Travel Update #2

Made it to London safely. The flight felt longer coming back than it did going out. I don't think anyone got more than an hour of sleep and it is 8:30AM here already. But we've all gotten some food and coffee, so we're feeling pretty good. One more flight to go!

P.S. I will write a comprehensive post about our visit to Victoria Falls later. But I did want to share that while we were shopping near the falls afterwards, John was attacked by a male alpha baboon! He's completely fine and was not at all hurt, but it has had us laughing all day and night just remembering it! The baboon walked up to him, took a swipe at the bag in his hand, and was trying to get something John had just bought. John tried to swing the bag away from the baboon and then threw it up on the hood of the car. As the baboon went for the bag, a Zambian suddenly showed up with a sling-shot and scared it away. I didn't see this happen, but it sounds hilarious! You need to hear John tell the story.

Travel Update

We have reached Jo'Burg! (Dr. Kari says that's how the "cool people" say Johannesburg) We had a few complication with the luggage but that is all sorted out now. We board in about 45 minutes. See you soon!

Good-Bye From Zambia!

This will be my last blog post from Zambia. It is currently lunchtime on Friday, but we will be busy packing tonight and leaving very early tomorrow. Our flight leaves Livingstone at 1:30pm tomorrow, but we are leaving early to go sightseeing at Victoria Falls before we leave.

            Last night was a very dramatic night. Kari and Barb were running late on the two scheduled surgeries (not at all their faults). As soon as they finally finished the second surgery (at about 7:30), there was a woman rushed into the hospital from out in the bush who needed an emergency c-section. After already being worn out from the two other surgeries, they needed to start this new one. The problem was that this woman had given birth by c-section once before to a stillborn baby, so with this second pregnancy the clinic she was at should have performed another c-section before she even went into labor this time. The clinic failed to do that. By the time this patient arrived at the Zimba hospital, she had been in labor for two days, her uterus had been ruptured for a day, and the baby was already dead inside of her.  They needed to perform the c-section to remove the baby and then perform a hysterectomy and then stitch together the rest of the organs that had been dislodged and rearranged. If they did not do this all quickly, the woman would probably die.  We rarely see this kind of complication in the United States. Praise God, they saved the woman’s life. From hearing their descriptions it was an extreme tense and stressful and scary couple of hours as they performed this operation. Kari and Barb did not return to the mission house until about 10:50. Meanwhile, the rest of us had started getting concerned that they hadn’t come home yet even for dinner. We had sent John and Larry to check on them at 9:45, and since they hadn’t returned by 10:45 we were about to send two more people to check on all of them. It was a stressful night, to say the least.

            Today has been better! We have had our now ‘routine’ activities. Larry, Bob, and John treated the water supply but it will take a couple days to see how well the cleaning worked. They spent some time this morning explaining and teaching to some other maintenance workers so they can carry out the purifying process after we leave. The medical people in our group did their rounds at the hospital this morning; and Lindsay, Tehanne, Lori, and Kari helped in the pharmacy. Since I am now done teaching, I spent yesterday afternoon and this morning shadowing Dr. Dan in the Out Patient Department. I am able to do small tasks and running errands for him, making me feel useful. We all took a trip through the market for the last time during lunch break to purchase gifts for our families at home.

            This is good-bye from Zambia, I suppose. I will probably write at some point during our travels from Johannesburg or London. (If I have internet. I may not be able to connect, so do not worry if there is not any more posts in the next couple days.) We are sad to leave but excited to be home again. God has done many great things while we have been here. We have met dozens of amazing people. I, personally, have been so grateful for this life opportunity. We can’t wait to tell you all about it in person. See you soon!!

As a final summary, I wrote this small semi-humorous post below. I hope you like it, though you probably won’t find it as funny as we do. Enjoy!

