Village

A few of us spent week 3 in a remote village while the others stayed at the school...

This is a village of the Serahule people. Pastor and others have been reaching out there for some years now. They welcome practical help so we held a clinic there for 5 days. The students gave out numbers while the nruse and I set up in an unfinished hospital room. No electricity and the only water source was a tap coming out of the ground around the corner. We dusted off a makeshift table for our meds and set up some chairs.

It was a little overwhelming for me at first, unlike any nursing I've ever done. And it was about as frustrating as it was comical that when someone's number was called, they'd "sneak" up to 3 people in with themselves plus 4-6 children; nearly each of them had a health issue. The men wouldn't sit in the waiting area with the women so we had to squeeze them in between numbers which occasionally caused a ruckus with families who'd been waiting long.

We would ask questions via a translator and then give the meds that matched the symptoms. If we didn't have what we needed, we'd write a "prescription." The pharmacy is another story.

There were a lot of malnourished kids and preventable diseases. We treated people for malaria, worms, high blood pressure and various infections including syphilis and gonorrhea. The last 2 are tricky because men can have up to 4 wives (and girlfriends on the side) but we can only treat the person who comes to us and women can't really talk to their husbands about such things so if he doesn't come, the problem continues.

Girls get married off as young as 13 so it's not uncommon to see a 15-year-old mother of 2 like the one who came to us for vitamins. Many people have rotting teeth but all we could give them are painkillers and antibiotics. The nearest dentist is probably in Banjul and they likely can't afford him anyway.

One man came with a big hole in his armpit 'cause he'd just been stabbed by a cow's horn. We didn't have the means to stitch him up so I cleaned and bandaged the wound as best as I could, gave him something for pain and we sent him on the 3-hour journey to a hospital.

The people were grafeul and generous, bringing us rice and peanut sauce with fish every day.

The following week,the nurse was back at the school so Bettina and I ran a little clinic at Pastor's compound. The needs didn't seem as severe here and we got to pray with the visitors, some even requested it before we offered.

We leave for Banjul on Thursday and fly out on Friday the 9th. The team heads back to Jamaica and I'll be on my way to Hungary.

God has really blessed us with giving us the opportunity to serve in The Gambia. We even found a place that has icecream in Basse! And I got to see baboons and a warthog run across the road, looked just like Pumba. Of course that had us singing almost the entire Lion King soundtrack the rest of the way home, afterall, this is probably where it was filmed.

Please pray for a safe journey and no breakdowns!