Screening, Water Shortage, and Electricity Outage

One of the views from deck 7 looking into Freetown...a beautiful site!

So once again I am behind on my blogs. It has been a couple weeks since our second screening day. If you have not already heard, it went super well. Thanks so much for all the prayers. God even granted us cloud cover! We got to the site around 0500. A few friends were on the overnight security team. They made sure things did not get out of hand and even did a little pre screening. We finished seeing everyone around 2pm. I am sure there were not as many people there as were at the original screening. It makes me sad that some people that came from far away for the original one did not get seen. I continue to pray for God's faithfulness in the situation. I think part of the reason the line was not as long was because we had so many pre screeners...who went down the line to get the obvious ones out-ex. dental and eye who get seen at our clinics in town and the usual illnesses that we cannot do anything about. I did see some large tumors and many little ones with crooked legs. The last patient who barely made it in the gate is the cute little boy pictured with me below. We had packed up, but managed to find the appointment cards to get him one:) The surgery schedule is not quite filled but we got a good start on it. Not sure if we will need to have another screening later in the year or not. So you can join in praise to God with me for the safety of all those involved and the success of the day.

On another note...we are continuing to just have a rough start here. It is getting better, but every time we seem to be getting somewhere we have another set back. This past week the power went out unexpectedly for a little bit. There were four patients on different operating room tables. The generators did kick in as they should, but made us a bit nervous when the flickered a few times. All the patients were fine and surgery was able to continue. God is good. It is cool in times like these when we can stop what we are doing on the wards and pray together for the outcome:) One of the return anesthetists, Dr. Heinz, laughed later when I asked him how it went when the power died. He said, "I finally got to use the headlamp I keep around my neck instead of feeling silly for always carrying it around with me!" The simple things you take for granted:)

We are also now on a water shortage. Apparently a water main in town broke last week and we have become quite short on water. It has gotten so bad that in order to prevent us from having to cut the surgery schedule short we are not allowed showers and the laundry room is closed. This ship could become quite smelly soon:) So far everyone is handling it pretty well and getting creative with keeping clean..or lack there of;) I used water bags to rinse off after my hike this morning...seemed to work ok. I have to say a bunch of us chuckled when a group returned from the beach yesterday covered in red dirt from head to toe from the poda poda (bus taxi) ride....only to get onto the ship to read on the captain's board "no showers". Hopefully we will be back up to capacity in our water situation within the next few days so we can shower again! We have been using water trucks to bring in water in the meantime, but the water is dodgy so will take even longer to clean before it is usable for the ship. I hear it was a problem for the city also as hotels were having to pay large sums of money to haul in water. All this while they are trying to prepare for the big 50th Anniversary Celebration April 27.