A typical day in the life of a temporary missionary

4:00am – get woken up early by roosters and stray dogs making unnecessary noises

6:30am – wake up for real and get dressed

7:15am – have a delicious breakfast

7:45am – take malaria medicine and soak yourself in bug spray

7:50am – leave to walk to the hospital for morning chapel

7:55am – attempt to greet someone in Tonga

7:55:05am – be laughed at by the person you greeted because your accent sounds funny to them

8:00am – arrive on time for chapel, but you are the only people present so far

8:05am – chapel begins with singing in Tonga and a sermon

8:10am – all the other people arrive for chapel ten minutes late

8:40am – chapel ends, go to your separate projects/activities

About 9:05am – discover some kind of problem

About 9:30am – start to get a little frustrated with the said problem

About 9:45am – realize you can’t find a solution to the problem

About 9:55am – say a prayer to ask God for help

About 10:00am – find a solution to the problem

About 11:00am – meet one of many amazing Zambians that you can work with

12:00pm – come back to the mission house for a delicious lunch

1:00pm – continue to enjoy the Zambian 2 hour lunch break

2:00pm – wait for whichever Zambian worker you are with to return from lunch break

2:30pm – have someone mistaken you for the doctor because you’re white

About 3:00pm – witness/experience some kind of traumatic event (e.g. emergency surgery, see a man get run over by a semi, deliver a still-born child, find a water tank full of dead animals)

About 4:00pm – return to the mission house and relax a little bit (unless you’re a doctor/surgeon)

About 5:00pm – take a walk through the marketplace

About 5:15pm – be charged twice as much for whatever you’re buying because you’re white

About 5:30pm – power goes out

About 6:15pm – power comes back on

6:30pm – have a delicious dinner and dessert

About 7:30pm – have nightly devotional and praise God

About 8:30pm – shower (sometimes by candlelight)

About 9:30pm – Praise God for another day, go to sleep, and pray to have the strength to do it all over again.

Lunchtime Update

Last night’s guest dinner went very well. We had about 7 guests, and two of them brought their children. There was a 3 year old boy and a 4 year old girl. All of the mothers here who have been missing their children really enjoyed spending time with these kids. The power was out for the first half of the dinner, so we ate by candlelight again. The power returned half way through the meal.

            Also last night, Lindsay and I visited the teacher’s house. He had a small brick/concrete house with a small living room, a kitchen the size of a closet, and 3 bedrooms. He has 3 children, but he has taken in SIX other children who are orphaned or not cared for. We were amazed at how much he had obviously given to others.

            As Lindsay and I were walking back to the mission house, we saw a man get hit by and partially run over by a semi-truck that was going way too fast. Everyone who had been standing around the road and market place created commotion as everyone tried to help the man. We had quite an adrenaline rush as we sprinted the remaining 100 yards to the mission house to get one of our doctors or nurses to come help the man. But by the time we came back out to the road, the people had already thrown the man into a car and were taking him down the road to the hospital.  The man who had been driving the semi had stopped his truck and gotten out and ran somewhere. John explained to me that he probably was running to the police because in these types of countries, the community will kill someone who hits a person with his vehicle. So that man was running to the police for safety before the community could catch him.  Our doctors and nurses have been checking in on the man who was hit throughout the night and this morning, and they tell me that they expect him to make a full recovery.

Now that the pipes are connected, there has been a brick and concrete box built around the junction to protect it. John, Larry, and Bob ran some tests on the water from the well we are using and found that it is contaminated. They asked the city water maintenance what they should do about cleaning the water in the well, and the city told them they should abandon the well. But we believe there may be some bad history between the hospital and the city water maintenance because the hospital refused to use the city water’s services. We are going to attempt to clean the well so that all this work we have done won’t be wasted.

Today, Lindsay is running the mission house. She is having a great time cooking for us and cleaning the house. She was very excited to feed us lunch, which consisted of sloppy joes and baked beans. She led the prayer, and at the end added in, “And please Lord, don’t let my food kill them,” which didn’t make us feel all that confident. But the food turned out to be very good and we are enjoying her work.

            Lori, Tehanne, and Kari took baby hats around the maternity ward this morning. The hats had bunny ears sewed on top. And Dr. Kari and Barb are doing more surgeries today.

