Clinic Update #2

The clinics are over and the team left for Beaumont, TX (via Kenya) this morning. It was really great having them here all week. I know Carrie and Shannon appreciated the English conversations and "normal" friendships even more than I did.

The last three clinic days were as successful as the first two, and we averaged around 300 patients per day. We implemented a new crowd control strategy that was new to the Toposa (to put it lightly). 99.9% of Toposa have never had to wait their turn in line and instead operate on the "let's all crowd around and see who can push their way to the front next" method. This was not only stressful to the group of Americans used to at least a few inches of personal space but it was also simply hard for the doctors to hear their patients with a million people standing there and talking. Our solution to this was to rope off an area around the trucks so that those who were waiting would be 20 or 30 feet away from those who were being treated. Of course the rope itself wasn't enough to keep them from ducking under it or keep them in any sort of order so two/three of us had to be the enforcers. The Toposa weren't thrilled with this new concept of following rules but we made it work with some creative methods. At one point I may have beat a guy with a stick but he hadn't understood my verbal explanation of why he couldn't just waltz underneath the rope ahead of all the women with sick babies. So we can cross "beat someone with a stick" off of my bucket list...

I'm also in the middle of perfecting the art of driving a land cruiser through the mud. It's rained pretty much every day so none of the dirt paths roads have had a chance to dry out. This makes for an interesting driving experience.

Thank you for praying for us this week! We had a five loaves and two fishes experience with the medicines that can only be explained by the Holy Spirit. Our original order of medicine from Nairobi didn't even get processed so we were scrambling at the last minute to find any medicine at all! The amount that we started with should not have lasted the entire week with the amount of people that we were seeing. Thank you Jesus for multiplying our medicine so that we had enough!