by Fenton Rees
On Tuesday morning I did the two-and-a-half-hour drive back down to the capital Bujumbura with Tony and Judith Sykes (He’s the English civil engineer), as they were headed to the UK for a month that day, too. “Buja” seemed much more sophisticated than when it did when we arrived from the US (funny how your perceptions change depending upon where you just came from). The differences were quite striking:
- Mostly paved roads (at least kind of), versus all dirt roads around the Kibuye campus.
- A few fancy looking steel and glass multi-story buildings versus a maximum of two stories and that of mud colored bricks.
- More nicely dressed people versus mostly just basic work clothes, and those often quite beat up.
- A few nice cafés and eateries versus NONE.
- Much more non-farm work going on.
I could see why some of the medical students coming from Buja for a two month rotation in Kibuye think they have ended up in their version of rural Appalachia.
You can certainly see the wisdom in having the five or six medical and support families that have moved to Kibuye in the last two to three years where they have a built-in support network and school-mates/play-mates for their children. I have admiration for the likes of the Dr. Frank and Carol Ogden who were there for over twenty years ending around 2007 and who were pretty much the only doctors and only westerners there for much of the time.
I think it was the Sunday night before I left that I walked up to “Urgence” (=ER) with Pat. There was a one or two day old baby with a bad case of spina bifida where photographs were needed. Definitely a sad case and a tad hard to look at. It is good that someone like Pat love being at the “pointy” end of the medical system; others of us are quite content to be a layer or two removed. And both are needed: without all the accoutrements provided by scientific advancement and industrial economies that can engineer and make a whole host of medicines and medical supplies and devices, doctors at the “pointy” end of the “business” would not be able to administer care that is much better than in Jesus’ day.
Newborn baby with spina bifida.
And of course providing health care at the likes of Kibuye Hope Hospital is not a complete end in itself--there are many secular NGOs (like Doctors Without Borders) that do quite a good job, at least in the physical realm.
Sadly, I think the parents of the baby with spina bifida elected not to go forward with surgery as the best case outcome whether it was done or not was still not that great.
Monday morning Pat read from the devotional book we have been going through. This has been one of my favorite verses as it summarizes how you become a Christian (through grace and faith) and then what you do after that (walk in His works for you).
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”
I was struck by the phrase in verse ten that talks about good works that God has prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. I think that sums up the last two months for me--at the right place at the right time to make a difference. That does not mean I want to sign up for a longer stint at Kibuye, but that these two months have been a worthwhile boost for them, and an interesting one for me. Who knows that in a year or two they will need another boost to the next level?
And it certainly doesn’t mean that regular paid “secular” work is somehow second rate in God’s economy; secular work in some way or another pays the freight for the missionary work and of course has worth apart from that as well.
On September 11, 2016, a team from an outfit called “ITEC” will be at Kibuye for a week, investigating whether a solar and/or battery system would make any kind of sense. This is a Christian charity that assemble such systems at cheaper-than-commercial cost and helps install them. Count me a bit of a skeptic on its usefulness at Kibuye--at present the grid electricity is cheap enough and available enough of the time that solar/batteries would seem to be an expensive extra. I have no idea what these six guys will do there for a week. I would have thought that a day or two would kill it.
But the good news is that many of these guys are electricians and I am going to encourage them to carve out at least two days of their time to help rewire at least some of the houses that I helped identify as being wired with copper coated steel wire and are therefore a total fire hazard. Caleb was up in the ceiling of one of these houses a few days ago and the wiring to the water heater was quite hot to touch. And it is going to be even hotter when it goes down inside the walls and has much less available cooling. Not at all a theoretical problem. Pray with me that they would also see that is a good use of at least some of their time to help fix this issue. Having a missionary family lose family members in an unnecessary house fire would definitely suck the joy out of the place.
I am now back home and Pat has another three weeks of “rounding and pounding” interspersed with “slicing and dicing." Pray she paces herself through to the end. In Pat’s last email, she said:
"I have a really sick thirteen year old boy who fell off a truck last week and I operated on him Monday night before you left. The kid is still really sick with temps up to 103 degrees, even though he is getting a lot of antibiotics. He had ruptured his bladder and has skin that is dead all over his right groin for about ten inches. His "insides" are also a mess with huge amounts of bleeding around the "back" of all his organs (called the retroperitoneum). I am praying that he does not "seed" the big hematoma--then we will have a really big problem. I am taking him back to the OR daily to irrigate his leg and hoping to NOT have to go into his belly again. Pray for little Abele."
Well that’s about all for now.