            I had my last day of teaching today. At the end of class I talked with the students about America again and showed them some pictures that I brought on my computer. I’m always entertained by their reactions to things like pictures of my brother with red hair, my fiancé, and the pictures of snow. They said my brother was very handsome (hint hint, Luke) and wanted to see lots of pictures of my fiancé and told me “I know how to choose them”. I said my good-byes to all the students and the teachers I have been working with. It was bittersweet to be finished with my teaching project. I feel very accomplished that I can now say that I taught in a Zambian school for a week!

            It is currently lunchtime on Thursday, so we have one and a half more days of work. We are all sad to leave but very excited to get home. I will be writing again tomorrow, God bless!

Update from the last couple days

Hello, again! We lost our Internet connection the last couple days, but it seems to be working again now. Instead of going through each individual’s activities, I am going to give a general update of the different projects we have all been working on.

Thank you for your prayers for the water supply. After I posted the previous post, I found out that Larry, Bob, and John had already discovered a solution to the problem I had explained. By fitting some of the pipes inside each other they were able to make them fit. However, your prayers were still very much needed because, as seems to be the trend, as soon as we solved that problem a new one came up. Larry, Bob, and John started running the water from the new tank to test it, and found that there were little black chunks coming out. Long story short – the tank had been just sitting there for about a year, with the lid off. A giant hawk had made a nest inside the tank. When John climbed up the tower to look in the tank (the tank is about the size of a round kitchen table and about 10 feet high) he found six dead baby hawks and three dead rats amongst a ton of floating dirt and grass. We now are looking back at this and laughing, but at the time is was anything but funny. Larry, Bob, and John spent the day creating a make-shift net and fishing out all the carcasses and junk. Now that the tank is clean, we started working on hooking up the pipe we constructed to the pipe that is already in the ground. We had a lot of trouble connecting to the pre-existing pipe. We tried multiple times but it leaked every time. This was very scary because we had to cut off the water supply to the Women’s Shelter in order to hook up this new pipe; so if we could not re-connect it then dozens of people would be without water. In one last attempt, John and I tried some “MacGyver-ing” by wrapping the pipe in rubber and glue and calc.  It was mostly John’s work; I basically stood by and gave ideas. We left the glue on the pipe to dry over-night before opening the valve to test it. When Larry, Bob, and John returned this morning, they found that someone had come and opened the valve during the night! But praise God because the pipe did not leak! So the new water supply is now connected, which is a huge victory and success for us! This was our original goal and after many obstacles and challenges we have met our goal. However, we now need to test the new water and treat it for any bacteria we find in it. In the meantime, we are able to supply the Women’s Shelter with water from the old tank by closing our new valve and opening the old one. That is what we are working on now, but we have had a great accomplishment regardless because as soon as the water is clean it is only a matter of opening the valve.

In other news, Lindsay and I were able to observe some surgeries. I observed a C-section and Lindsay observed a hysterectomy. We both really enjoyed it! The medical people in our group have continued to help at the hospital and work with the Zambian staff. There has not been anything too unusual going on with them, as far as I understand. I apologize that I have so much more detail on the other projects; it is just difficult for me to explain the activities I have not been witnessing. However, Tehanne was able to work in the dental clinic that has been going on for the last two days. She has really enjoyed it! She has been working with a dentist and has been pulling teeth! She usually does not get to pull teeth in the States, so this has been a great privilege for her! She came back to the mission house beaming and with photos of her pulled teeth.

I have continued my teaching at the school. I am getting a lot more comfortable in this new environment. Lindsay and Tehanne came to school with me today and took pictures. And Derek, the teacher I am working with, gave us all a tour again. It has been very nice! The kids really seem to like learning about America.

Tonight we are having a dinner and inviting the people we have been working with. We are all very excited for this! We will have about 17 people total. And this afternoon Lindsay and I are going to see Derek’s home and family.

We are all missing our families very much and are looking forward to seeing you soon! As we put it at lunch, “Every day we enjoy our time here more and more, but every day we are longing more and more to come home again.”

