Choices

Choices

Choices

Today I drove a girl home from the hospital. Her family wanted her to
die at home. I drove the green truck very carefully, trying to avoid
as many of the bumps as possible. Every so often her family and the
staff who had come to help with the stretcher and try to provide
comfort had to get out so I could drive across a stick bridge or make
it up a steep hill. I did my best, but she still cried out in pain.

Seventeen-year old Asaitu didn't know that by choosing to become
intimately involved with her friend would lead to pregnancy. Trying to
salvage her reputation and get rid of her "problem," she decided to
try to self-abort with a stick. She had no clue about the
consequences of these decisions. How could she have predicted that
she would get an infection, that her left leg would become gangrenous
and have to be cut off at the groin, and that the infection would
spread to her other leg, sealing her fate?

Sleeping with her boyfriend and then having an abortion; obviously bad
decisions, but still, two mistakes and now she has to die? Why does
she have to bear the brunt of her choices, and so many other people
don't? I've sinned before, and I'm still alive; why her? These are
the thoughts that whirl in my mind as I grip the steering wheel
tightly, trying, by sheer determination to keep from jarring the
stretcher balanced on the bed of the truck.

Later, at her house, I tried to think of a scripture to read. All I
could think of was "Even though I walk through the valley of the
shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me." Scott
Barlow, the hospital matron, shared about the hope we have in Jesus,
and then prayed and annointed her. A few Ormos also gave little
sermonettes while the flies gathered and the sweat dripped from our
faces.

Most of the people who rode back to Gimbie with us weren't notably
sad. In fact, one boy asked me if I was all right. Life is
difficult, he said. Yes, I guess so.

So, I keep living, meeting my own challenges, making my own poor
choices. I don't often think about the consequences of my decisions.
I usually just do whatever seems best to me, given the information I
have.

So did she...

