She knocks on my door to bring me a letter and we get down to chatting- as we usually do. "I was just thinking about it" she says in the course of the chat, "why don't we each take a morning this week- Wednesday or Friday and have a bit of a lie in, have a chance to do our reading and eat breakfast leisurely and come up in time for tea break. You see its gonna be busy over the next few weeks." And suddenly the room brightens, my head still feels like jello and the thought of getting any sort of food from the kitchen only 15 feet away still exhausts me, but that's ok now, it doesn't seem to matter as much. Not that I wouldn't have risen tomorrow and (after the initial grumblings of 'why does morning come so early?') thanked my Father for yet another day to live and enjoy life and to serve Him and love the people around me.

Our God delights to bless us- He daily loads us with blessings as some translations record this verse. Others say: "He daily bears our burdens." Either way, what beautiful, sustaining, steeling promises these are. Not only does He LOVE (thoroughly enjoy, to be passionate about) to LOAD (so heavy that we cannot measure the weight of it or carry it ourselves unless we unload it unto those around use) us with blessing (gifts); not only all that, BUT He also carries on Himself the burdens (the struggles, the sorrows, the temptations, the trials, the low points) that we face daily (each and every single day). Can I say- we who know Him as Saviour and Master and Father, we are truly the most blessed- oh to live with this knowledge as daily and as certainly as He carries our burdens!




The world changed last Thursday night- but maybe you didn't realize it. Maybe you could write under the heading 'the day the world changed' your own story and it would be a poignant story. My world changed Thursday night and so did the world of hundreds of people. It started off with a bang! Supper (tea) at the house of the doctor. Not just supper- barbeque! Even hot dogs! It was like a far off memory brought to reality the first bite of that wonderful hot dog dripping with ketchup and mustard and covered with onions. Wow! And so great to spend time with the medical team and some of the other missionaries here in a social setting and not in a hospital or out reach environment.

Actually the story starts that morning with the patient who arrived in the middle of ward rounds who didn't get as thorough an assessment as she should have had, who fell through the cracks.


I left our new doctor off at the hospital after the bbq at the doctor's house to see two sick babies, one new born with twitches and one with malnutrition and a bad chest, before dropping fellow nurse, Alison, off at her house and then going home and collapsing into my bed. Thursday are theatre days- great fun, but long. And we had gone late that night. I was so glad to see my bed and end my day. But for a call 1 hour  later. "Christina, can you get Kayombo. We need to operate." I stumble out of my bed blearly wiping the sleep from my eyes- 2230- its not that late really right. A simple task, wrapping my chitengi around my waist over my pajama bottoms has become a struggle and a source of amused irritation. I manage then stumble out the door in the pitch dark and the icy cold (and it is COLD here at night now- this is the season of chishika cheneni- the big cold) and somehow crawl unto the bike to go out to a village about 5 minutes on the bike to pick Kayombo our scrub nurse at a random path that I still have troubles being sure of during the day- did I mention how dark it was that night???

Found him ok. Sorted a few other things out and were in theatre from 2330 until 0130. Through God's grace and kindness, we saved the life of a young girl who miscarried, and the lives of a second and third- a mom who had placenta previa and her unborn baby; a big healthy baby boy! During that time I floated between between Theatre and Maternity as one of our nurses helped another mom deliver two beautiful baby girls. It was a cold night and we couldn't get them to warm up quite quick enough.  Our nurse, who has little maternity experience and did an amazing job with the delivery! and I worked closely together to try and get these little ones to turn from grey to pink- hot water bottles and heavy warm blankets and body heat go a long way! The next morning they joined their mom in the main ward rosy pink and squalling loudly- like any decent baby should!

After we finished in OT we spent time again with our twitching baby, giving a dose of diazepam to settle him down and a course of antibiotics. And also sorted a new admission in with varices, a low hemoglobin and the very real risk of a huge bleed before morning.

All this was accomplished between 2130 and 0200. Five babies and three women whose lives were touched and preserved and changed. But all this was accomplished to the eerie cry of wailing women mourning for the one patient whose life ended at 2300 that Thursday night.

