Thanksgiving week highlights

Happy belated Thanksgiving! We are so thankful for you all. Here are some highlights from our Thanksgiving week:

We got two packages in the mail!! What a treat! For this pic, I asked everyone to hold their favorite item :-). For the record, Gid chose mac and cheese, Levi - gummy bears, Silas - a pickup truck for his birthday, Josiah - Lego magazine, and Mark - choco chips.

Another, umm, highlight (for the boys at least) was slaughtering our turkey. Here are some pics of the event. I've left out the most graphic ones, but they're still kind of gross. Really makes me appreciate Butterball!

De-feathering

I'll stop there. You can thank me later :-). Obviously, after some more work, we were able to enjoy eating Mr. Turkey the next day. Even more, we enjoyed great fellowship with new friends. 

This is a terrible pic with all the glowing eyes. I didn't take as many pics as I should have, so this is all I've got :-).

Tomorrow, we are heading to a Ugandan wedding, so I'm sure there will be more pics to come in the near future.

More November Pics

Here are some more pics from the last couple weeks:

We've started hosting football (aka soccer) games at our house on Saturday nights, and have been drawing a pretty good crowd. The only thing that scares me is about half of the group wears cleats and the other half is bare foot :-//.

Donah and Maureen - our two brave lady players this past week

Spectators!

Another favorite activity at our house...jumping on the trampoline. Totally worth the space it took up in the container!

On Monday, to celebrate Mark's completion of his time at the hospital, we took a trip to Jinja (about 2 hours away). We enjoyed some fun times, including:

Milkshakes!!! (When it comes to milkshakes, absence really does make the heart grow fonder :-).

We also played tourists and took a boat to see the source of the Nile. Pretty cool

This is the place where Lake Victoria joins up with the Nile river...our kids were ready to jump in, but we had to restrain them...not the cleanest water for swimming.

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Some November Pics

This is Christine here, so no pics of people's guts coming your way today. Sorry. Here are some shots from November.

Digging a hole in the mud, filling it with water, and putting toys in it...doesn't get much better than that!

Watercolors with Levi

What are these, you ask? White ants - caught by Gideon, of course. Cooked in the top pic and uncooked in the bottom. Did he eat them? Sure did.

Here, our friend Donah is pointing out that he should have taken off the wings first :-).

Celebrating the birthday of a particularly nice boy who turned four this month...

We have some newly hatched chicks scampering around after their mother in our yard these days. I couldn't resist throwing in a shot of them in all their cuteness.

Final weeks at the hospital

My last two weeks at Mbale Regional were in the Pediatric Acute Care Ward and the Theatre (Operating Room - for those from the other side of the pond)

                                     ***** Warning- may be a bit gory for some ******

These last two weeks ended well. With my background being in pediatric critical care I enjoyed working in the Peds Acute Ward. They have strong leadership in the unit that shows in the way they approach and organize patient management. Just outside the ward on the veranda is a desk where two of the providers sit. They gather a quick history and physical exam and determine the patient's treatment. If they are really ill they slide into the 4-6 bed high acuity side. If not so ill the get in line for an IV placement. After their IV is placed they get in line for their first dose of antibiotics or any other treatment that is indicated. From there they find a bed and continue with their treatments.

It was nice to see the organization and the benefits of it. As I mentioned earlier the unit has a strong leadership base as well. The nursing staff is great and the physicians are involved in a fair bit of research. One past multicenter study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. A current study is assessing the effectiveness of fluid resuscitation in children, and for this study the use of bedside ultrasound is used to assess their cardiac function. (For those who know me I was pretty excited about that!)

My following week was in the Theatre. There was a surgical team from western Uganda that was doing a cleft lip/ palate camp for 18 children. I was able to help out in the OR and get a feel for the anesthetic practices in Uganda.

One of the cleft lip cases. 

When the 3 day camp was complete I spent the rest of the time just hanging out in the OR seeing other cases. Thursday started out with an intestinal obstruction- a hernia with about 1 meter of necrotic bowel. The patient was quite ill and hypotensive throughout the case but pulled through after some work. 

Couldn't resist adding in the picture. 

I was able to have some good talks with the folks there. Resources are limited but they make do with what they have. For instance... there was a 1 month old that needed and exploratory laparotomy. Cutting into his abdomen, pulling out his intestines to look for any damaged spots and placing them all back inside his body.  This is a pretty big case for a small kid. They were out of oxygen so had to do the case with the child spontaneously breathing under ketamine with face mask oxygen from an O2 concentrator. The only monitoring that is available is a hand held pulse oximeter that shows you oxygen saturations and intermittent heart rate. (And I would complain when I could not see the ETCO2 waveform) If the child stopped breathing during the case they would just manually bag him up for a bit. I talked with the anesthetist  about this and the final conclusion was that you have to do the best work you can with what is at hand or else the child would have died in 12 hours if you never went forward with the case. 

