Sunday, July 6, 2008
Gavin was in charge of taking us to
church this morning. There were
Laura,
Evan,
Vicki,
Nadine,
Amy, and
Steve, who is here for a week to work on some projects with the radio station.
Gavin had been up
very early this morning because he had been
called in to the clinic because a
10-year old girl was having a
sickle cell crisis. He had
relieved her symptoms and she was
resting at the clinic when we left for church. A few minutes after, Gavin got a
call from the
mother of the girl saying she was in
pain again, so we
turned around to go back to the clinic.
Gavin and
Amy rushed into the clinic while the rest of us
waited outside. I didn't want to
bother them, but I got
concerned about what was happening, so I carefully went in. I watched Gavin and Amy as they started an
IV and tried to
calm her down.
A few minutes later the girl's
father came in. While Gavin was out of the room looking for something, the father asked me, "
Doc, in your opinion,
do you think there's a cure for this?" All of a
sudden I felt a huge
weight on my
shoulders, as if I had to
deliver a
bad news. I almost
choked, but said in
broken Creole, "Well, Gavin is the
doctor, so he would know better than me, but this is a
genetic disorder so..." The father
understood what I wanted to say, and he responded, "But we can
control the pain, yes?" "
Yes, we can," I replied, and he
accepted my answer.
It seems that the father had
already heard that there is
no cure for his daughter's
disease, but I felt
awful to think that I might be the one to tell him there's
no real hope. I had learned about
sickle cell anemia many times probably since
elementary school, but actually seeing how it
affected the
girl and her
family had a
profound impact on me. It made me realize how
serious the disease is, and that the people
suffering from them are not just
numbers in statistics.
Gavin and
Amy were able to calm her down after a
few minutes, and we let the family stay in the clinic with her while we went to church. Since we were
running late for church, Gavin decided to go to the church next to the OMS compound. We used a little
portable audio system so Gavin could
translate into a
mic and we could listen to him through an
earphone. He started to translate for a bit, but he
left in the middle because he was called by the
girl's parents again. I could only catch a
few phrases because they talked so fast, so I
couldn't translate. I need to
practice listening more.
After the service, we went to
Christoph Hotel as we usually have lunch there on Sundays. We took a
dip in the
pool afterwards. We did a few
cannonball dives, and
Laura and I threw
Nadine and
Gavin in the air like we did last time when we were at Christoph.
Later in the afternoon, we went to
English Bible Fellowship, which is held at the
Radio 4VEH station every Sunday at 4:00PM. There were a few
short-term mission teams with different mission organizations. It was
cool to see them and to be able to
worship together in
English.
On Sundays we are
on our own for dinner, which just means that we don't have a cook to
prepare us food or
wash dishes, but they make
pasta salad or something we can
heat up in advance. We also don't have a long-term missionaries
scheduled to join us, but
Amy joined us for dinner tonight, just because she can.
Afterwards, we hung out in
Vicki and
Nadine's room as they
packed their bags because they are
leaving tomorrow. We watched the rest of
Chaos Theory, which had a pretty good ending. It's going to be so
sad to see the two leave tomorrow morning.
Bonjou Mezanmi!
