Housemates

My Roommate, Corrie, eating delicious homemade pesto pasta with our housemates, Grace and her husband Jeff.

A few pictures

The flowers around the guesthouse are beautiful. (click on images if you want to see a larger image)

The surviving twin is doing well. This morning he was breathing easily. He is on antibiotics because he spiked a fever last night. Please keep praying!

Living life at a snail's pace...

I was admiring this little guy the other day.

Hospital work

Well friends. Where to begin. Work. Alice and I are rounding together on the pediatrics ward. There are about 20 patients. Many are children with hydrocephalus (big swollen heads because their spinal fluid builds up inside and pushes the bones apart. To fix this requires surgery to place a small tube in the brain that drains into the belly. It can allow the child to develop normally if done early enough, but often we see children who have already had the problem a long time. One of the saddest cases I have seen is a 1yo girl who weighs probably 10lbs, of which her head is probably 5 lbs. Her little body is the same size as a newborn baby only thinner. A rat chewed on her head an broke the tube that had been put in to drain the extra fluid from her brain. Often the children with hydrocephalus are not fed until after everyone else in the family. I feel like one of the things we can do is touch them and love them to show their families that they are still valuable, but this child is so horribly deformed I find that my natural response is to shrink back. Makes me think of Isaiah's description of Christ, "his appearance marred beyond any man."

I have been working in the outpatient department after I finish rounds in the morning. It is fun to work with the nursing students as my translators, and I am learning a lot about medicine here. So much is different. Different problems, different medicines, different attitudes.

Speaking of attitudes. I was working in the out patient department the other day and running around checking to see what medicines we had or going to do an ultrasound and suddenly realized that when I returned from "tea" (a break from 10-10:30 during which all hospital staff vanish without a trace) I forgot my wrap that I had been wearing over my jeans. It is a very strange sensation to be fully clothed and feel naked at the same time. A friend who has been here for a while told me the only ones I was likely to scandalize were missionaries, but I still embarassedly tiptoed up to the guesthouse to get my wrap. :)

We had a 35yo patient with a snake bite last night while Alice and I were on call. Can't say I've ever treated one of those before. He was in shock with low blood pressures, cold and clammy skin. His pupils were dilated and he was drooling profusely. We don't have any anivenom, so we gave him fluids, epinephrine and atropine. His heart is very irregular, but still beating this morning. I hope that he will pull through, but there is no ventilator to breath for him if his breathing fails.

I also got a 13yo girl who had fallen from a moving vehicle and has a skull fracture we are pretty sure. We can't do x-rays at the hospital right now so we sent her to a town about 45 minutes away, but their power was out, so she was brought back to us. we had no collar to stabilize her neck, so by the time she returned we decided that trying another hospital farther away was more risky. So she is on the peds ward and I don't know what will happen to her.

Surprise twins were born last night. The mother had no idea that there were 2. We delivered the first, reached in for the placenta and encountered another head instead. Unfortunately these little ones were too early. They would have done well in the US where we could give them surfactant to help their little lungs work, but here we have none. They were placed on what oxygen we had and their bodies wrapped in plastic bags to hold in their body heat. I was called later in the night because they needed to turn off the generator, but the babies oxygen was from an electric compressor. They would die. Then the nurse asked if it was ok to turn on the smaller generator. I almost cried with relief as I answered "yes." However only a few minutes later I received word that one of the twins had finally run out of strength to breathe. The other is still alive this morning and we are praying for a miracle for those tiny lungs.

My living situation here is actually really wonderful. My roommate is a blessing and the other couple sharing our kitchen (a med student and his wife) are great fun too. Last night we made an italian feast complete with spiral noodles topped with homemade spaghetti sauce and fresh basil. An appetiser of mozzarella, fresh basil and tomatoes in olive oil and delicious garlic bread. We ate by candle light since the power was out. Amazing!

And, last but not least, my roommate and I removed a 6 inch centipede from our bathroom last night. As first we thought it was one of the harmless millipedes that merely look disgusting, then we realized that it had 2 spikes on its tail and only one pair of legs per segment. Making it both ugly and poisonous. (gulp!) We took it outside and doused it with insect poison.

Please pray for the power to be fixed soon. Please pray for my patients. Please pray that the supplies for the x-ray will arrive, and that God will guide us as we try our best to care for people in horrible situations. Please also pray for a language tutor for me. I would like to be able to talk to my patients or at least respond to greetings from passerby.

