By the shores of Lake Kivu & Loads of Village Children

May 30, 2022.  

  

This May 15th marked our 12 year wedding anniversary!  We enjoyed time on the shores of Lake Kivu together, swimming, kayaking, eating good food, and just having family time.  

So Many Kids

“There are so many kids here!  Where do they all come from?”  said our current visitor.  It is true.  There are so many children here in this season, compared to a few years ago.  Children are the majority of the many displaced persons living in our community.  In the ED/ICU the other day and ¾ of the patients were internally displaced.  People are truly moving from place to place these days as the security is fluid.  Now we are a safe haven for many-last year this was not the case.  A year ago when we bolted the doors to our house shut during a military siege there was doubt as to whether we would return.  Yet a year later and here we are again.

Homes have recently been marked with a triangle representing the number of households living in them.  I saw one home with 5 triangles today.  It is amazing that people are able to make things work under such challenging conditions.  We are seeing more and more cases of advanced chronic diseases such as tuberculosis.  Many women are coming in late to give birth, many with complications and infections.  Our maternal and neonatal mortality rate is quite high; much of it due to lack of prenatal care and trained birth attendants.  The insecurity we experienced last year has set our community back for years.  

We are finishing up an antenatal ward, a building where women with high risk pregnancies can await the birth of their babies.  It is going to be wonderful to be able to offer this to these women.  It is simple and has an outdoor kitchen, but it will be adequate for our needs.  We are grateful for the help of the organization “Saving Moses” that is helping us to get this program going.  Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest neonatal mortality rate in the world.  We need these kinds of interventions in place to help the most vulnerable women in our communities.  It is simply a safe place adjacent the hospital in which to give birth.

Practicing Pediatrics

There are so many stories I could share, of children who have found healing recently.  Just two days ago a child traveled with his parents at night, on a motorcycle, unable to breathe with a bead in his airway.  They were desperate, otherwise they never would have taken such risks.  Warren placed a surgical airway and was able to see the bead and remove it.  The child survived!  I have seen children with rare genetic disorders-hemophilia.  Kids with inherited heart defects making them blue…I always get nervous managing these kids.  Then I usually have at least 4 kids hospitalized with sickle cell anemia.  It seems like children are the ones coming in with the greatest needs these days.

I wonder what it would be like to practice pediatrics in the USA again.  It would be so nice to be able to call a cardiologist!  All of these kids would be going to clinics to see specialists and I would probably miss out on managing them.  Kids come back for their “hospital follow-ups” and simply show up on the wards.  What a joy it is to see them again!

Visitors

We are very thankful for our current American visitors-Iyed and Ellen.  They were planning to come a year ago, but our evacuation caused them to cancel their plans.  They transported some critical endoscopy equipment here for us (thanks Samaritan’s Purse)!  They have been seeing patients and troubleshooting machines.  They are our second “wave” of medical volunteers this year.  Their curiosity about people and the way people live here is refreshing.  Iyed has been training our doctors and nurses in anesthesia and the use of ultrasound for procedures.  Their presence has been encouraging to us at a time when we needed it.  

  

Home Life

Emmanuel is finishing up first grade!  He has done a great job having his parents as teachers this last year.  We have seen him gain confidence in his reading and writing.  It has been such a blessing to be part of his development and to see his unique abilities and interests.  We have done our best to connect regularly with one of his classmates from last year and his previous teacher Angel.  We are so proud of him for his hard work.  

We plan to spend a couple of months in North Carolina in late summer/early fall of this year.  Emmanuel will attend a local Christian school for a couple of months and then we hope to continue to curriculum throughout the year in Africa.  We are “tentmaking teachers” so it will be good to have this encouragement and continuity with a peer group in future years.  We’ll see how it goes.  Emmanuel has developed a certain proficiency in spoken French.  We hope to also teach him written French, but we have wanted to take one written language at a time.  

Our puppy Sirius is growing by leaps and bounds!  He is now bigger than our 3year Basenji dog named Jacob.  We usually have at least one chameleon in in our possession.  

  

We are just plugging along here in eastern Congo with the work that the Lord has given us to do.  The needs are tremendous and we believe in being people that promote peace.  We would love to hear from you.  Please drop us a line.

Blessings for us,

Lindsey

Thanks for our recent 12 year wedding anniversary.  We are thankful for each other and the love of God that binds us together.

Pray for peace in DRC in particular North Kivu and Ituri Provinces.  It is a very complex environment.  There is a new insurgency north of Goma, pray for this region.

Pray that we would continue to have confidence to walk in the will of God.  Pray that we would have a voice to speak for peace.

Pray for the plans to come together for our upcoming home assignment.

  


Peanut butter manufacturing & checkers with friends

  

A new take on a traditional oven (pot thanks to Jon Cadd)

Snapshots of Village Life Again

May 8, 2022

Wishing a Happy Mothers Day to all the moms out there.  There has been a lapse in our communication, but we are still here and doing well.  We are busy planting fields and getting settled into village life again.  I will try to use stories and pictures of people I know and have cared for recently to give you an update.

