Esengo Mingi

"Humility has nothing to prove and nothing to lose."

Blind Eyes

"And how was Tiny Tim in church today?" his mother asked.

“As good as gold,” said Bob, “and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.” 

Henri Samoutou is our doctor from Gabon. He is specialized in eye surgery and does dozens of eye surgeries here at Pioneer Christian Hospital. Last Tuesday, I had the privilege of sitting in his office while his post-surgery patients came in to be looked at and have their eye bandages removed. This was an amazing and exciting experience. Have you ever seen someone who has been blind for years, maybe their whole life, look around the room seeing? 

Henri’s wife took a photo of one man pre-surgery, and another afterwards. It was hard to tell that it was the same man. The clear, open eyes and huge smile showed the changed life. He had over one hundred grandchildren he was looking forward to seeing, a lot of them for the very first time.

One man came in and when his bandages were taken off he looked all around, a big smile on his face.  He told Henri to back up far when he held up his fingers. He’d left his cane outside, hopefully never to be used again. Henri told us that he used to have a whole collection of peoples’ old canes: a testimony to his success as a surgeon and the grace of God in his skilled hands.

Mud

So I finished my second day of “house mudding.” Saturday we got one wall done, and then over the weekend the family of the lady we’re building it for worked on another wall. When we came back to do it again, there were more people to help, which made the work go faster and a lot more fun. Several guys worked on the roof and helped make the mud, and the kids and I did the building, as well as fetching the water from the well. Let me tell you, those were some hard-working kids!

It was an extremely hot day and I got a little sunburned and was quite exhausted by the end of it. I guess it didn’t help that I’d walked three miles to the hospital that morning and probably didn’t drink enough water overall. But that is nothing compared to the daily duties of everyone else who lives here. I am continually amazed at the endurance and strength of these people. They have very high pain tolerance and just grit their teeth and bear the pain. They carry heavy loads, work long hours in the heat, walk for miles, live in poverty and still manage to smile. So what’s a little sun and mud on me compared to that?

I have left my southern comfort zone...

My "home health" transportation.No more running up and down stairwells... now it's motorcycles instead of security guards I've got to watch out for. :)

For all you banana eaters at A/BE, here's where bananas come from!!

 

Yep, I know. I was pretty shocked when I found out you can get Mountain Dew here. Made me homesick. (And, yes I tried it, but it's not the real stuff).

 

There are moonshiners here too; just a different type. :) Below is an example of a Congolese-style still:

Aka Pygmies

Since I missed church last Sunday, due to rounding with Laura, I had my first church service here in Congo at a village about thirty minutes drive away. It was an Aka pygmie village. Most of the people in Impfondo are Bantus, although we have some immigrants from Chad as well, but I had seen a handful or two of pygmies around town. 

They are very small people...I'm taller than the men even. They have really unique, beautiful eyes and the cutest babies and toddlers I've ever seen. As we drove past one of the villages, a bunch of people were wanting a ride. We continued on to the church without them, and then once all our people were unloaded at the church, Henri and I went back for them. Otherwise there would have only been about ten other people at the service. Most were out living in the woods hunting at this time of year.

I tried to count the people once we were all in the truck. There were at least 37 (counting the babies.) This is a pickup truck, too. I kept being handed babies and pulling kids up into the bed of the truck until we had everyone who wanted to come. Needless to say, we were very squished. When we got there; I jumped down first and helped the children get down. One mama handed me her baby - it was a tinsy, adorable, very dirty (and damp) baby. When she got down, I indicated that I'd like to keep holding him, so I did, and we walked down the hill to the church building.

The singing was absolutely amazing. The guys with the drums were really into it and everyone sang loudly and joyfully in that little brick building. The singing went on for over an hour, and when it was finished, one old blind man stood up and announced that he wanted to sing some more, but there was a great clamour, so I guess he was voted down. We went on to the sermon. Henri preached in French (he is from Gabon) while Serge translated into Lingala.

Sometime during the service, the wet, diaperless, little baby I was holding got a whole lot wetter, but stayed happy until the very end, when I had to give him back to his mama. Afterwards, some of the older men, about five young guys and three women with babies on their backs led us on a walk through the jungle. They stopped to point out different plants and their uses, the animal traps all along the way they had made, and various interesting trees and bodies of water. 

The different personalities of the Aka really came out as we walked along. I could tell they were very at home in the rainforest. Some of them got really enthusiastic about different things, and the women with the babies talking and laughed almost non-stop. They even acted out how they did their fishing when the stream was high enough. 

