The First Week!

    Settled in Mattru Jong!  Settled is an exaggeration, as we are in a house that has potential, as they say in the realtor’s magazine.  We inherited 4 large overstuffed chairs, a sofa that rams springs up your buttocks, 2 beds, and no other furniture.  The house has two bedrooms, with a nice big European shower, separate from the bathroom, which is nice.  Both the bathroom toilet and the shower were right in front of huge windows, but as we are not exhibitionists by nature, we have found a way to cover those nicely with some homemade curtains.  The solar powered unit at the Guest house has been connected to our house, and so we have plenty of power at night to run our new fans, and to have a few lights on.  The fans are a necessity on these hot sticky nights of April here.  Wednesday might have been the hottest day yet, with a high close to 100 I believe.  But by morning, it is usually reasonably cool, making it necessary to pull on a sheet to keep warm.  The screens on our windows are actually mosquito nets, and since they are stretched slightly in the installation, we have plenty of bugs that can make their way through the mesh and cluster around the lights at night.  You will have surprise protein if you would eat under one of those lights, so it is good we do not have a table and chairs yet!

The front of our house.

The back of our house.

   

Harmony House, the guest house belonging to the hospital, where our colleagues Pam and Matt are staying.

 God has been very real to us for the first few days here.  We were able to get our vehicle the day before we left to come out to Mattru, and when we drove it home, I noticed some looseness in the suspension or steering.  It rapidly got worse, so I took it back to the fellow where I bought it at quarter of 5 on a Friday night, and they graciously took off the steering wheel that had 2 bolts that were quite worn, being the cause of the looseness.  We gave thanks to God for getting that fixed before we left.  And we were able to leave the next morning right on time.  We were pleasantly surprised at the journey. Although it took 7 hours, all the police at the check points were very nice, and we had no difficulties at all in finding it, thanks to a fellow who met us and rode with us the last 18 miles on a motorcycle.  The road up to the last 18 miles is nice enough, but after that, it is not that easy.  When you arrive at the Jong river, which passes by the town of Mattru Jong, you need to honk your horn for the man-powered ferry.  The ferry is made of metal and wood, but can carry 2 vehicles of normal size, along with several motorcycles, and people, and is propelled across the sizeable river along a cable which is grasped with a wooden tool and pulled manually.  The ferry is free, but you give a small token as a thank you, although if you don’t know that, they may try to charge you as well. 

    The road from there into town is a combination of dirt and blacktop, but the blacktop is finished, as they say, before we get to our house and the hospital, on the edge of town.  It makes it quite convenient to get to the hospital when you live this close.

Greenie, our gecko, of course traveled with us to Mattru!
Paved roads first, then a couple of hours on a nicely maintained, wide dirt road.

The last 18 miles are a narrower dirt road which was not to difficult to take now,
 but will be a challenge during the rainy season!

And finally we reached the Jong river! 

Getting on the ferry...

   Besides the work of moving into a house, (and a lot of cleaning, that first day) the work at the hospital started almost immediately, with rounds the morning after getting there late in the afternoon, and then a C-section the 2^nd day.  This was performed on one of the CHO’s wife, sort of the equivalent of our physician assistants.  So there was a bit more stress associated with that, and also because it was Jon’s first one in 28 years.  But surgery went well, and the baby was a girl, with mother and baby doing fine.  The second day, they brought in a child which was in the process of triage and admission, when he arrested and died, probably with cerebral malaria.  Although we did a bit of CPR, it is not a country where children can be placed on a respirator, so we soon stopped when it was unsuccessful.  It illustrated to us how that death is never very far away here in this land, and also shows there is only so much that can be done here.  But the compassion of Jesus is always available when medicine fails, and is available in every country.

Jon by the sign board of the hospital.

   The 4^th day, a lady was admitted with ectopic pregnancy with a hemoglobin of 4 (about 1/3 of normal) suggesting that she had lost most of her blood.  She was close to death, and not really responding well.  Upon opening of her abdomen, it was filled with blood.  Once we got everything drained, covering the operating room floor with blood, we were able to see the tube with its bleeding area.  This area was easily tied off, and surgery was successful.  I was starting to wonder whether this is the norm, but they said it was the first ectopic in a long time.  But praise God, she is doing well and is scheduled for discharge.

The front of the hospital.

Medical Wards

Pediatric ward.

Jon and Pam attending to a boy brought in after a bad fall on Saturday morning.

    In the meantime, Heleen is trying to set up a household. This is a bit different from setting up home in America, but thankfully, with many years of Freetown-experience and the help of local women, she is making progress. We sometimes run out of water so we need water stored for drinking, cooking, bathing, laundering and cleaning, which means we invested in lots of buckets! Cooking is a daily challenge as we learn to prepare meals with what is locally available – enough material for a separate blog post, so we won’t go into details about that yet, apart from listing the meals we’ve had so far: rice with sautéed potato leaves and ground peanuts, rice with okra stew, and white beans with a kind of eggplant in tomato sauce. As of next week we will have someone cooking for us from Monday through Friday one meal a day, which will be a big help! We ordered paint for some of the walls and tiles for the floors and hope that this work can be started soon. And Heleen can’t wait to go fabric shopping for curtains!

    Yesterday we attended the Good Friday service in the local UBC church, with the theme “It is Finished”, Christ’s finished work on the cross in our redemption.   And we are looking forward to celebrating Easter with them tomorrow morning.  The first week has been good but challenging and at times we feel overwhelmed, discouraged, and a little homesick.  So it will be good to be reminded of God’s power over death and sin.  We serve a Living God, a Risen Lord! We trust in Him as we go forward…