Summer 2012 letter

Daniel at Dondi

Mother and child at Dondi Mission hospital

Steve Collins, operating on a patient with cataracts (over 100 operations in 2 weeks at Dondi)

Patient in bed, after her surgery

 A happy patient the morning after the operation, able to see her daughter again

AK-47 shells: remnants of the war in Huambo province

I visited Dondi Mission Hospital for two weeks last month. While i saw patients with general medical problems, Steve Collins cared for patients with eye complaints (the main reason for our trip). Until the mid-1970's, the mission maintained a seminary, agricultural school, leprosy mission, TB sanitorium, nursing and lab training schools, an international school, animal husbandry and a busy hospital servicing an area close to 2 million people. All this was destroyed during the civil war; now, a Bible school and girl's school are all that remain. 

It's a beautiful area, with even more beautiful people we met through our work there. And we pray that, with time, help for the people of the area will be restored.

Some of our medical work

Medical team to Kalukembe: the regional referral hospital for  1 million people, 180 beds and no doctor. We  come here once a month and are wondering if this might be a place for us long-term 

So this huge abdominal mass, thought to be a large ovarian tumor turned out to be a 10kg messenteric cyst!  

Nursing at Kalukembe: limited resources, lots of work. 

Priscila supervising the medical student Jody... they actually had fun! 

Zeke growing up: 15months

Zeke with his friend, Eva

We were trying to get a nice family picture.... Daniel had a temporary mohawk and Zeke was very distressed about our removing him from the fish pond he was swimming in. 

Catching up

We visited for our first time last month Kalukembe/Caluquembe hospital with the team from CEML. Just a 45 minute flight away (and now with paved roads only about 2 1/2 hours by car), this hospital was founded  over 100 years ago. It is a busy place with a wide reputation and without any permanent physician for over 10 years. It only shut down one day while it was being bombed by government forces during the civil war. Today, it is a church-administrated, government-funded hospital. The CEML staff go almost every month for a long weekend to perform surgeries on complicated cases (vesicovaginal fistulae, complex femur fractures, oromaxillofacial surgeries, and so forth), round with staff to see the difficult cases and discuss questions they have, and encourage everyone in the good work they do. While Annalise Olson performed surgeries all day and night, Priscila was busy repairing vaginas in the OR; Daniel taught a some ultrasound, saw medical patients and relocated a hip that was out for 2 weeks! and Zeke entertained the off-duty nursing students. We look forward to returning later this month, then hopefully extending our time to a few weeks in September with them. For more stories on Kalukembe, check out Dr. Tim Kubacki's blog at http://kubacki6.wordpress.com

 Daniel, Eduardo and Annalise with a sequestrum and the patient (from whence the rotten mandible came) at Kalukembe. For those with stomachs, we have pictures showing how far the infection spread. Feel free to ask. 

 Zeke and friends on the airstrip at Kalukembe

Priscila and Annalise at the weekly radio show on medicine and health. Yes, even an OBGYN and a surgeon have opened Harrison's. Priscila has been involved in the topics of sexually transmitted disease and endometrial cancer. Daniel volunteered to watch Zeke at home for these shows. He did try his hand at the motor vehicle accidents show and realized his Portuguese was still at an elementary level. He answered an open-ended question with "Sim! (yes)" The moderator wisely navigated the rest of the questions to others for the remainder of the show.

At Hospital CEML

Dermatology is not my strength, so skin diseases continue to keep me humble. I read in one manual that skin diseases make up 20% of outpatient visits in the developing world. That’s more than I see, but there isn’t a day that goes by without at least one patient with concerns regarding the body’s biggest organ. Here are three of many patients I have seen. . . .

This is a young lady who had lived further in the interior of the country for a couple years and came because she was having an itchy rash all over her body (except her head). These lesions were tight and were not fluid-filled.

She had a slide of her blood prepared and reported to have microfilaria whipping around. Diagnosis: Loiasis. Since we don’t have the first line treatment, DEC, available, the royal we prescribed a 3-week course of albendazole. She hasn’t returned, so we hope it worked.

This 45-year-old gentleman has a rash I’ve seen several people with. It started on his shins 10 years ago and gradually has spread up. He had a (successful?) ligature of his veins on the right leg that stopped the spread, but had an unsuccessful attempt on this left leg. He also went a 6-month treatment course for pulmonary TB but this rash continued to spread during that time. He is in the hospital for a skin graft of a part of the rash that had ulcerated; he was treating that area with cow dung—to no avail. He had a couple checks for lymphatic filariasis that were negative (and he’s HIV and VDRL non-reactive, too). Diagnosis: not sure, and we welcome your thoughts! Being a surgical hospital, his skin grafting will be prioritized.

The right leg (like his other side) had a saphenous vein ligation.

We frequently find this strange boy waddling around in our kitchen, getting his hands, feet and face into anything he can find. The lesions on his face tested positive for chocolate. Diagnosis: bagunça

Spring 2012 letter

At our new home: Lubango!

La Leba: a scary road

Young men singing on the edge of cliff.

We were praying the roads were de-mined.

Daniel and Zeke looking out at the expanse.

The valley bellow the plateau; during the war, victims were shot and thrown off the edge... until recently, bodies and skeletons could still be seen.

Zeke playing on our new porch.

Making bread with Berta, our friend and neighbor. 

Patients at the Rio de Huila Hospital: Zeke loved meeting them! 

Zeke's first birthday in Lubango with friends.

Moments with our family... en route to Angola.

In the Air

We are on our way to Angola! Saying good-bye to our brothers, sisters, friends and neighbors in Kapsowar, the Familia  are now en route to Houston to pick up our visas. We are now enjoying a 3-day stop in the Netherlands on the way.

Zeke enjoying  his last rolls in the yard with his favorite toy

part of the Rorok School church family Easter Sunday

Priscila's last hysterectomy, with RN Wilson and med student Christine

Tchau to our neighbors

Our mother in Kapsowar, Laura Rhodes

The society into which the Christian is called at baptism is not a collective but a Body. It is in fact that Body of which the family is an image on the natural level. If anyone came to it with the misconception that membership of the Church was membership in a debased modern sense—a massing together of persons as if they were pennies or counters—he would be corrected at the threshold by the discovery that the head of this Body is so unlike the inferior members that they share no predicate with Him save by analogy. We are summoned from the outset to combine as creatures with our Creator, as mortals with immortal, as redeemed sinners with sinless Redeemer. His presence, the interaction between him and us, must always be the overwhelmingly dominant factor in the life we are to lead within the Body, and any coneption of Christian fellowship which does not mean primarily fellowship with Him is out of court. . . . The sacrifice of selfish privacy which is daily demanded of us is daily repaid a hundredfold in the true growth of personality which the life of the Body encourages. Those who are members of one another become as diverse as the hand and the ear. That is why the worldlings are so monotonously alike compared with the almost fantastic variety of the saints. Obedience is the road to freedom, humility the road to pleasure, unity the road to personality.

--C.S. Lewis, from “Membership,” The Weight of Glory

Zeke at 10months

Happy to have daddy back!

Helping clean mommy's drawers. 

Do you like my art work?

Moment with mommy at lunch.

Cuddling with daddy before bedtime.