I was glad that the last two weeks went well. I was thankful to the Lord for this as it was good to leave on a positive note. I was also thankful for the good relationships that I was able to start there. I plan to keep in the loop with how things are going there at MRRH. 

Random Pics from October (Part 2)

Here I am back again with some more pics from October...

Here are our dogs, Heidi and Justice, lounging in the shade. They are super sweet pups.

Having fun, playing pretend outside. Gideon was also involved but was too embarrassed to be photographed :-).

Last weekend, we had a team retreat in Karamoja, which is about a four hour drive north of us. The other half of our team lives and works there. We enjoyed a beautiful (but rather bumpy ride) up.

The big boys even enjoyed a brief ride on the roof...

Until we had to cross through some nasty potholes, at which point they (thankfully) got down.

Part 3 coming soon!

Random Pics from October (Part 1)

I just downloaded a bunch of pics from our camera, and I should probably try to organize them into separate blog posts, but this is more my speed right now! So here's some random pics from this month, with explanations, if necessary...

One Sunday per month, the Mbale church shares a meal together after morning worship. Normally, the dishes get washed at the home of the other missionary family (the Tuiningas), but this month, they didn't have water, so the dishes came to our house.

And were washed by these sweet girls, who even washed my dishes for me after they had washed all the ones from church :-).

This is our turkey that we are supposed to eat for Thanksgiving. Here's hoping we are actually able to "do the deed" when the time comes. We were told we had to buy him early to avoid holiday prices! A little different from the Butterball I purchased last year at Food Lion!

Here he is showing off :-)

Here's our pet bunny, Oreo, in a little "home" Josiah made for her.

A pic from our last visit to a village church. The lady next to me is wearing a gomesi, a traditional Ugandan dress. It is designed to make the wearer look fat, because fat is beautiful :-).

After the service, we were invited to the Pastor's house for lunch. As you can see, we drew an audience.

Here is the delicious meal they served us...all cooked on a fire.

Well, I still have a lot more pics to go, but I'm told that blog posts shouldn't get too long or people won't read them, so I'll save the rest for later this week!

Thoughts on Homesickness and Mount Wanale Hike

Last week I was really struggling with homesickness. I knew that the Lord had called us here, but I found myself missing family, friends, fall, and basically everything familiar :-). I asked for prayer - that the Lord would use those feelings of homesickness to draw me closer to Him, and He has been faithful.

At the Mbale church, Pastor Charles Magala has begun preaching through the book of 1 Peter, so I thought I'd spend some time reading and studying it. The apostle Peter addresses the letter to "refugees of the Dispersion". One of the commentaries I was reading pointed out that many of Peter's intended audience were probably living in their hometown, yet he addresses them as refugees. Why? Because as Christians, we are all refugees, strangers, pilgrims.

In the words of a song I enjoyed as a child...

"This world is not my home I'm just a passing through
If heaven's not my home then Lord what will I do
The angels beckon me from heaven's open door
And I just don't feel at home in this world anymore"

And it hit me - this homesickness is really a blessing. In a spiritual sense, we are all away from home. I just have the gift of really feeling it right now. So whenever I feel that ache for home deep in the pit of my stomach, I have been trying to remember to give thanks. What I'm really aching for can't be found here on earth :-).

And on a lighter note, yesterday, we hiked up Mt. Wanale with a group of about 20 friends. It was Ugandan Independence Day, so school was closed and many people had the day off. Mt. Wanale is one of the foothills of Mount Elgon, an extinct volcano that sits on the border between Uganda and Kenya. We enjoy a beautiful view of Mt. Wanale from our yard and we drove to the top once, but the boys have been itching to hike to the top. Sadly, Mark had to work at the hospital so he couldn't join us, but here are some pics of the rest of us having fun/feeling terrified :-). (Thanks to Dianna Tuininga for many of these pics!)

The kids like to play in the water at the top

View from the top...complete with random dog

Someone in our group bought a jack fruit from the locals who even cut it up for us.

Jack fruit tastes like super sweet Juicy fruit gum and the texture resembles gum too - chewy, but not juicy. I don't particularly care for it, but some others I know do...

Here's our group at the top, minus Dianna, who graciously took the pic :-).


One of the seminary students from Knox Theological College joined us. I found his shirt to be rather appropriate

This was the scariest part of the hike for me...a "stick" ladder.

It is always rather humbling to see the Ugandan women calmly carrying huge loads on their heads, when you are struggling just to walk!

Well, needless to say, we made it home safely! Today I'm sore in places I didn't know I had, but thankful for a sweet time enjoying the Lord's beautiful creation.