Recent Clinic Trip

Recent Clinic Trip
On Wednesday, Shaunda, Renée, and I, along with Priscilla, the new
doctor from Argentina and a dentist, druggist, and eyeglass prescriber
from the hospital, and Ashiber, the driver, left in the ambulance to
go visit the four clinics west of the hospital. We stopped at Inango,
Dalati, and Guliso clinics in quick succession. I helped Shaunda do
payroll briefly, but spent most of my time during the stops fixing
latrine doors. I rigged up a couple different several latches and
reattached a door that was falling off the frame. Then we drove three
hours past Guliso and got to Dembi Dollo, where we spent the night.
The next day we drove to Mugi and started seeing patients. Priscilla
worked really hard; in spite of the delay caused by having to
translate everything from either Amharic or Oromifa into English, and
then into Spanish, and then vice versa, she still saw about 90
patients in a day and a half. Tsegaye, the dentist, also stayed
pretty busy, but he wasn't nearly as popular as Yohannes, the
maintenance man turned eye glasses dispenser. Yohannes worked with
Dr. Hans, the German eye guy who was here for a while, and now he's
learned enough to dispense the spare glasses we have by himself.
Everybody crowded around him and the eyechart, and he pulled in a lot
of the money we made on the trip, selling bifocals for $5.50 and
regular glasses for $3.60. I helped Shaunda with inventory, and
Yohannes with the glasses, and measured the well behind the clinic so
we can find out if it's worthwhile to put in a pump to get running
water (it's not, unfortunately; there's only three feet of water in
the bottom of a fifty foot well.)
Thursday afternoon Shaunda and I went to talk with Merdassa, a SDA
nurse who used to work for the hospital, and who has now opened up his
own competing clinic. Last time Shaunda was there, he expressed a
desire to work for the hospital again. The benefits when
self-employed apparently don't measure up to to those we offer. We
were hoping that we could talk him into taking over the management of
the clinic in Mugi, since he's familiar with the place and seems
reasonably competent and trustworthy. However, when we went and
talked with him, he told us that he was sick and tired of Mugi, and
that he was leaving whether we hired him or not. So, we told him we'd
get back to him. I think he would be an asset to the hospital, but
hiring somebody here is a very momentuous decision, because it's very
nearly an irreversible decision.
Thursday night the girls slept in a tent behind the clinic and I slept
in the ambulance. Ivan's Christmas present finally arrived, so we
watched two episodes of Hogan's Heros before retiring :D Friday we
left around 2:30 and drove back to Dembi Dollo, where Shaunda and I
stopped off at the Zonal Health Office. We'd made an appointment when
we came through on Wednesday, but the guy told us no one was there.
Fortunately we persisted, and he finally went and found the assistant
director. We had a good visit with him, basically just explaining
that Mugi clinic was in pretty poor shape financially and that among
the options we were considering was closing the clinic. Initially he
was opposed to this, but when we showed him the financial statements
and other documents, he agreed that it didn't make much sense to
operate a clinic that was losing 3000 birr per month. We haven't
given up completely yet, but we've learned that doing things slowly,
and laying a paper trail is essential when working with anything
involved with the government.
We met up with everyone else and waited for a couple hours while
Ashebir got a two tires fixed on the ambulance. Fortunately we were
able to make good use of our spare time teaching Priscilla how to play
Seven Up, Seven Down, an essential part of the Gimbie experience ;)
By 6:15 the tires were finally fixed (or so we thought), and we
started on the remaining 4.5 hour drive back.
At 10:30, as we were just getting to the paved road outside of Gimbie,
both front tires went flat. This stumped us at first, because we only
had one spare (and the steel belts were showing quite prominently).
But we ended up making do by putting the threadbare spare on one side
and switching the other flat with one of the good tires from the rear
duals. Finally, by 12:30 am, we were on our way again, just in time
to meet Mark Squires and Gadisa and Tinsaye, who had gallantly come to
rescue us. Pity they hadn't arrived in time to help with our
complicated sequence of raising and lowering the ambulance with a
jury-rigged jack handle!
Anyway, we all got back safely, the ambulance suffered no permanent
damage, three latrine doors are fixed, the government feels like
they're in the loop, and most importantly, there are now lots of
satisfied Mugians, with new glasses, fewer teeth, and hopefully, in
better health:)

Excelsior

Miracles In Gimbie

Miracles in Gimbie

Hey everybody!  Thank you for your prayers!  God has definitely been busy here lately.  The number of amazing events I've witnessed just in the past few weeks is astounding!  If you want some assurance that God is still in the miracle business, read on.

As you may know, we're working on building another building for the nursing school.  So, we needed gravel to mix with the concrete, and apparently the only way to get it was on the black market (diverting truckloads from the local road construction project.) That's what everybody else was doing.  But I wasn't too sure if that was a good idea.  So we decided to go directly to the Chinese contractors and ask if they would sell us the gravel.  That was an adventure.  A few days later, Henock (young Ethiopian accountant I work with) and Justin (SM from Walla Walla) and I drove out to where they were working on the road and tried to explain our situation to the Chinese foremen.  That seemed like it was going to be a dead end, until one guy made us understand that we would have to ask his boss at their camp 70k out of town, and wrote us an introduction letter to this mysterious Mr. Li.  A few days later Justin drove out to see Mr. Li.  He was apparently very friendly and willing to help us, except he had to have permission from the local government to use the gravel for anything other than the road construction project.  So the next day Justin and Yohannes (our well-connected HR director) went to see the mayor of Gimbie.  That was also a successful visit; the mayor agreed to tell the Chinese to give us the gravel, and what's more, he would also ask them to pave the driveway to the hospital!!

