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Day Two: How is your body?
So much happens in a day in Tonj, especially because In Deed and Truth Ministries is so incredibly efficient and runs a well-oiled machine!
Here was the basic layout of our day:
-Breakfast (yummy)
-IDAT staff devotional
-Team meeting to plan out our week in Tonj
-Work in the clinic
-Timtuk village outreach
-Receiving Dinka names
-Push-starting the truck
-Leper colony
-I felt the first inklings of a maternal instinct
After our team meeting, we all went to assist in IDAT’s clinic. We were each assigned a staff member to help, which meant that we were quickly trained and then put to work. Andrew and Bob became “pharmacists,” Ashley became a “midwife,” Lizi and Susie became “intake specialists,” Kerrie was triage nurse, and Elizabeth and I became “wound care specialists.” I assisted Margaret in the wound care room, where we cleaned and dressed some very interesting wounds. Many of them started out as simple cuts, but because of the lack of hygiene and poor diets, wounds don’t heal well…they fester and become flesh ulcers. If you’ve never seen an oozing, pus-filled wound, thank your Heavenly Father. I’m serious. Anyway, Margaret showed me how to properly clean the wound in an outward, circular motion, and then how to apply iodine to a new bandage and dress it neatly. I think I worked on five or six patients independently. You can call me doctor now…by Sudan standards, anyway!
After the clinic work and a quick bite to eat, it was off to Timtuk where Sabet goes each week as part of their outreach program. We went alongside him so that we could both support his work and do some survey work for the Sister to Sister Program. It was a small village, but the people were amazing. There we also each received Dinka names, which was a lot of fun! My new name is Amer, which means white cow with reddish streaks. It’s an honor in their culture to be named after a cow!
Here are pictures from the visit in Timtuk…
Sabet and Suzy’s adopted daughter, Agum, giving us her silly faces…
The water in the bucket is their drinking water…it’s quite cloudy and dirty. Only minutes after we asked about water, this woman fetched some to show us. Then, a child came over and drank straight from the bucket only minutes after that. It was REALLY hard to watch a precious child drink such filthy water…but that is life there.
This is called a Red Velvet Mite (I looked it up after we came out of Sudan), and it’s apparently important in the decomposition process. In the States they are considerably smaller, but in Sudan they are probably the size of a dime or a little smaller. These things were EVERYWHERE!
This is the inside of their local church…
Ashley had handed out stickers and suckers. The stickers ended up in interesting places!
This is what they use to dip water out of the open well…
Aduel nhial (literally, sky house)…
T.I.A.: This is Africa. We thought we would be leaving Timtuk, but we discovered a dead battery instead. We had to push-start the truck, and I did help push until someone kicked me out and told me to take pictures of it instead!
After we left Timtuk, we swung by a leper colony on our way back to Tonj. Yes, an actual leper colony! I kept asking if that was politically correct, because it definitely isn’t person-first language; however, in Sudan (like in the Bible times) people with leprosy (aka lepers) are removed from their villages and secluded in their own housing. It was fascinating to see such “archaic” ways of handling a disease. There were people who were blind, who had lost fingers and toes, and who had sores. However, all of the people were filled with joy and they thanked us profusely for visiting them. They praised God for bringing us to them, and they told us that it was enough that we came and prayed with them…they didn’t need anything from us. A little part of me wondered, how could that be? Here are people who are ostracized from their own community because they developed a disease that is completely treatable and yet they are so filled with joy and praise for a loving God! That blew me away, and I realized how slow I am to praise God and how I often wait until I am “wowed” before I truly shout and sing.
Here are pictures of the beautiful people of the leper colony. This first one is me with the child that I really fell in love with quickly, and she fell in love with me, too. In the span of minutes she was on me like white on rice! Oh, and I didn’t even train the girl up for this picture, she was just beaming!
This is the final picture from the day. Here is my little girl again. We were getting ready to leave and she was just wrapped around my waist, not at all letting go. This shot was looking straight down my body at her face smiling up at me. Is this how precious motherhood feels?
Highs:
-Becoming Dr. Cass for the morning
-Seeing the stickers all over the faces of the children in Timtuk
-For sure, bringing an unexpected surprise to the people in the leper colony, and seeing how quick they were to praise and worship God for their blessings
-Meeting my little girl
-Meeting my little girl
Lows:
-Hearing the women in Timtuk discuss the harshness of life in the bush was a definite low. I want to point out that my pictures generally depict smiling children and adults, but that is because they love the camera and they love when khawajas pay so much attention to them. The reality is that life is brutal for them. They have no access to clean water, many women miscarry, many children die prematurely, food is scarce many times, and the elements are unforgiving. They lack basic education, hygiene, and healthcare. It is tough to be faced with that glaring reality.
Day Two will be up soon!