The next afternoon I gather with the people around the coffin of that lady- questioning over and over "Why didn't I pay more attention to her? Why didn't I realize how sick she was? Why didn't I fight harder for her when I saw her that morning? Why did it have to end like this?" And I don't know! The very real tears of the women I work with, of the men from some of the surrounding churches wrenches at my heart. Why did it end this way?! I am standing next to my friend and she comments "her mother is a very sweet Christian lady. I don't know about her, but I've heard she was also." It doesn't change things, but it does. She is still gone. Her mother is still left with neither of her two daughters and now three grandchildren to raise. I still wrestle with the questions "what could I have done? and what should I have done differently?" But the difference lies in where she is now. Not that she was a sweet Christian lady, not that she was like her mother, but that she knew Christ as her Saviour- that is, she knew herself to be guilty before a God who cannot tolerate anything less than sinless perfection and she had claimed the death of His Son and full payment, had claimed His Son as the only one who could make her reach that standard of sinless perfection. Yes, she has left us here. Left a hole in the community of people who surrounded her, but where she is now she rests with her Saviour away from the sick body she lived in. It doesn't change what happened and yet strangely, it does...

All these lives touched and changed. I wonder about these fives babies and three women- will they come to know Christ as Saviour? The One "who to know is life eternal". Will they be good and honest people? Or have we fought for their life only for them to turn out to be rascals and trouble makers? - not that it changes the fight in any way at all! Whose lives will they touch in the future and who will they be touched by? Will they become someone inspiring? Someone for people to look to as leaders in their community, in their country, in the world? I wonder about it.... the lives touched by the lady who died, touched not just in her life, but in her death also...

It seems all so random, maybe even senseless... why would God take that woman's life? Why would He spare the lives of the two referrals who were bleeding (the miscarriage and the section)? Why the five children? But He knows the plans for each one of us, they are for good and not for evil- He delights to bless us, to pour out blessings on not only His children, but everyone- they are plans to give us a future and a hope- even if it doesn't look quite how we expect it too.

I had a wee house guest last night. And that's likely a large part of the reason I am so tired today. A two year old boy weighing 7.4 kg (about 15lbs) an average 1 year old weighs in at about 10kg...

He was referred to us, as a tertiary care centre, for failure to thrive on a feeding program. Its our job to make it happen. But it hasn't been happening. Mom is giving up, she is losing interest in fighting for her baby whose body is swollen taut with severe malnutrition; there will be other babies afterall...

We took him home yesterday for some intensive one on one care (hard for our nurses who manage two busy wards each). Despite persistent attempts to feed him, he refused, shaking his tiny swollen head and pursing his lips shut, spitting out any food that was pushed between his lips in the hopes that the taste might encourage him to chew and swallow. We passed a tube through his nose into his stomach that night and fed him every two hours through the tube. There is nothing quite as sweet as falling asleep to the even sound of a wee sleeping child's breathing next to you.  Little Wana, looked much better this morning when I returned him to hospital; but he has a long way to go- malnourished and suffering from some neglect and now with malaria, we have to fight for him and for mom. Fight to show her that he is still a life worth saving- he matters because he is her child and because he was created by God, he was knit together in his mother's womb, because he is fearfully and wonderfully made.

He stayed in the house of Sister Sombo, Tanis, today and she and a visitor smothered him with love and attention. So exciting to hear he ate some bits of pasta and chicken at lunch, especially after hearing he vomited everything we gave him this morning. I have just now heard her bike drive by, taking our wee boy up to hospital for the staff there to help with feeds- we're hoping he can get 30 mls of milk every hour along with some more solid food in between.

Pray for Wana and pray for his mom, pray for the miracle of healing and life that God can work here, and pray for us as we love these people and as we learn to accept God's will even when it doesn't look the way we think it should.

Our God, He daily loads us with blessings and daily He bears our burdens, He will not allow us to be tried beyond what we are able to bear, our cares matter to Him, He bears us up, bears us on eagles' wings and gives us eagles' wings to fly. He gives to His beloved rest, sweet rest, peaceful rest- You alone oh Lord are with us!

He delights to bless us His children, and sometimes, those blessings can be as simple as the chance to sleep in an extra hour.