10 ~ (1993—1995)
Marah and Elim
As our plane from Bolivia prepared to land in São Paulo on a hot summer January day in 1993, I made the surprising discovery that I was happy to be back. God was answering my prayer that I would begin to like living in a mega-city, not just tolerate it, endure, survive. As far as we knew, God had called us to São Paulo for the long term, so I really wanted to feel at home there.
At the same time, there was a flickering concern at the back of my mind. Over the last couple of weeks away from home, Karis had started throwing up again. It was easy to blame the Bolivian food and water, or a bug she might have picked up in a new environment, but I knew that we were fooling ourselves. None of that explained green bilious vomiting, and the degree of distention and tummy pain that nine-year-old Karis was experiencing once again.
We had gone to Bolivia for a Kornfield Christmas reunion, eight little girl cousins plus Danny, the only Kornfield grandson, visiting Santa Cruz, Cochabamba, La Paz, Lake Titicaca and other fascinating places. (Hearing Spanish for the first time, four-year-old Valerie, fluent of course in Portuguese, listened intently and then said, “Mommy, why are they talking baby talk?”) Dave’s parents were preparing to retire from their forty years of missionary service in Cochabamba and return to live in the US, so this family reunion, in the places David and his brother and sister had grown up, was a very special event. Dave’s brother Bill was the first one to discover Karis throwing up, in the middle of the night, trying not to disturb anyone.
Soon Karis wasn’t able to hide the fact that she was getting sick again. Over the next year and a half, as she enjoyed school, neighborhood activities such as a traditional June bonfire in the street and the children’s Bible clubs in our home that drew dozens of children, her symptoms gradually worsened until we were seriously concerned. I had helped start Pioneer Clubs at our children’s school, but eventually had to withdraw from that and other involvements as Karis required more care. Karis still remembers some of the songs that Rocky, a highschooler who lived with us, sang to her when she wasn’t feeling well that year.
As I went about my daily duties, I frequently challenged God on why this was happening, just when we were starting to really settle in and take hold of our life in Brazil. I reminded God that I had entrusted Karis to him when we had decided to take on this missionary adventure. I told him that if He could keep her well for six years, he could certainly keep on doing it! I begged him for relief, for healing. I grieved for the physical suffering that Karis once again had to endure. I reminded him of our friend Jan’s vision that Karis would be well at three years old, and the marvel of having believed for all of the last six years that God had fulfilled that vision. Karis couldn’t be sick again. It didn’t make any sense.
These conversations with God seemed completely one-sided. I wasn’t able to hear God say anything back, nor did I see him do anything to relieve my daughter’s pain, no matter how reasonable my arguments or how impassioned my plea. Karis just kept on getting sicker. We communicated with Dr. P in Detroit and followed all of the advice he gave us, but it didn’t seem to make any difference.
One day Karis came to us very seriously, Bible in hand, and asked us not to pray anymore for her healing. She had been reading 2 Corinthians 12, where Paul says that he asked God three times to remove his thorn in the flesh, and God had said no. Karis told us that we had asked many more than three times, and she believed God was saying no. She asked us to pray instead that she would have strength and courage to honor God no matter what would happen. Chastened, I adopted that prayer for myself as well. While many others did continue to ask God for another healing, within our family we tried to honor Karis’s request. 2 Corinthians 12:9 became the guiding light of her life: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
As Karis navigated fifth grade, she was sick so often that her teachers arranged blankets and cushions in the back of their classrooms so that she could lie down, but still be present in class. She was also given permission to run to the restroom whenever needed without asking permission, because of her frequent need to throw up. Teachers told me stories of seeing her run outside, throw up in the grass, stop for a minute to regain her composure, and then walk quietly back into class as if nothing had happened.
The teachers’ willingness to accommodate Karis’s needs allowed her to participate and progress in school, and we were very grateful. When Karis and I disagreed about whether she was well enough to go to school, she almost always won. On those days she did sometimes make it through the day, but quite often I would receive a call an hour or two later asking me to pick her up. Or she might wake up sick, but feel better later in the day and still get in on some of her classes. I was so grateful that we lived close enough to the school that this type of interchange was possible! Karis was curious about everything, soaking up knowledge like a sponge even when lying in the back of a classroom with her eyes closed. She grieved when she was too sick to go to school.
As we planned our first furlough for June, July, and August of 1994, the first event to be scheduled was an appointment for Karis with Dr. P in Detroit. He recommended surgery, believing from the exams that a section of her intestine was not functioning well and was putting pressure on the rest of her intestine. When he opened her tummy, however, he found that her abdomen was full of adhesions from previous surgeries. Thinking the adhesions were the cause of Karis’s problems, he decided to just clean them up, rather than removing any more of her intestine. Karis was cheered in the hospital by a visit from Lolly the Clown, who later became a close friend and even moved to Brazil to teach at PACA! Once released from the hospital, Karis participated as enthusiastically as she could in the events of the summer, but frequently required “crash times” to recover some energy, and seemed to be tummy-sick as often as before.
It was an intense summer for all of us as we got reacquainted with the US, visiting family, supporting churches, and friends from Florida (Disney World!) to New York to the Midwest. (When six-year-old Valerie used a restroom in the Miami airport shortly after we landed from São Paulo, she ran out very excited, saying, “Mom! Come see the lady in the bathroom! It must be someone we know, cuz she’s speaking English!”) We enjoyed a few days in Illinois with about thirty aunts, uncles, and cousins gathered from my side of the family. Using unlimited thirty-day air passes that were available to people visiting the US from out of the country, we spent two weeks at our mission headquarters in Colorado Springs, followed by a special “just us” time at the Grand Canyon and more visits to supporting churches, friends, and family in California, Texas, and Kansas City. Our kids actually got tired of flying on airplanes.