Much love! Sorry for the long post. It's been a busy week.

Preparations

So we arrived Monday night and stayed with the missionaries in Harare until Friday morning. It was a good time of acclimating to the climate, which is indeed much warmer. Temperatures were in the 60’s – 80’s.

I had my first real grocery shopping experience in Africa. In the past, the food has always been provided for us, but here we have to buy groceries for a month. I’m not actually sure how much I eat in a month, so this was quite a challenge. We went to the meat store which carried mince (ground beef), chicken, and ostrich as well as biltong (a thick, juicy beef jerky). Then to the dairy store to get yogurt, cheese, butter, and cream. And then to the grocery store which actually wasn’t too different from home except that they sell bars of soap that are a foot and a half long and “long life” milk in boxes (I like to call it eternal milk). Then on to Vege City where we found peaches (the best I’ve ever tasted) and lettuce (yay!). Some things that I was surprised to see included Heinz ketchup (bought it), Pulsar toothbrushes (already packed them) and A&W Root Beer. All told, I spent $400 on groceries but am pretty certain that I won’t starve this month.

On Friday we loaded 8 people and their luggage and groceries into a van with a trailer behind and started off for the hospital. The countryside was beautiful with round brick huts and thatched roofs hemmed in by green trees and grass with emerald mountains in the backdrop. This is the rainy season here and it rained several times during our journey. But all of our luggage stayed dry and on the trailer despite bumpy dirt roads. When we arrived at the hospital there was no running water. Apparently the water here comes on at 5:30 in the morning and only lasts until 11am. It was hard to settle in without water, but at least the power was working. Temperatures at the hospital are in the upper 70s to 90s, which is pretty warm with no A/C. This weekend we are just settling in and getting toured about the hospital. I believe we will start work on Monday.

Alive and well!

This is just a quick hello to let you know that I have arrived in Zimbabwe. Thank you for all the prayers. Alice and Elliot were able to get their things up to North Dakota. All our luggage also arrived in one piece (or well, the 4 pieces it was originally). I had some fun encounters in airports, including Dr. Walt Larimore (a Christian doctor who spoke at the missions conference I attended in November) and his wife. They prayed for me and my trip before I left Tulsa. I met up with my Dad and his wife at the airport in Washington D.C. They drove 2 1/2 hours to see me for a couple hours between flights. Chicago had only scattered snow on the ground and was sunny. On our 16 1/2 hour journey from the US to South Africa, I sat next to a cool guy who sells archery equipment and loves Jesus. It was really encouraging. Then there was actually a call for a medical doctor on the plane. Gulping, I walked up to the flight attendant and volunteered my services. A brave ten-year old girl had developed nausea and vomiting that had lasted for 6 hours straight. The stewardess showed me the plane's medical kit which had an injectable medicine for nausea: Reglan. I offered it to the girl and she agreed, so I gave her a shot. She was able to get some sleep after that but still felt sick when we landed. (picture of South African Airways plane wing with Johannesburg sunset in background)

We arrived and were taken to the lovely home of some missionaries in Harare, where we are resting and getting over jet lag. Hope to head to the hospital by Friday.

Thanks for the prayers. Keep it up!

Passion

How appropriate that the word used to express intense love is also the word for intense suffering. According to enneagram personality typing, there are 9 personality types, all with characteristic strengths and weaknesses. Sevens, among which I number, are characterized as enthusiasts with the chief aim being the avoidance of suffering. Sevens are therefore all about passion in both senses, as two faces of the same coin. Buddhist teaching centers around the avoidance of suffering by gradually detaching oneself from any feeling at all. The ultimate goal being complete dispassion. Which, sounds strikingly like death. Christ, by contrast, invites us to enter into his suffering to discover all that is true life. To deny one side of passion is a denial of the whole. That being said it is not in our own sufferings that life is to be found. Somehow our sufferings only yield life when they are linked with Christ's. I can suffer for my own sake nearly constantly and yet should expect no harvest of Life. On the other hand, when my sufferings are those of Christ, passion begets treasures of an enduring nature. So if my present sufferings are nothing in comparison to the riches of Christ, how then do I overcome my aversion to suffering and rather seek to enter into Christ's suffering? How then am I to become dispassionate to that which is temporary and engage fully in eternal passions? I have no answer, but that this is the work of God in us.