Snapshots of Village Life

 

Occasionally children bring other children to the hospital for care.  Sometimes children admit themselves to the hospital when they are sick.  It always grabs my attention when I see this.  This week a 9yo girl sibling arrived to the malnutrition ward carrying her little brother.  She came with a transfer note from a nearby village stating their concerns.  He was malnourished and weakened by malaria.  He was unable to sit and had edema in his extremities.

“You are his mother today, thank you, I said.”  Without any emotion she told me her mother had died a while ago and now she was caring for 4 children on her own.  She told me her father was sick and in the local health center.  She told me that she had prepared foo-foo and sombe (cassava leaves) for him the day before and that he had eaten.  Today he was refusing to eat, had a fever, and diarrhea.  He had signs of muscle wasting and protein malnutrition which is common.  

It is not ideal of course to have a child caring for another child, but we have been doing our best.  A community nurse visits the child every morning and evening and our kitchen prepares daily meals.  The extended family has abandoned these children and the father is labeled a “sorcerer,” which makes him a social outcast.  The hospital plans to do a home visit in hope of convincing them to be involved in the children’s lives.  I have not encountered this exact scenario before.  Clearly there is a spiritual aspect to this and we will be praying for a breakthrough.  Meanwhile we will love this child well.  

Jungle Rumblings

Last weekend a group of terrorists marched across the Ituri River invading a series of villages.  I will not give the name of this group for security reasons, but if you re not aware of the many tens of thousands of displaced peoples in Ituri Province I would encourage you to google it.  We have been seeing some refugees from this region for a while.  I have been caring for a little girl from the village of Lolwa, which has been next in line for invasion.  One day on rounds the father explained to me in Swahili that he needed to go back there to find his wife and kids. It really wasn’t safe to do so and the young girl could not be left alone in the hospital.  I advised against it.  Their village was in fact attacked a couple of days later.  He has not been able to reach his wife by phone since.  Today he requested discharge so he could search for his family.  We prayed together and I advised him to find a family to welcome the girl while he went searching.  The suffering and separation that people go through on a regular basis is beyond what most people will ever experience.  This other dear family (pictured here) recently evacuated this particular region where there are terrorists in the forest.  We are glad they are here with us.  

Back to Work

We have been back in Nyankunde for the last 3 months or so.  It has been a blessing to be in our home again.  We and get re-established in the work here and feel like we belong.  This is an interesting season that God is asking us to work actively for peace and our true identity being found in Christ, not in tribe.  We do this mostly through healthcare.  Promoting peace is active work, pursuing reconciliation between God and man, and man with fellow man.  Our walk with God is never really authentic until we learn to truly love our brother(s) who are different from us.  At times distrust and fear for others different than ourselves can lead to defensiveness and even violence.  Somewhere along the way we can stop seeing people as people.  

Many things seem better on the surface.  Health centers are functioning, patients are coming for care, there are less traumatic injuries, markets are open, babies are being born, life continues…but you don’t have to look far to find problems.  As an example, within the geographic area of Andisoma where we live, 15 of 58 villages have inhabitants.  Only larger villages have inhabitants .  It is true that many rural areas are void of people and people are gathered in larger settlements for security.

We believe that God wants us to be salt and light, to represent Him in Word and deed in this season.  “You are the salt of the earth.  But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?  It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.”  Matthew 5:13.  Salt adds flavor to food and it also preserves it.  Salt can disinfect a wound and can be painful.  It is also essential to maintaining our blood electrolyte balance as it flows in our blood, essential to functioning of cells and organs.  Jesus calls us to be salt in the world-a reminder of who God created people to be.  We are able to live out this calling as Christians anywhere, and we believe in not shying away from “difficult places.”

This year we are planting fields again that we WILL harvest.  Last year we planted fields but were unable to harvest, due to a local rebellion leading us to evacuate.  It is a blessing to work the earth and plant the fields again. We have planted peanuts, soybeans, black beans, corn, carrots, eggplant, onions, green peppers, orca, tomatoes, and squash.   A variety of fresh vegetables are hard to come by, so this will be a blessing.  We only have 1 chicken compared to the 20 we had last year and no goats, but that is ok for now.

We have a new puppy named Sirius, named for brightest star in the sky in Canis Major.  He is growing by leaps and bounds and is loved!  Emmanuel has made lots of local friends and is adjusting well.  He is finishing first grade!  He has a new wheelchair go-cart which his dad made him which he loves to race down the hill.

Thank you for your interest in our lives in eastern Congo. We are grateful for your prayers.  Continue to pray for peace in the region…not transient peace but deep peace that comes from people being right with God and man.  Pray that we would use our voices to glorify God.  Pray for villagers who have fallen into traps of tribalism, that they would turn to the one true God and not false ancestral gods.  Pray that Nyankunde Hospital could again serve all people well.

Blessings,

Lindsey