 

Another huge dilemma we've been dealing with recently is keeping the hospital stocked with medicine.  Patients frequently have to go into town to get the medicine the doctors prescribe because our pharmacy doesn't have it, which is not good.  We're going through drugs at a rapid clip, and as you can imagine, they're not cheap!  Well, Keresa, the hospital druggist (we don't have a pharmacist, which is a huge problem in itself—no pharmacist's license means we can't buy certain drugs, and we can't get discounts on others) was in Addis to purchase drugs and he needed money—about 50,000 ETB.  Which we didn't have.  I checked the cash balance and it was hovering at about 4,000.  AHI donated money a few months ago to pay for large credit pharmaceutical purchases the hospital had made, but there wasn't enough left from those funds to pay for these drugs.  Tadese, the head cashier hadn't deposited the patient receipts for about three days, but we usually make 6,000-10,000 per day, and there was no way that it would be even close to the 50,000 we needed.  But we asked Tadese to expedite his deposit anyway because it was our only chance.  We prayed frequently that morning as Tadese counted the money.  When he left to go to the bank, we asked anxiously how much he was going to deposit; 53,000 birr.  It was a miracle: there's no other explanation!  And then God worked another miracle to help us to wire the money to Keresa in Addis in time so he could pick it up before the bank closed.  Pretty amazing day!

 

So our cash balance was still basically at zero, because we had used the money to purchase drugs.  And payroll is coming up.  There were about 10 days between then and payroll, and even less working days.  Even my most optimistic calculations showed us missing payroll by a large amount.  But God wasn't going to let us down.  The hospital works closely with a group called Maternity Worldwide; basically they subsidize Labor and Delivery procedures through something called the Safe Birth Fund.  Well, we decided to calculate how much money the hospital was going to receive from the SBF for the month.  Usually we get something like 30,000-40,000 birr per month—no small sum, but not nearly enough for us to meet payroll.  You can probably guess what happened; when we totaled everything up, the SBF subsidy was over 80,000.  The biggest one-month total yet.  Incredible! 

 

(FYI, we met payroll today!)

 

In addition to all the financial excitement, there have been lots of other crazy happenings.  For example, the water situation; the water is always off and on, but lately it's been off more than it's been on.  As you can imagine, it is pretty hard to try to operate a hospital without water.  Things came to a head one day last week when Tsegaye, head of the OR informed Scott Barlow, the Matron, that he didn't have any water to sterilize instruments, they'd used all of their clean sets, and therefore he couldn't do any surgeries.  This presented a pretty serious problem, because in the event of an emergency situation, we couldn't operate.  Fortunately Mark Squires and Mamo, the plumber, had succeeded in hooking up the new water tank (remember the miracle of the water tank?:)  and it was about half full of water.  However, we couldn't use this water for the autoclave because it wasn't connected to that tank; it was connected to our tanks up on top of the hospital.  So somehow we had get water into the tanks up on top of the hospital.  Mamo was working on a solution to use an old pump to pump water from the tank out front up to the tanks, but it wasn't really working out.  Then Paul came up with the idea of forming a bucket brigade!  It wouldn't fix the problem, but it might be enough of a temporary solution to provide time to come up with something better.  So Paul and I ran around organizing the bucket brigade, drafting the voluntaries from their various jobs around the compound and gathering buckets from anywhere we could find them.  In the midst of this, Belinda, the Danish midwife, came in looking for someone to give blood for an emergency case.  Most of the volunteers had given recently, but I learned that Mark Squires, our new COO hadn't, and he had the right type of blood, so I found him and sent him down to give blood.  In the meantime, we got the buckets moving.  Three people were working filling them at the tank and handing them down about six feet to ground level, then others carried them into the lobby, up the stairs to the second floor, down the hall, and then up a ladder where two more people lifted them up and poured whatever water remained into the tanks.  It was quite an operation!  And it was also a lot of work.  All of us were pretty tuckered after about an hour and a half of this.  Fortunately by then, Mamo had been able to hook up a direct line from the tank to the OR.  But the autoclave ran for about 45 minutes thanks to the bucket brigade:)

 

