My Day

There is no "typical day" here. I can't even think about what I usually do, because there is no usual for me yet. But I can write about today, and you can hopefully appreciate South Sudan a little bit more.

6:30am: Alyssa and I go for a walk hike through the mud. I've already been awake for almost an hour because of the birds that like to have a party as early in the morning as possible. Usually puts me in a bad mood and today was no exception. There are about 20 kids outside our gate when we leave. Exercise (aka walking somewhere with no reason) is an unexplainable concept to the Toposa, so we go through the same conversation every time.
-Where are you going?
-Uhhh, just over there. [hand motion toward the path]
-Why?
-Just to go.
-By your feet?
-Yes.
-[Laughter. We leave]
I decided during this walk that I needed to adjust my attitude because being that hostile so early in the morning was not going to set me up for a good day. For some reason I had the song I Will Follow You by Chris Tomlin stuck in my head while we were walking. I liked the song before, but I think I'm enjoying it less now that the "where you go, I'll go" part is a little more drastic.

9:45am: I started making bread to have later this week. This rainy season is not stopping so I was trying to take advantage of a sunny day. Last time I made dough bricks bread it was a disaster, but this time I did a better job and the yeast actually made the bread rise.

Late morning: Emails and reading on my Kindle while waiting on the dough to rise. A ginormous rat made an appearance running through the kitchen somewhere in this time frame. I almost vomited. The thing was huge. I don't do rats.

12:15pm: Lunch. Last week we bought the world's largest head of cabbage and we have been eating cabbage every day since then...and I think we're finally halfway through it. Lunch was coleslaw, lentils, passion fruit and a homemade tortilla. Rustic. The bread baking endeavor was a success, whew.

1:30pm: Carrie, Alyssa and I leave for Naskal to pick up the translator so Alyssa can tell an AIDS story and a gospel story in another village. We drive around Naskal and can't find him. A guy working at the clinic ran up to the car asking if we could take him to get the clinic vehicle since he needed to take a severely anemic child to the hospital. Of course we get stuck in the mud while trying to drive this guy to wherever the clinic vehicle was. Stuck in the mud means knee deep Sudanese mud, tires completely stuck. We had a winch to pull ourselves out with so 20 minutes and two uprooted trees later, we were good to go. Perfect picture opportunity but no camera.

3pm: We give up on finding our translator so we drive back to Paringa, stopping by another village on the way back.

3:45pm: Alyssa and I dig a trench in our yard for our shower to drain into. It's approximately one million degrees outside and at this point I can't remember a time before I started sweating. Bucket baths have never seemed so appealing. But then I remembered that I really did appreciate having a shower, and was okay with helping dig the mud pit drainage system so that the water won't back up into the shower.

5:30: Dinner prep begins. A healthy mix of carrot, eggplant, onion, cabbage (more!), and tomatoes sauteed in the skillet, successfully negated by a family sized box of Easy Mac. Yum.

YOU KNOW YOU LIVE IN SOUTH SUDAN WHEN...you ask "so, did you hear the bomb go off this morning?" and it's not a weird question. The UN likes to detonate bombs outside of Kapoeta so we hear them go off on a regular basis. Totally normal dinner conversation, right?

Where I Live

My tukel is a one-room concrete hut. Alyssa has her own tukel (the one with the blue door behind mine) and there is another tukel that teams stay in when they come.

Outdoor bathroom. Shower is on the right, and long drop outhouse is around the corner on the left. The water in the shower is one temperature (cold) but it feels good 90% of the time since it's usually pretty warm outside and will only get hotter as we get into January and February!

Mosquito nets are a must! Since there is no air conditioning it can make the bed a little stuffy, but it's better than getting malaria. I thought about moving the other bunk bed into the guest tukel but then I decided that it would be good shelf space. My action packer makes a pretty nice footstool. Most of my stuff is still in Nairobi but it's coming to South Sudan next week. Hopefully my tukel will start to feel less like a concrete room and more like home once I have all of my things.

Alyssa and I share the kitchen. We have a solar powered fridge, and a gas stove and oven so we haven't had any problems with cooking our food. There's no "dining room" obviously, so we eat on the porch. Samson is our ferocious guard dog who decided to take a short break to be in the picture. Everything has to be cooked from scratch unless we plan months ahead of time and bring it from Nairobi or request that volunteer teams bring things for us. We've made bread twice (once successfully, once needed some major work!) and tortillas several times. When Carrie and I were in Kapoeta on Tuesday we saw some people selling some really nice eggplants so we took advantage of the opportunity and I brought five home. Alyssa and I got creative and made lasagna with two of them. We cut the eggplant into slices and used them in place of lasagna noodles. Delicious!

