Our toughest day yet!

Let me give you a little update on the Due Unto team.  We spent Monday sorting, packing and ordering our supplies for a 4 day rural health care trip to Mubende.  We also got our van (FINALLY) off of the lot.  She is a beaut!  We’d like you to help us name it.  Our van is a 1994 Toyota that has been reconditioned and we are the first owners to bring it on to Ugandan roads.  It had lived previously in Japan.  It is a diesel and smokes a little going up hills!!  When we get back to Kampala, next week, we will get the top rack, seats and bota bars.

Tuesday, we set off on a 3+ hour trip towards the west.  We are spending 4 nights in Mubende and working medical clinics in different directions from here.  Our hotel……well, it makes us appreciate our apartment in Kampala.  Last night, the power went off, right after we arrived, and came back on at 5:00am this morning.  After breakfast, we set off to Kachungwa to run a medical clinic.  There is not a medical facility close to this village.  The last time that Africa Renewal Ministries operated a clinic in this community, they took 14 doctors and 20 nurses and saw 700+ people in one day.  We had some worries as we thought that after it was announced that a medical team was coming, that they would anticipate the same big team, and we did not have near that many.  When we finally bumped our way across the dirt roads to reach Kachungwa, there was a line of people waiting on us, as expected. 

 I was not aware of it, until lunch, but the local team had identified a 3 year old girl that was quite ill.  They asked Dr Martin to see her while we started unloading medical supplies.  Dr Martin gave her a shot of malaria medicine and asked the father (mom was not present) to take her home and to return at 5:00pm for a recheck. 

 Well, the family just hung out around the clinic all day.  We did not realize this among all of the commotion.  So the child had not had  anything to eat or drink all day.  When they returned at 5:00, the child was rushed (in our new diesel van) to the regional hospital in Mubende.  Our driver, David, obtained info from the father that she had been sick for 2 weeks and had not gone for care because of lack of money and no way for transportation.  After a long day of clinic and seeing around 475 people, we headed  back to Mubende and our hotel.  We stopped by the regional hospital to check on the little girl, on our way home.

The “ward” in this regional hospital reminded me of barns that we showed pigs in when I was in high school.  Not the fancy ones like the one in Duncan, but the cruddy ones like in smaller towns.  There were probably 50 kids stacked in beds closer together than bunks at Falls Creek cabins.  All of these kids with IVs, and looking quite ill.  That shocked me.  Honestly, this is now my 6^th week (total) in Uganda in the past 13 months, and I was not ready for it.  This whole scene was not OK with me!  Some conversation went on as we walked into the ward.  I did not understand what was said and I was in shock.  It was then told to us that the child had died, shortly after David had dropped her off.  This hit our family really hard.  We have celebrated God’s healing of Eddy and Jonathan over the past week.  We were ready to celebrate God’s handiwork again, but we, instead, received a kick in the gut.  We began to wonder, what could we have done differently?  What do we need to add to our medical van?  Our kids have been around death, with our ranch.  But they have been blessed to not have a lot of death of close relatives.  This is very hard on all of us.  One of the hardest parts of my ER responsibilities is telling families that their loved ones have died.  I have received training in this and I have been told that I do this well.  I am not sure that is a complement and I know that I would almost rather do anything than to have this conversation with someone.  I have experience with sick, death and dying but most of us do not.  

Please keep this child’s family in your prayers.  They were likely given their dead child back and then had to find a way to get home (probably 20 miles away). 

 Please keep our family in your prayers too.  We are headed back to the same village tomorrow with a more keen sense of the physical and spiritual life and death battle that we are facing every day.

There is a celebration in the same area as Kachungwa.  A team, from Camby Christian Church in Oregon, is staying at our hotel and doing some work in the same village.  They were able to speak in a school yesterday and saw 153 young people accept Christ in one day!!!  Another reason that they are in the area is because they feel that God is calling them to build a medical clinic in Kachungwa.  What a day for them to see the need!


Thanks for your prayers!


Jay