That wasn't the end of our water troubles however.  Two days later, this past Friday, I found out that again we didn't have water.  Only this time we were completely out.  None of our tanks had any water.  Since Paul and Mark were both gone to Addis, I was kind of responsible to think of something. (Well, I wasn't, God was in charge, but you understand.:)  Henock thought it would be a good idea to contact the Chinese and ask if we could use one of their pumper trucks.  I also thought we should ask the mayor about what was going on (since he's good friends with Justin now, thanks to the gravel deal:) so Henock and Justin call to see about that. In case that didn't work, I figured it would be a good idea to have a backup plan, so I rounded up some of the voluntaries and some 55-gallon drums and sent them with Tinsaye in our little green truck to the river to get at least a little bit of water.  Justin got in touch with the mayor, and he told us that the water company generator was damaged, and nobody had any water.  So we decided to go talk to the Chinese.  But Tinsaye was taking the truck, and our Landcruiser was gone to Addis.  (It would really be helpful to have another vehicle around here…which is why we're hoping to buy one and get it shipped somewhere and drive it here:)  So we decided to drive the ambulance!  But we promptly figured out that the battery was dead.  So much for that idea.  Henock and Justin headed out to find the Chinese on foot, and I decided somebody should stay around the hospital in case anything else happened.  And of course it did.  First I came back to find Mulisa, the Administrative Assistant hiding in the back room from some irate lady who was yelling about something.  I finally figured out that she was an employee of the hospital who was mad that Mulisa told her she couldn't get a medical allowance from the hospital for her niece.  I solved that problem temporarily and got her to go away only to be confronted with another.  The day before, Mamo stopped the water company from shutting off our water (because apparently we were five months behind on paying our bill,) and I had sent him to pay 4,000 birr on our bill. Now he had returned with a notice that they were going to shut off the water if we didn't pay an additional 9,000 birr. So I decided to go talk with them.  About that time the green truck came back in with the guys and full barrels of water.  They started siphoning the water into our main tank and I was about to leave when Henock and Justin came driving down the driveway in the cab of a big tanker truck!  They'd found the Chinese and gotten permission to use one of their tanker trucks!!  Henock had also convinced another one of the truck drivers to bring us a truckload of water.  Mulisa and I finally got to the water company office, where I found out that they wouldn't even give me our overdue bills—apparently they give you your bill after you pay it!?  But they did agree to up to town and make copies and give them to me, and they promised not to turn off the water until Monday at least.  As I was walking back to the hospital, the tanker truck drove by with about half of our voluntaries riding on top on their way to the river!  By the time the tankers left we had almost a full tank of water, and the water had come back on so our other tanks were starting to fill as well:)

Excelsior!

Changing Habits

Changing Habits

I just finished Desire of Ages! Now I'm 3/5s of the way through the
Conflict of the Ages series. I'm going kind of backwards; I started
with the Great Controversy in 2005, then read Acts of the Apostles in
06-07. Now I'm going on to Prophets and Kings, but I think I'm also
going to read GC again.

I think there are two factors that are contributing to my increased
pace and interest in this series; I have more time for discretionary
reading (i.e. not assigned reading), and there aren't a lot of "more
interesting" options, like there would be at home. I've read tons of
exciting literature in my life, and it's been a challenge to get
interested in spiritual things. I've read a lot of quality stuff as
well, but usually because I "knew it was good for me," similar to the
way some people eat salad. But if you persist with salad-eating long
enough, and especially if other, unhealthy alternatives are removed,
it's very possible to develop a taste for the stuff. And that's what
God is doing for me.

