by Fenton Rees
We have been here just over two weeks, and we are certainly into a routine. Three mornings a week we have the son of a pastor (Amon) come in and do some cooking and cleaning. Partly because so much has to be made from scratch and partly because any kind of paying job is hard to find here. He makes “killer” fresh bread and cinnamon rolls and quite good minestrone soup. So we are not suffering. And then the last two nights we have been invited over to eat with missionary families, so sweet and sour chicken and pizza! And of course there are all kinds of tree ripe tropical fruit: bananas, pineapple, passion fruit, and an unnamed tropical plum. So definitely not losing weight.
For Pat the routine is:
- Writing and wiping: Adding names to her typed list of patients and deleting those who have gone home or died.
- Rounding and Pounding: Walking around the surgery wards and visiting all who have had or will have surgery.
- Slicing and dicing: You can figure that out.
I was in the room behind the operating room looking at a piece of equipment, so took this photo of Pat operating on a patient's head; outside not inside the skull, but it still looked bad to me!
For the first week, Pat was initially a bit overwhelmed; what with all the patients being new as well as most of the staff. But she now says that she is much more comfortable with everything.
Oh yes, and the woman I previously mentioned who was likely to die unless God showed up, well she is still hanging in there, and it looks less bad than it did.
For me, the routine is a combination of identifying problems and proposing solutions. Of helping them plan out for the future and of course fixing simple stuff that doesn’t work.
And then sometimes there is a “teaching moment” like yesterday. Tony (the short term civil engineer) thought it would be a good time to have a session with the main electrician, DieuDonne, (= God given) and his assistant as they were about to embark on the final wiring for the latest missionary house being built. So we gathered in the mission school room (along with chief engineer Caleb to translate as necessary), and asked him what he was intending to do and why. There is a huge problem here with them having the electrical cables too small and the circuit breakers too large, so the cables melt before the circuit breakers open; obviously it is supposed to be the other way around. I think finally the “light went on” and he understood how to do it correctly. Progress!
Caleb on the left, Tony on the right, and Caleb explaining to DieuDonne (next to him) in Kirundi (national language) a point that was beyond his current grasp of English.
My old public high school in New Zealand has as a Latin motto, Lumen Accipe et Imperti. It means “Receive the light and pass it on”. In some ways that is what we are doing here; obviously more in the technical sense (medicine and engineering) but also of course with THE LIGHT.
Pat says that her patients here have far worse disease than back home, partly because they wait too long and partly from malnutrition. Some of the surgical wounds end up with “puss of every color”, to quote Pat. So there is only so much she can do, so pray that the Great Healer steps in.