Some whom we visited may remember that the World Cup games were a big priority for us. There was a large representation of our Brazil mission team with us in Colorado Springs and I guess we were all a little obnoxious in our enthusiasm over Brazil’s soccer success. At lunch one day OCI’s president (who formerly had lived in Brazil) announced that a special cake had been prepared to celebrate Brazil’s victories, and those from Brazil were invited to be served first. The cooks brought out a large sheet cake decorated as the Brazilian flag. It didn’t take long to discover that the joke was on us: green-dyed mayonnaise, blue toothpaste, and mustard were the icing ingredients of choice!
(A side note about soccer and crossing cultures: In São Paulo during the World Cup, nearly every house and car sports a Brazilian flag and during game time, everything else stops. Stores and businesses even provide TVs so their clients and employees won’t miss anything. Throughout the city, firecrackers are set off to celebrate each Brazilian goal. During the 2002 World Cup season, upon arriving in the US for another short furlough, I noticed that virtually every house displayed an American flag. I was very impressed that the US had finally caught up to the rest of the world by showing such support of the US soccer team, scheduled for a big game that day. Uh . . . no. It was Flag Day.)
Back to July 17, 1994: We calculated our trip from Colorado to Arizona to ensure that we could watch Brazil beat Italy. Anxious because our flight was delayed, we doubtless broke all the speed limits driving a rental car from the Phoenix airport to our motel in Flagstaff. Hot and sweaty, all six of us leaped from the car and literally ran into the motel lobby, only to discover that our room wasn’t ready. Frantically we begged for a room—any room with a TV—and did succeed in catching the last half of that landmark game!
The glory of the Grand Canyon was stupendous. David took twelve-year-old Danny on an ambitious hike all the way to the bottom. The three girls and I made a slower descent. We were hiking merrily along, still headed downhill, when a monsoon suddenly struck. Within seconds we were totally soaked and the steep trail was a running torrent. As the girls hung on to me, all of us fighting just to keep our balance, a cheerful French family came around the bend. We couldn’t understand what they said, but the mom and dad and oldest teenager each took a girl by the hand and helped them climb to a place of shelter under an overhanging cliff. As we waited for the worst of the storm to pass, Karis learned her first few French words and birthed the desire to learn the language of these kind people.
The last flight of our one-month unlimited air passes took us to a Kornfield family reunion on the Jersey shore, a wonderful way to relax before returning to São Paulo mid-August where the kids were already two weeks late for school.
Karis’s daily struggles seemed much the same as before her surgery. As Christmas approached, we became increasingly concerned, and felt we needed to take Karis back to Detroit, taking advantage of the January summer vacation month. But we couldn’t find space on any airline.
Dave’s brother Bill and his family visited us from Buenos Aires for the holidays. Much of the time Karis lay on the couch just watching her sisters and cousins play. With her sisters, Karis did perform a couple of lovely dances she had choreographed to the Hallelujah Chorus and Simon & Garfunkel’s Patterns, their Christmas gift to their dad.
During the week after Christmas, a friend called who knew a high official in one of the airline companies, who pulled strings for us. So, on January 6, 1995, leaving the other kids in São Paulo with David, I took Karis back to Children’s Hospital in Detroit, and Dr. P performed the surgery he had originally planned for the previous June. This time Karis recovered more quickly, and began to regain energy and health. Our chief memory of that month in the US is Karis’s pleasure in seeing snow again. A friend even made her a little snowman and brought it to her in her hospital room. By the time the snowman reached her from the ground floor, however, he was quite wilted. She remembers that a mounted policeman let her feed an apple to his horse, as it stood panting and blowing in the cold outside of the Ronald McDonald House. Since Karis needed time to recuperate before we returned to Brazil, we found refuge for a few days with her Kornfield grandparents, newly settled in Columbia, SC.
We learned a few things by again being in touch with the American medical community in 1994 and 1995. I believe that this was the first time we heard the term “Chronic Intestinal Pseudo-obstruction Syndrome” (CIPS), replacing the descriptive label of “hypoganglionosis” that Karis had received as a baby in Chicago. Pseudo-obstruction was becoming a recognized syndrome, now that TPN was allowing babies with this problem to survive. Dr. P told us that we might start hearing about efforts to transplant intestines, but that we should disregard those rumors because he didn’t believe intestinal transplantation would ever be successful.
During the surgery in January, 1995, Dr. P took several biopsies of Karis’s digestive system, from her stomach to the end of the intestine that she had left, so that he could compare them with the biopsies performed in Chicago when she was five weeks old. At her final check-up in Detroit before we returned to São Paulo, he told us the results: there was no significant change in the number or structure of her ganglia (intestinal nerves). Nor was there any noticeable difference between the ganglia in the section of intestine that he had removed and that which was left intact. We needed to shift our perspective, Dr. P advised. We had been asking the wrong question. Rather than being dismayed when she was sick, we should be amazed and grateful any time that she was well, because there was no logical explanation for how her intestine could function at all with her ganglia in that condition.
Our mystery was compounded. If Karis’s nerves looked the same as when she was a baby, what had happened that June night in 1983 when her intestine had started functioning? And what could explain the amazing six-year hiatus that she had enjoyed, when her intestine seemed to be normal?
Back home in São Paulo, for many months we were truly amazed and grateful, because once again, Karis thrived. The bitter waters of 1994 had been made sweet, and right around the corner of 1995, we discovered the springs and palms of Elim, “for I am the Lord, who heals you” (Ex. 15:26).
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