One of the chickens decided that our porch was the place she absolutely had to lay her eggs. This is the second day we've found one on our couch. Yuck.

Our solar panel makes a nice yard decoration. It's been acting up lately so if any of you have any experience with solar power/batteries let me know! It would be nice to have enough power to get through an entire evening. It was working fine but the past few days we've woken up with no power stored in the batteries. I waited until the sun had been out for several hours before I started a load of laundry in the washing machine but it didn't even make it halfway through the cycle before the battery was drained again. Now I have the washer paused and I'm letting the batteries juice back up. Hopefully it will make it through the rest of the cycle by the end of the afternoon.

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!

Clinic Update

Big time thanks to those who are praying for the clinics. Our first clinic was on Sunday in the village of Nataragat. It went pretty well (we mostly saw a lot of malaria cases, and one that we think has TB) and our plan was to have a clinic every day this week. Yesterday it POURED rain for hours so we couldn't go anywhere! When there are no paved roads every heavy rain turns dirt paths into mud pits. We are supposedly at the end of rainy season but it's rained at least 3 times in the last week and a half so I'm not convinced.

After it finished raining and the sun had been out for an hour or two we took the team on a walk to the nearest village by our compound. I was not really in the mood to go but I decided to go anyway, only because it was my only opportunity to not be the newest person there. I would actually know some of what was going on and be able to explain it to the others. It turned out to be a really nice visit and the team got to see a Toposa village and some even tried grinding sorghum...harder than it looks, people!

Today's clinic was definitely more interesting than the one on Sunday. We were in the village closest to us and had lots of needy people. Needy as in, just want us to give them anything and everything no matter if they are sick or not. But the Toposa are a hard people to love, and that's a whole 'nother blog post (or 12 blog posts) for later.

Be glad I did not take pictures today!!
One of the babies that we saw today, maybe a year old, had a giant infection in his neck, kind of behind his ear. I don't know what had happened originally but this morning he had a giant infected pocket of nasty crap that needed to be drained out. We hadn't brought a scalpel blade with us so Carrie and I drove home "quickly" to get one. One the way back we drove past the local clinic and got waved down by the workers there because a lady had been brought there with really bad angiodema and her tongue was so swollen that she couldn't close her mouth or talk or swallow. So we put her in the truck and I slipped and slid down the mud pit back to our clinic and we gave her an antibiotic injection as soon as we get there. I'm not sure what happened to her after that because I went straight to the operating room plastic chair to hold the baby's head while one of the doctors prepped him for surgery. Any by surgery, I mean we laid his head in my lap, wiped the area with an alcohol swab and betadine, injected the area with lidocaine, and made an incision big enough for us to drain the pus and blood out into my (gloved) hand. We didn't have any bandage tape so we put some antibiotic ointment on the incision, wrapped a gauze strip around the baby's head and I secured it with neon green duct tape, the next best thing. Sorry, I know all of that was a gross description, but it was part of my day. Swollen tongue, surgery in my hands, duct taping a baby.

Tomorrow we are going to a different village so you can pray that we will have enough of the right medicines and that the local Toposa believers will use their time at the clinics wisely and be able to share stories from God's word. I have also been dealing with an eye infection, but I think it's about over. Thank you for praying for our team!

A Week

So I have been in South Sudan for just over a week now. 9 days to be exact. My main job right now is to just get used to everything, which is not simple!

Last Sunday there were two really good groups at church under the trees! Thank you to those who prayed about that. We went to Namamninyok (literally translated "there are no dogs" and good luck trying to pronounce it) in the morning and sang some songs about Jesus in Toposa, then listened to the parable of the sower from Luke on the proclaimer in the Turkana language (a sister language to Toposa). The Toposa are such a small, isolated tribe that there are no portions translated on the proclaimer yet so we listen to Bible stories in Turkana. Sunday night we had a similar gathering under the big tree down the road from where we live. We sang Jesus songs in Toposa, listened to John 3 on the proclaimer in Turkana and then Alyssa asked some questions to generate some discussion about the story. Overall there were about 50 people there that night.