Summary of the Week

Hello all! It is currently Sunday afternoon here in Zambia. I know I missed writing the blog about Friday’s activities, but I have decided to write an overall summary of the week instead of trying to retroactively write about the specific activities we did Friday.

            After our long plane rides and spending a day in London, we arrived at the mission house on Tuesday afternoon. Dan and Joan Jones, who are both doctors, run the mission house and help at the hospital. During our three working days thus far, our medical people (Dr. Kari, Barb, Lori, Kari, Tehanne, and Lindsay) have been spending their time in the hospital doing various things. Dr. Kari and Barb have been doing surgeries with the Zambian staff, and Lori and Kari have observed some of them. Lori and Kari have mostly been working with the other nurses and have been learning how the Zambians treat certain conditions while lacking what we would consider the “proper supplies”. Tehanne and Lindsay have spent a couple days trying to organize the pharmacy and have been preparing for a dental clinic (Tehanne’s specialty) that starts tomorrow. They have all been experiencing some of the culture differences, like the way a woman needs her husband’s permission to have surgery.

            Jonathan, Larry, Bob, and I have been working on the hospital’s water supply. After discovering that the hospital and surrounding houses could triple their water supply by connecting the unused water tank, we began working on that. We have had a lot of success, but a lot of difficulties, too. We have been working very hard with some of the maintenance people from the hospital to find the connecting pipes and dig the trenches (with nothing but one shovel and two broken pick-axes) for the new pipes to go in. However, on Friday we discovered that the piping that we have does not fit any of the sizes that the Zambian stores make for the valves we need to attach. We have gone through a lot of hassle to try every size they have in this country, and none of them fit. This is quite a setback. By Friday evening we were a bit discouraged because it seemed that all the work and digging we have been doing might be useless if the valves can’t connect. We need prayers to find a way to make this work.

            Bob has also been spending time going through the hospital to pray with the patients. This has been very rewarding for him. Kari and Larry have also been working with Bob to start a type of prayer group for the Zambians on how to manage finances. As far as I understand, they have many videos and pamphlets of sessions to have on their computers. On Saturday, while the rest of us were on the Safari, they had a group from the local churches over to try to get this started. It is their hope that this will be something lasting for the locals that will remain while we are gone and help pull some of them out of the deep poverty that has plagued this country.

            I have spent much of my time at the local school. The assistant headmaster assigned me to work with the 9^th grade science teacher and for me to teach a class every day for 5 days. I began my teaching on Friday and it went very well. There have been awkward moments (they are unavoidable when there is a slight language barrier) when other teachers came to the classroom, as I was finishing because I am obviously a foreigner and they do not know why I am there. But the children seem to receive me well, and I have had fun by leaving much of the class time for Q&A on American and Zambian culture. One of the girls asked me if I had any brothers, and when I told her yes, she said, “Okay, good. Save one for me.” All the kids laughed and it was really funny. So Luke, if you’re reading this, I think I might have accidently set you up with an African girl from Zambia. 

            This morning everyone except Tehanne, Barb, and I went out to a “bush church”. In the Zambian lingo, “bush” basically means that it is somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. They took a trip to a newer church that is far from the cities with a pastor that Kari and Larry know. They said it was an amazing experience because they were the first white people to ever come visit their church or village. It was a powerful experience, but slightly awkward because the locals had them sit in cushioned seats (because they were the guests of honor) while the rest of the congregation sat on wooden logs or the floor. They said they also gave them food as thanks for coming. Tehanne, Barb, and I did not go because there was not enough room in the vehicle and we agreed to stay behind and get some extra rest instead. We went to the local church and it was still very nice. We also got to see what the Zambian church service is like; it just was not quite as far away or foreign to white people. It was very spontaneous and full of singing. Both services were about 3 hours long!

            That about sums up our activities so far. Please pray that this next week will be productive, and especially for a way to connect the water tank. We greatly appreciate your prayers! We hope everyone at home is doing well and we are praying for you, also. Looking forward to seeing our family and friends in a week! God bless!