All Saints Day

Today is All Saints Day which means the hospital has another holiday.  Clinics and elective surgeries from today got moved until tomorrow so we are primarily just taking care of emergencies and the current inpts.  It is an incredibly beautiful day and the breeze is blowing slightly which makes it even nicer!  What a great day for a holiday.

Last night three more short term missionary physicians and their families came to the hospital.  Many of them will be staying here for over a month.  It is always so wonderful to have extra help especially with Kelly the pediatrician gone until this weekend.  Last night was Halloween which is not a holiday celebrated here in Togo, nor really encouraged by the missionaries here.  Instead, we had a bonfire and made smores.  It was fun and the kids enjoyed the special treat.  As I looked around at now more than 30 white people sitting under the African stars around a campfire in the sweltering heat roasting marshmallows I could only laugh.  So comical in so many ways.

Roommate update: I am now sharing my room with a gecko and a lizard.  The lizard scurried in the door when I was coming home one day before I could stop him.  There are so many lizards of every size and color here.  Growing up in San Diego I am used to lizards, but there are far more here than even from back home.  The gecko decided to surprise me yesterday as I was opening the curtains in my room I apparently knocked him off from under one of the folds where he was sleeping.  He landed on me.  I screamed.  That was about the end of it.

Yesterday, Rhonda took me to eat with her off the street from some of the vendors just outside of the hospital grounds.  She says that she has done this for months and hasn’t gotten sick so I decided it was probably a low risk deal.  We had so much fun!  I finally got to experience some real Togolese food which was wonderful.  The guest house where I am staying only serves American style food which is fine, but I definitely felt like something was missing.  The crazy thing was that for both Rhonda and I to eat lunch plus buy a few snack items for later it cost a grand total of 60cents in US money!  Fast food has never been so cheap.  Even the dollar menu at McDonalds can’t beat that.  I think we are going to try to do this for lunch more often.

(Warning – this next part is not for the squimish) This morning we had a normal delivery that went very smoothly, but as we were standing around waiting for the placenta to deliver a very interesting conversation was started.  I have noticed that we send all of thepts home with their placentas.  Occasionally people back home ask to take their placentas home with them.  Sometimes they use them as fertilizer and plant a tree, but sometimes people take them home and eat them.  They are a rich source of iron and can be dried and ground up and put into pills or made into soup, etc (I am not necessarily advocating this practice, just telling it like it is).  I sort of assumed that when everyone was taking home their placentas that they were taking them home to eat them.  I could never have been so wrong!  When the nurses heard that people back home sometimes eat them it was all I could do to keep from falling on the floor from laughing at the looks on their faces.  This is clearly not a Togolese custom.  Apparently it depends on what village you come from as to what you do with the placenta when you bring it home.  Many just simply bring it home and burry it.  Others, however, have the custom of sending it to the maternal in-laws as a type of birth announcement.  That made me smile.  Could you imagine that happening in the States.  Up walks the FedEx guy with a package that you sign for only to bring it inside and open it on your kitchen table to find a bloody, gooey mess!  Oh so interesting.

Update on the 4 year old Bernadette that I posted about last time:  She made it to Ethiopia where she was supposed to have a connecting flight to get her to the US.  Her condition was deteriorating though and they had an ambulance that was supposed to meet them on the landing strip at the airport when they arrived.  The flight was two hours delayed so when they got there the ambulance had already left.  Kelly somehow managed to get Bernadette to the hospital.  After talking to the surgeon in the states and the surgeon in Ethiopia it was decided that Bernadette needs to stay in Ethiopia and have the surgery done there.  We are asking for a lot of prayer because none of us are really very sure or confident in the skills of the neurosurgeon in Ethiopia in regards to this surgery, but at this point it doesn’t look like there are very many other options.  Kelly and Bernadette are staying in the ER there with all of their luggage until surgery which is scheduled for tomorrow.  I talked with Bernadette’s father today (Healing the Children does not allow the parents of the pts to accompany them to other countries for treatment) when he came by the hospital.  My heart is breaking for him.  You can see the weight of it all sitting on his shoulders as he is not sure if he will ever see his 4 year old daughter alive again.  He did say though that he was talking with his wife this morning and he told her “you and I did not make Bernadette, God did and she is His. He is the one who will decide what will happen to her and it is because that I know He is alive that I can go on and face another day.”  Such incredible faith.  It took almost everything to keep the tears from welling up.  Tomorrow will be a big day.