In the mornings I was going to language lessons with Shannon and Carrie but that only lasted until Wednesday because it poured all morning on Thursday and no one gets out in the rain! I used the extra time that morning to make tortillas and read. The pace of life in Africa as a whole is much slower than in the US, and out here in South Sudan is slows down even more than that! The slow pace has been one more thing to get used to, although I'm currently grateful for the slowness because this new life is easier to handle when I have time to process everything. My team is awesome so I am thankful that I have such a great group of friends here to hang out with and immediate help/explanations when I need it!

We drove to Kapoeta this morning (about 8 kilometers away) to pick up a medical team from Beaumont, TX. These six people will be here all week to do clinics in nearby villages. This is the first time a medical team has come here so over this week please pray for each clinic! Our plan is to do one clinic per day from about 9am-3pm, which would be about 1am-7am CST. As you are going to bed each night you could pray for that next clinic! One specific thing you could pray for is accurate diagnosing and medicine dispensing. Malaria has been a big problem lately, so we are thinking that a lot of what we will be doing is malaria testing/treating.

And weird, not many Toposa seem to care that the Rangers are in the World Series...

Mata

I got to South Sudan on Thursday afternoon and have been thinking about how to narrow down all the information that would be too overwhelming for the first blog post!

Picture any stereotype you have in your mind about what the bush in Africa is like, and that's probably pretty close to what it's like out here! No paved roads for hours, cows in the road, lots of people wearing very little clothing (if any at all), and little groups of huts every now and then.

I live on a compound with the rest of the Toposa missions team: a family with two boys and my partner Alyssa. My tukel, or hut is a fairly large, round room made out of cinderblocks. We share an outdoor shower and a long-drop outhouse, and an outdoor kitchen.

This is my home, and even though it might not look that big, I have plenty of room for visitors! You know you're curious. The white shipping container in the background is where we homeschool the boys.

This nasty little rat had the nerve to die in the middle of my tukel floor on the first night! It didn't even give me a day to settle in before it invaded my space! I have two new younger "brothers" and Davis did his brotherly duty by disposing of the rat for me.

Mata (the title of this post) is the Toposa greeting and it's one of the only words I know how to use! Add to that good, very good, no, and kitchen...and I'm about done! Natabo is the Toposa kitchen, and also my new Toposa name.

Thank you so much for praying for me! As you are reading this, you can pray for encouragement for me while everything is so new. Everything is different. Sometimes the different things are fun to figure out and sometimes they aren't! If you aren't on my email update list and would like to be, send me an email at mindymoser [at] gmail [dot] com and I will add you to it. Feel free to share my blog address or email address with anyone that you know would be interested in praying for me and the Toposa people!

Preparations are underway!

So far so good in Nairobi! I really like Nairobi more than I thought I would. It’s very British and very African at the same time so it’s a fun mix. I'm staying at a guest house until Thursday, then fly to South Sudan.

The rest of this is about food. So Becky, I dedicate this post to you! J

Nairobi has a KFC now, AND a Yogurt Planet. WIN! I met up with Ester, Emily and their crew for yogurt for lunch and had KFC for dinner tonight. I would never think KFC is that good in the US but I’m thinking that by the time I come back from months in Sudan I’ll think it’s the best food ever!

I’ve gotten a lot of shopping done in preparation for Sudan. The other day I got out some of the food I’d brought from the US and combined it with some of the food I got here, just to see what I had. A lot of food is what I have!

All the fresh stuff had to be peeled, chopped, sliced, parboiled, cooled, bagged, and frozen before it goes into the cooler on the plane. Now my freezer looks like this:

Trying to plan in advance like this is super challenging so hopefully I’ll have a better idea of what to get when we come out again in January. Right now I have pineapple, butternut squash, Brussels sprouts, zucchini, broccoli, cauliflower, red and green bell pepper and probably something else I forgot. Plus 6 double chicken breasts and 1 kg of beef are underneath all the produce.

One thing I’ve noticed with all the food shopping that I’ve done is that all the nutrition labels have kilojoules listed instead of kilocalories like in the US.  I’m currently snacking on these really good ginger cookies that were meant for Sudan but honestly, I’m probably going to finish the whole package tonight (since I haven’t bothered to convert to calories to know how much I’m eating) so I’ll have to just get more tomorrow. Darn...