You know, as I think about it, this same process is evident in every
part of my life. God is working with me to purify and elevate my
tastes and desires. For instance, last night, we watched a very
funny, mostly quality film called The Gods Must Be Crazy II. It was
produced quite a while ago, and so has very few questionable elements
in it. But still, there were a few moments when I thought, "why did
they have to put that in," and I came away from the evening with a
slightly bitter taste in my mouth. Yes, it was 99% good, very funny,
and it even had lots of moral lessons; in fact, it was more wholesome
than a great majority of other things I've watched, but I still felt
kind of disappointed afterwards. It was sweet in the mouth and bitter
in the stomach. I think I want to try to make the same committment
that David did; "I will set no unclean thing before my eyes."

Given the times we're living in, I think it is especially important to
commit to God 100%, in everything we do, or read, or listen to, or
watch.

What do you think? God has high standards; should ours be high as
well? Has He really called us to holiness?

Excelsior

What I've Been Doing

What I've Been Doing

Hello everyone!
Yes, I'm still alive; things are just getting so busy around here that
it's getting harder and harder find time to blog and email. It's
interesting how God works things out. On Monday last week, I was kind
of depressed, because I felt like I wasn't really doing anything
important. I was trying to find things to keep myself occupied. I'm
used to being busy, independent, and productive, and it was a new
experience to have to depend on other people, to try to find things to
do, and feel like you're not really making a difference. But I talked
with God about it, and came to the realization that if I can best
serve Him by doing little odd jobs in the accounting department here,
then I'll work hard to do my best at that. That very afternoon things
picked up, and now I'm absolutely swamped, and loving it! For
example, here is a sample of some of the things I did last week.

Took minutes for Administrative committee meeting. Hired some
blockmakers to teach the volunteers how to start cranking out cement
blocks. Drew up new organizational chart for the hospital. Went to
town with Henock and purchased mattresses for the incoming volunteers
and lots of flour for the Kitchen. Went to the bank with Mulisa and
wired money to Ashebir. Wrote a check for petty cash (first time by
myself) and worked on posting some misc. cash payments. Drafted work
statements for Personnel Director regarding a nurse formerly employed
by the Hospital who is seeking employment in Australia. Wrote a blog
for the hospital. Fixed some accounts in Peachtree. Paid
blockmakers. Tried to come up with volunteer schedule. Wrote up OPD
Doctor report form for Yohannes. Wrote up volunteer questionnaire and
internet use schedule. Participated in orientation for Barlows. Got
them started on clearing out storeroom. Negotiate with their
cooks—one doesn't like the other, they don't know if they can handle
the work load. Drafted letter to gov't. concerning closure of Dongoro
clinic. Started tabulating results of volunteer questionnaire. Met
with some guys who offered to lift our water tank onto the
platform—today! Got gardeners to come up; one guy climbed the tree
overhanging the platform and chopped off a couple of branches so the
crane can get in. Helped chop some limbs down. Drafted letter to OHB
regarding their annual grant to the hospital—asking them to give us
the money allocated to us. Crane came, so I went out and helped with
that. Paid them 2,000 birr, plus 50 for the broker. That was kind of
an interesting deal because the crane operators used a crane owned by
the Chinese road construction crew, without telling them. It was sort
of a side job. Coordinated Barlows activities for Thursday and
Friday. Did a lot of computer troubleshooting. Started exploring
process necessary for filing quarterly OHB report. Found a bunch of
dept. report forms that apparently aren't being used (need to get
those into use so we can get data from the depts. about numbers of
patients seen, cases, etc. Began posting latest construction expenses.
Talked with Gadisa—apparently the hospital is out of propane, so he
wanted the okay to send our tanks to Addis to be refilled. Went back
to the house and had vespers with all the faranjis. I'm beginning to
think a significant part of my job from here on out is going to be
volunteer coordinator. Oh, and Paul came up with another title for me
as well; projects director. So those go along with accountant,
administrative assistant, and co-business manager. I am sure not
having problems finding things to do now!

God was just waiting for me to stop trying to make things happen on my
own, and let Him work them out in His time.

In a different vein; have you been following the news lately? Could
this be It? Definitely motivation for a closer study of prophecy; at
least it has been for us here.

Excelsior!