Don't Get Sick on Sunday!

It was 1:30am on Sunday morning when we heard the phone ring.  Bleary eyed, we wondered if it was a wrong number, but there was the name and the picture of our teammate.  Something was happening, and it couldn’t be good.

Our boys going back to school

“Hello?” We put the phone on speaker so that both of us could hear.  There was moaning in the background.  
“She’s in terrible pain.  What do you think we should do?”

We have one piece of excellent advice for everyone who comes to serve on the islands that should absolutely be followed:

Don’t get seriously sick or injured.

Unfortunately, we ourselves, and our teammates have trouble following this excellent advice.  We do our best, but sometimes our best is just not good enough.

Getting sick here is complicated.  Medical emergencies are not simple procedures.
Where you might think, “Medical Emergency—Call 911. Call an ambulance. Let’s get to the emergency room.”  We have no 911, no ambulances, and the emergency room—well, we just don’t want to go there if we can help it.  Is there a hospital?  Yes.  Is there an emergency room? Yes.  Would we trust them to carry out basic emergency care in a proper way?  No.  And there is the rub.  What do you do when you don’t trust the medical care close at hand?  You exhaust other avenues first. We are thankful for doctors we can call even at 2am (and they wake up!)  We are thankful for the medical knowledge (having a nurse on the team is wonderful) that is already among us, and we proceed from there.

After consulting our doctor contacts the conclusion was simple:  Get some pain medication and get some tests and scans done.  That’s when the corollary to the first piece of advice came back to us:

If you do get sick or injured, don’t do it on Sunday.

First day of school line-up

Where do you get medicine and scans on Sunday???  Sunday is the island day of rest—and they take it seriously.  Doctors go home to their villages, the hospital virtually shuts down and almost nothing is open.  Thankfully, there is always one pharmacy that is open.  Since we don’t have a car and there are no taxis at 2am, we had to call on another friend to get us to the pharmacy to buy pain medications, but the tests and scans would simply have to wait until the daytime.

At 7am we started trying to reach the doctor.  There are only two doctors on the whole island who can do ultrasounds who also have personal generators (did we mention there is usually no electricity on Sundays).  One was on the other side of the island and the other’s phone wasn’t ringing. Fortunately, we’ve been here long enough to have connections who can get through to a doctor not interested in coming in on his day off.  By 10:30am and with some miraculous provisions, we had the ultrasound.

Thankfully the situation was not life threatening, but our teammate would still have to travel.  The reality is, for anything serious, we have to at least leave Clove Island and probably the islands altogether to receive advanced care.  The good thing is, we have an insurance company that is ready to send a med-evac airplane to get us to a good hospital if necessary. Lest you think this is a Westerner problem, rest assured islanders deal with the exact same issues.  They don’t trust the hospitals here any more than we do.  They have their own form of “med-evac plane”—it’s in the form of a small motor boat to take them to the nearby French island.  The passage is dangerous and expensive, but if you can make it to land, the French medical system will take care of you.  

At ceremony this past weekend

Getting hurt or sick here isn’t easy. So we join with our island friends and neighbors in praying that none of us gets sick or injured. When someone is seriously sick or injured, no one on the island is surprised when that person travels for medical care, but having to travel suddenly isn’t easy. And in case you didn’t know, traveling on a Sunday is even harder. Just another reason why we maintain and still advise, don’t get sick on a Sunday!


PRAYERS ANSWERED
Our teammate was able to travel to the big island last Monday (not Sunday). We’re thankful for our other teammate who is a nurse and traveled with our sick teammate and has been taking such good care of her. We’re thankful for our leadership on the big island and in mainland Africa for organizing her continuing care. Our boys have restarted local school and while they are still nervous, the first few days have gone well. Please continue to pray for them. We believe we’ve found a new house to rent with the kids’ blessing— we’re just waiting for confirmation that there aren’t water issues at the house and we’ll sign a contract to move mid-January!


PRAYERS REQUESTED
Please continue to pray for our hurting teammate. She has a kidney stone that seems to be stuck and is causing her a lot of pain. She’s spent a week on the big island and will travel to mainland Africa tomorrow. Pray for smooth travels tomorrow and that her pain would lessen, and ultimately for full healing! We have two teammates heading to mainland Africa and one teammate coming back to the islands in a week. Pray for our team in this strange time. One of our good friends is coming up on his first wedding anniversary and is already encountering significant marital problems. He is coming to Tom for advice— pray that he would listen to good advice and to the greater truths he needs to accept in order to see real change in his life and marriage. We’re still hoping to see a new island sister connect with another island sister, pray that the connection will happen this week. Ma Imani (who lives on the big island now) had a dream that she went to a village there and shared good news- pray with her as she considers going to this village in response to her dream. Pray for another sister on the small island who was inspired by a dream to share with her extended family— she hoping to have them all over later this month. Pray for more dreams to inspire boldness and sharing from our island brothers and sisters, and us too!