Pole pole, slowly slowly

August 4^{th, 2017}

Today I went to a funeral of one of “my kids” from the nutrition program.  This one hit me especially hard, as the child is related to our nanny.  We have lost a lot of kids lately.  I happens every July/August and every year I block it out of my memory.  Every year.  It always knocks the wind out of me.

I sat in the family’s home with the little boy’s still body for about 1.5hours.  We sat quietly, waiting, waiting with the mother and grandmother and aunts.  Visitors came in and out to simply sit and be together.  I brought a blue hydrangea and tropical flower bouquet.  Very few words were exchanged.  There was a certain peace in the waiting.  I prayed silently for the mother, for consolation, for peace, for her heart.  I prayed for the father.  I cried.  I had time to think about a lot of things.  I told God, “I think I need another job?  This is just too hard.”

The hardest moments were when the mother had to be separated from her child.  At one point she had to say “goodbye” to his physical body and I could just feel her pain.  She wanted to keep him, but he was already gone.  She had to accept that all she would be left with was memories.  As a mother, I felt it so deeply, more deeply than I ever have before.  There is something so final about death.  As his body was lowered into the ground, she fled, simply couldn’t handle watching the men bury him.  Her little boy would not come back.

Friends and family came just to be present, to witness, to pray, to sing, and to consider the value of a 16month old child.  There was a certain beauty in that.  I was reminded that Jesus wept with those who wept and rejoiced with those who rejoiced.  There is a time to speak and a time to remain quiet.  There really is a time for everything. 

There is a Swahili saying here, “pole pole,” that is so appropriate.  It means “slowly slowly” and you can say it in almost any context.  We need to slow down.  We need take time to notice things…notice other people…notice our feelings.  We need to notice the sunset (or sunrise if you are an early riser).  We need to simply observe the passage of time.  Funerals have a way of causing us to pause.  

Hug your loved ones today and let them know what they mean to you.  August 4^th has come to a close.

Lindsey

Nyankunde Hospital needs your help!

July 30, 2017

It is not our usual practice to ask for money, but I'm going to take a deep breath and do it.  Nyankunde Hospital has faced a financial crisis in the past few months. The causes are complicated, but the results are clear. 

1. The Hospital workers are paid a fraction of their salary corresponding to the funds received.  For the past several months, workers have been paid about half their salary.  If you make 100$/ a month, and you get half of that, it becomes difficult to make ends meet.  Morale these days is pretty low and we have employees who struggle to feed their families.
2. The hospital struggles to purchase even basic supplies. At present we are running out of everything in the OR.  I simply don't have appropriate sizes of suture and we run out of basic items like anesthetic supplies and gloves. When the hospital does buy supplies, they buy a tiny amount and it runs out quickly. 
3. Basic medicines are in short supply. Lindsey has been going crazy because in the heart of malaria season, we ran out of basic malaria medicines. The lab struggles to do blood transfusions because they run of out of reagents. 

The solution is to fix the problem which has caused the current financial crisis, to keep the hospital running and provide essential care.  Nyankunde Hospital is a referral hospital which serves an extremely poor population.  Working within the rubric of the Congolese health structures means that patient fees are dictated at a governmental level. In the meantime the hospital receives very little support.  There are many complicated issues and our current  Administration is working on them. They have strived to manage finances and demonstrate transparency.  In the meantime we are faced with needing to replace expensive pieces of equipment such as an autoclave and imaging equipment with very little local resources to do so.  At this time it kind of seems like everything is breaking and the hospital has no money to fix things.

We are planning a trip to Uganda and we would like to buy some of the basic supplies we need to keep the hospital running.  We also need to buy an autoclave to replace one which has recently developed an irreparable crack. We need to purchase surgical supplies, including suture, gloves, gauze, drapes, anesthetic materials, etc. 

If you would like to help, you can make a contribution under our name by clicking on the Christian Health Service Corps and designate the money for Hospital supplies and equipment. Any amount will help us to keep caring for patients here.  We are trying to raise $10,000 to cover these costs. Your donations will be used to purchase critical supplies and this will help to keep the hospital running. Above all please pray that God will help us here at Nyankunde to share the Gospel of Christ through compassionate health care. 

Sincerely

Warren and Lindsey Cooper

You can contribute here:  https://app.mobilecause.com/form/UbgC0w

Broken Machines and RAIN

July 19, 2017

Visiting friends in the village of Etindey in the forest (after the rain)

It is time for another installment of life in Congo.  Day after day, there doesn’t seem a lot of new things to write about….but after a month there is usually a theme that has developed.  The theme of this past month is “machines breakdown.”

Broken Machines & Rains

As our son Emmanuel says so often...it's broken, so too are many things in the hospital.  This past week the digital x-ray system stopped functioning, the autoclave has an irreparable crack, and the hospital generator for the operating theater/ICU is out of order!  Yes, that is right.  These are really important resources that allow us to have sterile instruments, have oxygen, and really use anything electronic.  There is a lot of troubleshooting going on, local mechanics consulted, and getting by the best we can.  We have come to depend on these resources heavily.  Warren has been operating on machines more than people lately.  Please pray for the hospital as we do the best we can each day to find solutions and have limited solar power due to the rains.

