Updates

I've been missing Karamoja this week - we have a Ugandan flag hanging up in our church sanctuary (along with ones from Mexico, Bangledesh, and of course America), and looking at it this last Sunday reminded me of all the people I know there. That's one of the hardest parts: knowing that you can't just drive over and say "hi" to friends there. I'm not an especially patient person, I'm realizing. I want instant gratification, and you can't have that when you're just wanting to be in Karamoja (or Billings)!

Normally I'm not very introspective or into the "bare your soul" sort of blog, but I've just been wanting to talk about Karamoja lately.

I love Karamoja for many reasons, especially because of the church there, but it's not always a very nice place. Kris shared this in her last newsletter:

Along with the malaria we see anemia and dehydration. These two things in young children are a deadly combination, but put malaria in there also and they don't stand a chance. The malaria parasite kills the blood cells, causing the symptoms. Well when there is a count of 50 parasites per high power field, that means about 50% of the blood cells are affected. Anemia is present, weakness, nausea and vomiting and dehydration. When you are only a month or two old it can be a very tough battle, often one that can't be won.

It's true. Last year Martha and I were in the village for a Bible study, and ended up going to visit a girl who had a sick baby. I've never seen anything like it - I'm pretty medically ignorant, but I took one look at the baby and knew it was dying. The mother, who was probably still in her teens, was really upset but didn't know what to do. She said she had no money, so she couldn't take her child to the clinic. (The clinic will always see people when it's a case like this.) Martha told her the baby had to go to the clinic, so this girl got ready immediately - I think she just needed someone to tell her what to do.

We all went down to the clinic together. The head nurse saw the baby right away, and gave the mother a razor blade to shave off a section of her baby's hair so he could insert an IV. I didn't watch the whole procedure (I'd like to think it was just low blood sugar that made me feel nauseous, but really I don't think I could handle seeing them stick a needle in a baby's head), but seeing how competent Segal (the nurse) was, and realzing how we have so many medicines today that can save lives, was amazing. I'd never been so thankful for the gift of medicine before, or aware of what it could do.

Sadly, medical care couldn't do much in this case, though - the baby had been sick for seven days already and we found out later that he died in the hospital at Tekora. It wasn't exactly the mother's fault for not bringing him to the clinic sooner; she honestly was just clueless how to go about getting care for her child. I don't want to argue that education will solve everyone's problems, but there really are a lot of cases were we can be praying that God will bless the spread of basic medical knowledge, good hygiene and nutrition, etc. along with the gospel!

Speaking of good nutrution...bugs in food bother me much less since I've been to Africa. After you've picked the weevils out of flour, pasta, and rice, a little bit of residue isn't too gross, really. You can just pick it out. ;-) But I still gag at white ants, so I'm not that much less squeamish after all...