The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations

The moon shone bright in the dark desert sky as I scurried across campus to maternity. The nurse had called me for a lady at term with abdominal pain. The nurse could not hear the fetal heart sounds. Our handheld fetal Doppler’s have all been broken for the last two months. So the nurses use the antiquated metal fetascope and claim they can hear the fetal heart from time to time. I brought the portable ultrasound machine to the lady’s bedside. She had a scar on her belly they told me was from a c section her last pregnancy performed for an unknown reason. She had had no prenatal care this time around. I placed the probe on her belly and searched. I searched and searched, and I simply could not find this baby. Her belly was large but upon both feel and ultrasound I just could not find that baby. I saw a fleshy mass in her lower abdomen and bowel in her upper abdomen.  Her belly was distended, tender on palpation, and without a smooth normal gravid uterus feel nor the knobby body p

That afternoon, the sheep met all together in the garden of the farm. One of the rams had told Retriever about the meeting earlier in the day, but she had misunderstood and thought they were inviting her to the meeting. When she arrived at the meeting, however, she was greeted by angry and uninviting faces. One of the rams told her and Labrador that if they stayed at the meeting, she would have to answer to them and be responsible for everything that happened. Retriever didn’t really like meetings anyways, especially when conducted in the language of the sheep, so they left. She knew she would find out the purpose of the meeting soon enough. That soon enough came just a few days later when another unsigned letter arrived on her desk. This letter stated that they were sure that Chow was continuing to work from home. Therefore she had until the next day to vacate the town with “her accomplice,” the Beagle who lived in her house and also helped on the farm. If Chow was not gone

Once upon a time, in a land far away The Shepherd created a working-sheep farm to help the sheep of the arctic tundra. This farm, called Banana, is in a desolate land, a land where no one wants to go and few are brave enough to go. The winds blow bitter and cold throughout much of the year, and in season, the snow comes thick and heavy. The road to this farm is long and difficult to traverse, full of holes at baseline and heavily-peppered with snow drifts waiting to entrap vehicles on their way during the time of the snow. In such a harsh environment, the sheep of this land are hardy and strong. Suffering is no stranger to them. The diseases from the bitter cold and snow are rampant. To begin to alleviate some of this suffering, the sheep farm was created.  The Shepherd calls dogs to help run the sheep farm. Some have specialized skills, most have willing hearts, and all have come as a result of The Shepherd’s call. The dogs come from far and wide, lands of warmth and mountai

Hands In this culture, shaking hands is a key interaction between people. I was even accused of yelling at one of the other missionaries because I did not shake his hand. I didn’t actually yell at him, I just didn’t shake his hand and apparently that can be seen as yelling? So I shake hands, a lot of hands - hands swarming with innumerable parasites, viruses and bacteria. If I think too much about it I shiver, but I think in Jesus’ life He shook hands all the time, or whatever the equivalent of shaking hands was in that culture. Some hands I must shake quickly. I was in the salle de accouchement for another lady, à placental abruption, when the maternity nurse called my attention to her. “Les pieds sont dans la vagin.” I turned my attention to her and confirmed that indeed, there were baby feet in her vagina. She had borne 5 children before this and her labor had progressed so rapidly that she had just arrived to the maternity ward moments before me.  So I rapidly shook h

She wasn’t sure of her gestational age, as most pregnant women in Chad, since so few get first trimester ultrasounds here, or any ultrasound for that matter. She knew she was big for the 7 months she thought she might be, though. Sure enough, her 31 week ultrasound showed she did not have just one baby in her belly… she had three. We live in a world where we know a lot of things ahead of time. We often know when it will rain or when it will snow. We know what afternoon the UPS man should deliver our package. We can know the gender of our baby sooner than ever before. But here, in the developing world, the unexpected has a bit stronger presence in our lives. During maternity rounds, I found her in the labor room lying in bed leaking amniotic fluid and with only infrequent contractions. So we started her on oxytocin, a pain in the bum because we don’t have pumps and so counting the seconds in between drops and writing down each time a woman contracts is how we largely determine

Some silence is good, like a night without a pounding at the door by the maternity nurse announcing a lady in labor in distress. Or the silence of a young man now calmed down with pain meds and suturing after being bitten by a horse or gored by a bull. But some silence is bad, like a floppy blue baby delivered after an excessively prolonged labor. Or the silence of the generator after the diesel delivery man decided to not bring us a refill. I have been somewhat silent for the first two months of my service here at Bere Adventist Hospital in Chad, central Africa. The silence is not for lack of material to write about, but more because of soul fatigue. The frequent unnecessary deaths burden my heart. My mind is often overwhelmed with trying to communicate in French and figuring out what to do for patients without many diagnostics or options for treatment. I often feel like there is so little I can do for patients here. We can try to cut something out that doesn’t belong and try era