That leads me to the other theme of the month: RAIN!!!  If you didn’t know, Congo is the second largest rainforest in the world (after the Amazon)… “gorillas in the mist.”  A tropical climate, it rains a lot here.  Everything grows like crazy, including weeds.  We have planted crops this season: corn, soybeans, beans, and peanuts in addition to vegetables.  So far the fields seem to be producing well and our gardener is busy.  It really is a blessing to be able to grow crops.  This is the blessing of rainy season…although we miss the sunny days. 

Family Update

Emmanuel has been catching butterflies in his fingers.  He is really oblivious to where he is going, he just follows them from flower to flower.  I find him all over the place.  I may need to put either a cowbell or a GPS tracker on him.  He is becoming so creative with his drawings and sculptures in clay.  We are amazed at his progress in French these last few months.  It is the most fulfilling thing I have ever done, becoming a mom.

See the bus in the middle?  All our family and friends are inside.

Warren had a near miss with a forest cobra snake last week.  He was cutting up some dry wood from a felled tree for our pizza oven.  He detected the snake about two meters away at the level of his head.  He very quickly backed up, calling for a stick, and the snake slithered away.  I was at the hospital and heard that aftermath.  We rarely see snakes…so glad for that.  This serves as a reminder that they live here.  On a different note, Warren also completed work on a beautiful pizza oven.  You can stoke 

the fire to >700degrees and bake right on the tile floor.  Now our outdoor kitchen is complete.

I (Lindsey) broke a record for writing for the most transfusions in one day.  On Monday I wrote for 14 transfusions…all kids with severe malaria!  Perhaps all the mosquitos came out in large numbers on the same day.  Of the 14 kids, 11 received blood the same day!  Two children died before they could receive blood and the third received blood first thing the next morning.  I am really hoping that the malaria vaccine which is currently undergoing trials will be effective, at least to decrease the number of severe cases.  Until there is an effective vaccine I will continue to take malaria prophylaxis.  I actually convinced my husband to start prophylaxis after his second episode of malaria in a month.  Malaria really does take you “out of commission.”  It is lost work and family time and can be really dangerous (especially virulent here).  In the kitchen Lindsey is experimenting with new recipes for fruit crisps: mango, apple, rhubarb and learning new uses for beans and coconut.

Well that is the news from Nyankunde! 

·      We ask for your prayers as we troubleshoot many challenges on a daily basis.  Pray in particular for all the technical challenges. 

·      For those who are following the story of the long-awaited medication called tacrolimus, continue to pray for Jemima’s healing from nephrotic syndrome as takes this medication.  She seems to be responding well, praise God! 

·      Pray that God would continue to use this hospital to bring healing and wholeness to people’s lives.  Pray for a clear witness of the Gospel.

·      Pray for the safe arrival of our friends visiting for the next month from central Congo.

Blessings,

Lindsey for the Coopers

Our favorite hairdresser, Angel

Emmanuel spraying my hair wanting to "couper les cheveux"

Pure Joy

June 15, 2017 

Mail service in Congo

Today I had a feeling of pure joy.  Sometimes it feels like God is reaching down and giving you a blessing, reminding you why you do what you do.  I was reminded again that every day is a gift from God and that regardless of the circumstances we are in…there is always something to give thanks for.  We have felt discouraged lately (we have had reasons to feel this way), and yet today I felt encouraged.

I recently wrote about a little girl with a severe nephrotic syndrome in need of a specialty medication called tacrolimus.  The good news is that this medication arrived today after its’ long journey of almost 7 weeks!  We sent it from Kinshasa two weeks ago and it arrived via Goma today!  Praise the Lord!  She starts on this medication tomorrow.  Pray with me that she will have a good response to the medication. 

Today a little boy named Manda, (age 4) walked by himself to receive his therapeutic milk for the first time in a month.  His little legs were trembling, but he has the energy and motivation to do it.  It has taken over a month to regain his strength to walk again.  I can barely recognize him now he has changed so much.  He is smiling and has friends.  His mother says he began to get sick when his father was killed about 6 months ago.  He had a close relationship with his father and it seems that after his passing he slowly lost his appetite and desire to live.  Praise the Lord for this little boy and his slow but steady recovery!

We are the only hospital in our area with a feeding program and we are proud of it!  We use local resources, local cows, and local ingredients.  Why aren’t there more programs like ours?  Sometimes I wonder if other people think malnutrition is really a disease, or if it is a curse, or simply what happens when you are poor.  It is my hope that we can inspire other health providers from other health zones to use the resources available to them to educate and treat malnutrition. 

We recently treated a nurse’s child from another health zone for malnutrition.  This nursing director of another health center recognized that her son had a problem.  She was so discouraged and desperate when she arrived.  After a few weeks her son is doing really well, gaining weight and energy.  He needs to gain weight, but he is well on his way.  As is often the case this nurse has come with her own burdens to bear.  She says that she was able to get pastoral support for her struggling marriage during her time at our hospital.  She and her husband have reconciled and are working on their relationship.  She will spread the word in her health zone about her child’s improvement and encourage others who need help to get help.  She has been so impressed with the little boy Manda’s ability to walk again that she is confident that God is at work at our hospital.

It is our hope at CME-Nyankunde to see lives transformed spiritually, mentally, and physically.  Not just the individual, but the whole family.  We want to see people restored to a right relationship with God, to gain hope for a better future.  Often we see patients arriving in tears, lacking strength to walk.  They leave with a new found strength.

We have our daily struggles here, but we keep counting our blessings!

Lindsey (for the Coopers)

One of my favorite pictures of the Gety wilderness in our backyard