17 August, 2012
It is Friday and the last day of Ramadan. Tomorrow is a big celebration. Many people are slaughtering chickens,
guinea fowl and goats for the big feast.
Everyone in the hospital is eager to go home and the out patient clinic
is not so busy. I am on call for
c-sections which tend to keep happening no matter the calander.
I went on one of my village walk-abouts with one of the
hospital evangelists, Daouda. He
is 23yr old university student and a member of the local Hausa church and is the
music director, playing piano and acoustic guitar. He took me thru Galmi village and we ended up at his uncle’s
house. Both his uncle and aunt
work at the hospital and are the only people in town to have satellite TV! His cousins were watching “Aqua-marine”. We conducted the tour in French and I
did OK. C’est bon!
We had a lady come into clinic just pouring liquid stool
behind her consistent with cholera.
She was near death and had two large bore IV’s and saline started on her
Stat and then testing is being sent to the capitol hospital and then on to
WHO. It would be bad if there is a
cholera epidemic starting here.
They already have one of the worst typhoid burdens in the world, worst
malaria and worst TB and top ten AIDs.
This is a very tough place to live mainly all because of the poverty: therefore malnutrition, no education, no access to clean
water, no access to even the most basic health care like immunizations.
More later
Brad
Our prayers are with you and Katy and all of these people. God Bless you guys for going someplace where most of us couldn't imagine going let alone do what you do. We are so thankful for you guys. We will be praying for safe travel for your trip home. Reading your blog is like being on this journey with you. God Bless You,
ReplyDeleteJoel and Laurie Bisset
have been following with great interest, and lifting you to the Lord. So many sick bodies. I have tried to post twice but they don't seem to come through. Oh well, the Spirit connects us. Bev
ReplyDelete"If your heart is broken, you'll find God right there;" (msg) Eugene Peterson writes, Do you think the Christian life as something that lifts you out of the mundane into something majestic? If so, you're wishing in the wrong direction. The Christian faith draws us deeper into the stuff of creation: bodies, money, emotions, relationships. Some of the stuff we see is awful. And some of the stuff we feel is painful.
DeleteBut it is precisely there, in the awfulness and the painfulness of life, that we discover something that transcends these things. In verse 18, the psalmist says, "If your heart is broken, you'll find God right there." The times the psalmist lived in were not all that different from our own times. Back then, as now, there was a pseudo-theology that explained any kind of misfortion as a sign of divine punishment, whether that punishment was sickness, poverty, disability, or death. The sufferer's recourse was either to avoid the gods or to strike a bargain with them so they would back off.
The ministry of Jesus was the great refutation of this. He deliberately singled out every kind of trouble and initiated a healing ministry to the sick, the guilty, the hungry, even the dead. The single qualification for being eligible for God's help is that we be in trouble. The reason we're in trouble doesn't matter, whether it's our own fault or someone else's. What matters is that God is right there in the midst of our troubles, stooping to pick up the pieces of our broken hearts and put them back together.