While we'd been walking in the jungle, Henri had taken most of the people back to their village, and then returned to pick us up with the truck. We climbed in with the stragglers, as well as two or three kids who wanted a ride all the way back to Impfondo. The tires on the truck were getting flat, so all the extra loads and driving back and forth in the heat definitely wasn't helping, but it wasn't till we were a little ways further down the road that the truck protested enough for Henri to stop. "It doesn't want to go anymore," he said. We started and stopped about three more times before we got home, but it pulled through and got us back to the hospital.

Sunday

Today I was planning on going to church at the little chapel which is on the hospital grounds. Laura planned to start on her morning rounds before the service, and I was going with her, but we didn't get very far that morning, and didn't make it to church either.

First there was a little girl who had been playing and fallen, her mother explained. She lay limply on the bed and was extremely unresponsive. Laura felt her for internal injuries, looked at her eyes and ears and tried to get her to react by pinching her legs and arms. All to no avail. After a while, we had to move on, so we left her with the nurse and stopped in on a man who was dying of TB.

After that, we got some medicine from the supply shed and I brought IV fluids from the pharmacy for the nurses, and then there was a lady who needed an emergency C-section.  This was my first time being in the operating room anywhere. It was quite the experience.

Dr. Mano had been called in to do a C-section in the night for a 16 year-old girl. The heart rate had been fine before they started the surgery, but by the time they got the baby out, it was dead. Thankfully, this baby girl came out alive, but she wouldn't cry. The nurse suctioned her  nose and mouth out and rubbed the feet and put her on oxygen, and finally she made a few little cries. They took her off to the maternity ward while the woman was being stitched up.

I saw the girl who'd lost her baby today and she looked completely hopeless. She was sitting up in bed with some of her family around her. How terribly discouraging to go through a whole pregnancy, as well as the trauma of surgery, and then lose the baby at the end.

Two men died in the afternoon. When I walked back to the Blue House with Tom, he told he'd been up half the night because Dr. Mano got called in for a motorcycle accident as well as the C-section. Tom had to translate for Dr. Mano from English to French. The hospital staff speak French, but most of the patients only know Lingala, so communication is sometimes a three step process.

Later in the afternoon I helped hold down a screaming little boy while Laura pulled a palm nut out of his nose with tweezers. The medicine she gave to sedate him only seemed to affect him a little, and I felt really bad for him. He hollered and would not lay still. But soon it was over and he stoped screaming and sneezed. No wonder.

It was a long day. Tomorrow will be, too. I am helping the Samoutous with homeschooling and doing some data entry for the meds for Laura. I might hit the town again with Sarah and see some leprosy patients, too. We’ll see.

Vital Signs

In the town Sarah and I bought thatch to put a roof on a new house. (We didn't do the roofing :)
Later we will go back and help build the walls out of mud. The house is for a woman who lives in a hut that is about to cave in upon her. She'd had a stroke a little while ago, too, and had spent some time at the hospital, so Sarah needed to get her vital signs. I knelt on a dirt floor with a dog and some chickens nearby and took her blood pressure, her pulse and listened to her heartbeat. It was so hot I was dripping sweat, and there were still prickles in my hands from carrying the thatch to the house.

Everything is so different here.

L'Hopital Evangelique

So I had my first day in Impfondo. After spending the morning in the airport from 7:00 to 9:00, we flew up north. Sarah, the community health nurse, met us at the airport.

We made the rounds of the hospital campus today. We went to all the wards, as well as the E.R. There was a little boy sitting on a bed looking completely out of it. He was getting a blood transfusion. There was a boy with a badly burned face. Everywhere it was extremely hot. Everywhere there were people. There are very few private rooms, and visitors/family members crowded many of the 4-6 bed rooms.

There was a man who had been hit by a truck, shattering his pelvic bones completely.  One of the doctors is trying to get him flown down to the capital for extensive surgery. In the maternity ward I saw the smallest baby I have ever set eyes on. It's head was almost as small as a tennis ball.

I saw lots of miserable faces. I saw a man in a sorry-looking wheelchair sitting under the burning sun. We pushed him into the shade. I shook hands with everybody, since it is the polite thing to do. Sick children, sick women lying on beds; sweaty with vacant expressions. Sick men, one of them close to dying. But I saw happy faces too. Smiles when I greeted them in Lingala, and sweet children. One little girl followed us around everywhere.

I met so many people today: patients, family members, the hospital staff, the guards, the carpenters, the other missionaries, and so on. I have hopes of remembering names and faces but not today. I think I was in a bit of a daze for the rest of the afternoon. I have never seen anything like this. Not even close.

Well, the time has finally come to pack my bags and say goodbye to friends and family.

Today I get on a plane and fly to Paris. Tomorrow I get on another plane and fly to Brazzaville. In a just a few days I will be across the Atlantic ocean in some place I've never seen called Imfondo.