by Fenton and Pat Rees
I (Fenton) have been back home just over a week and am more or less back in to the groove--off the malaria meds, over the jet-lag, sorted all the mail, paid all the bills and taxes, caught up with my clients, and have even been on a couple of short hikes.
I also assembled a forty pound electrical care package for Caleb (civil engineer at Kibuye) and then drove it over to Eastern Washington to a member of the ITEC team that is leaving for Burundi this weekend. Their prime purpose is to do a solar power evaluation, but I encouraged (or guilt tripped) them to bust out a couple of days and do some of the necessary rewiring there.
I have received a number of emails from Pat. One of the missionary families has four kids, the oldest being about fourteen years old and quite a bit older than most of the other kids there. The parents reluctantly came to the conclusion that it would be in his best interest to go to a missions boarding school in Kenya (that is two countries and five hundred miles away by flight not driving). The whole family went there for a few days just before I left, so the younger siblings could see where their older brother was disappearing to. I subsequently heard that his first week there was extremely hard, but he is now beginning to settle in--that must be one of the harder things that missionaries have to deal with. Pray for this family and especially for their son. The sad reality is that a significant minority of missionary kids (perhaps twenty percent) get a little scrambled by the whole missions experience because they are not American, not Burundian, and don’t really fit anywhere. They can end up struggling for a while when they eventually return to the US for university or jobs.
Pat has just over a week left, as the full time surgeon returns next weekend. She will have a day or two to “pass the scalpel” and then she is on her way home. After last weekend she wrote:
"Tough weekend for me here. I moved to a smaller apartment, as a family with kids needed the one we had been in, and cleaned and did laundry. When I got in the house, I then got called to the ER. I went to Bible study after a quick dinner and then home to bed. So tired. But awaken at 12:30 PM to go to the ER for yet another issue. I had planned to do the first ER case at 7 AM and that was tough when the three day old baby coded (went into cardiac arrest) with anesthesia. Got him back after fifteen minutes of CPR, but that was totally a God-thing. He seems okay now.
Please pray for a little girl names Erisha. She is fifteen years old and has a huge spleen from repeated malaria that is now eating up all her own red blood cells and platelets (so she is anemic, doesn't clot, and doesn't fight infections well). She was at another hospital and got a bad infection in an IV site. Her entire arm is infected, swollen, and I am sure the vein is full of pus. I can't operate yet as she can't clot. Her spleen is so big she is very short of breath and her father is sitting behind her in the bed cradling her so she can breathe sitting up. She came into the ER yesterday and Dr. Alyssa (pediatrician) is going to admit her. I did some ‘local care’ on her arm to try to get some pus out. I then had a talk with the parents outside in the waiting area. My student was explaining in Kurundi (local language) the spleen immunologic activity, but I had to use the idea of Burundian military fighters, to make the man, who was not well educated, understand. We then finished and prayed, with my student praying in the native language. Following his prayer, the father then took over and prayed a very powerful prayer. I was so humbled by this man with such little education, little money, and a dying daughter, but amazing power in prayer. They obviously know God. I was just reading in Mark 12 about the show of religious leaders and yet they are not really God-followers. I thought about all my years of education, my learning, my opportunities, and my money, and wondered if my power with God compared to this simple village father. I pray his daughter is alive even now and I will continue to try to fight the infection."
I don’t think I can improve on that, so I won’t.
Blessings,
Fenton