning home after a lengthy period overseas do not happen every day, but the struggle of good people against a host of pressing life problems and realities does. Your correspondence and gifts of prayer and financial assistance are what make my presence in Madagascar possible. I thank you for these things. If you are able to consider increasing your gift, of whatever sort it may be, I will be grateful. Thanks be to God for the privilege of serving, and many thanks for each of you who supports and accompanies me on this miraculous journey that only gets more precious with every passing day.
Jan Heckler
The 2014 Presbyterian Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 147
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