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!
-Meeting my little girl
