Hi there,
It has been difficult for me to imagine or even wrap my brain around the fact that this is the week before Christmas. Thanks to many of you I actually know it is winter and that snow is in fact falling somewhere in the world. I regret to inform you ( well not really) that it is still right around 80 degrees here and the rain left and the sun has once again become our friend. Life is good. :)
Okay, enough gloating. I do want to wish all of you the best Christmas possible. I pray it is filled with family and friends and all of you are focused on the coming of Christ and why he came. Praise God for His Son!!!!
It has been a challenging week for me indeed. I have treated 5 cases of Malaria, all which presented looking just a bit different than another. 4 were babies and one was our night guard Joseph. Please pray for there continued recovery. All are doing much better now and I thank you for your prayers so far. Most I treated here at the house but spent one very interesting night at a local hospital with one of the babies. I must admit I hope to never do that again. Hospitals here are VERY different than America. (that is a huge understatement). It is usually but not always a nurse making the diagnosis and then once a treatment plan is made things get wild. I went to a private, you pay for hospital rather than a public your get seen for free government hospital. Dont be confused though, you get seen for free but still must pay for bed sheets, medications, and anything else you need. So anyway, I went with the private hospital. So I called a driver at 1am and had him come pick me and the baby up. Meanwhile I am praying hard because it is my first adventure out that late, by myself in, well you know...Africa! So the driver comes and drives FAST to the hospital because he knows I have a very sick baby, her fever was around 103 or 104. We get there and she is seen pretty quickly. Malaria! Oh how I am learning to hate that word! So we make the decision to admit her and I ask for a private room rather than the general ward where we would have to share a room with anywhere from 2 to six people who could be ill with just about anything. The first room we are given has no light bulb so the nurse can not see anything so we are moved to a different room. It is a small concrete room about 10x12 with two twin beds and an IV pole. It also had, much to my joy and thanks to God, a mosquito net. We get an IV started on the baby and then i am told, when it gets to this mark you come get us. It should take about 4 hours. Then the nurse went back to bed. Good thing I have some idea of what to do with an IV and what to watch for. So there I was on the bed next to my baby, her name is Grace by the way, watching her IV drip ever so slowly. The room was lit by a single bare light bulb, which did allow for me to see the shadow of an occasional mosquito buzzing about the room. I dropped the net over us and we snuggled up together on the one sheet we had to cover the bed. Fortunately I had brought an extra fairly large baby blanket which I used to cover the bottom half of me and had a sweatshirt for the top half. Grace was snuggled up in the blanket and sheet I carried her in. So anyway for the next 4 hours we listened to various sounds of Jinja town coming through the small window at the top of the wall. Various gangs of dogs barking and fighting in the street outside. People walking about in the night. And of course at 4am the call to worship from the Mosque which I can only assume was located just outside my window based on the volume of the speaker. WOW! So we tried to sleep some and I had my cell phone ring ever 30 minutes to make sure her drip was running right and had not gone past the intended mark. Needless to say it was a long night. In the end it was well worth it however. Grace is over her Malaria and cuter than ever. She was reunited with her mom and twin brother by 3 the next afternoon. And by the time you get this I will have fully recovered from my lack of sleep. It sure takes longer now than when I was twenty! That is for sure! ( the picture attached is Grace)
Today I realized that I am nearly half way through my time here and I just cant really believe it. Time is passing so quickly and then at times it seems very slow. I am trying hard to savor every moment for all that it has and learn all that God is wanting to teach me while I am here. I try not to dwell on missing my family and friends but it happens more frequently than I care to admit. I think of my Mimi and how I am missing holidays with her and my close friends back in the burg. I think of talking on the phone with my Mom nearly everyday, and the freedom of jumping in my car and going to town for whatever I want whenever i want it. I cant really do those things right now. I count it all the cost to follow. I heard a great sermon this week on my i pod about how my life should be spent following Jesus and if I am doing in right then i should be covered in his dust. That is my prayer this week. That I would follow him so closely that I would be covered in His dust. I pray that for each of you as well. After all, in the end that is all that really matters.
Counting it all loss,
Jennifer
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