Mercy Me

********Be advised that some of the following content is pretty graphic. I don't recommend you look at this post if you are of faint heart or have a weak stomach. Also, its probably not good for small children********

Yea so I'm not great at remembering to blog. Sorry Folks! But all is well here in Togo. I don't even know where to start. But we have been through a couple weeks of medical screenings and we started surgery last week as well. I have met some pretty great people.The communications team went to the entire first week of medical screenings, which is where the people line up and we go through and see who we can help. There were lots of people the last two days of screenings. But the whole week we saw crowds of over 3100 people. It was pretty intense.

People were there with every kind of illness you can think of from the common flu, cleft lips, and huge tumors. There are also tons and tons of kids there with orthopedic problems like bowed legs and clubbed feet.

Here are some pics from screening, once again some are pretty graphic: Photo By: JR Mercy Ships Photographer

Photo by Liz Cantu, Mercy Ships photographer

Photo By Debra Bell Mercy Ships photographer

Photo by Debra Bell Mercy Ships photographer

The hardest is the cleft lip tho because you all know my little brother had a cleft lip when he was born, well some of these kids are like 10. They aren't just babies. And it is especially hard to have a deformity here because some of the village people here will think they have demons of something weird like that. Well its weird for us but obviously not to some of these people.

For example, there was a lady in the ward and it was her day for surgery and she left because she thought there were demons in the ward. The night before she was telling the nurses to move the beds around because she saw demons in the beds... There aren't demons in our ward. Too much prayer is pored into that hospital everyday for any kind of evil anything to get anywhere close to our ward ;). So anyways, right before her surgery she packed up and left. And she had a goiter on her neck so she really needed surgery.

In other news, we are now officially confined to the ship for the next 48hrs due to the elections and our curfew was 6:30pm today. Tomorrow is the actual election day and we don't know what is going to happen. I've managed to get a little background from the locals, the guy currently in charge is the son of the last president, he died so now his son is in charge. His dad was president for 40 years so they don't want to turn over the power.

The campaigning is really cool to watch tho. I don't know exactly how it all works but on Saturday me and D and a few others went to town for lunch so we saw alot of 'campaigners'. I saw I think 3 parties, you can tell by the shirt color. There was people in white shirts, yellow shirts and a few in pink... They are alot more passionate than most of us, for sure. The people in yellow are really loud. Young guys pile onto these motorcycle/scooter looking things (a common form of transportation here) dressed in yellow and waving palm leaves and yellow bandannas and they lay on the horn and holler at fellow supporters and blow whistles really loud! It was such a sight. And then there are huge vans of people just driving around honking, its really funny to see one of the vans coming piled down with Africans all dressed alike, hanging out of windows and hollering. WTA.

Thats all I can say about that right now. But just pray for Togo. And I am personally praying that the current guy will win so there isnt much disturbance.

The poverty here is pretty bad. We have done alot of driving around to screenings or clinics and sometimes we end up taking the side roads. It is so hard to drive through and not stop and scoop up children. See from the main roads you see like markets or businesses, not so much slum looking places, but getting off the main drag is like WOW ok yeah so I'm in Africa. So many people live in shacks, literally.

Sometimes its all hard to take in. A couple of times at screenings I had to find a private corner and take deep breaths if you know what I mean. But all in all I think I am doing well taking it all in stride. I think its because most of these people don't feel sorry for themselves (as far as the poverty goes). Though there are tough times.

Its hard making good friends with a local and seeing how they live. For example, there is this guy that alot of us have made friends with, Uche, and he takes us around town and shows us where everything is. He is so nice, he will go get anything and bring it to the ship if you don't have time to leave. Everytime we go out to eat we take him. Well he is really loud and funny most of the time but sometimes if you watch while hes quiet you see the strain on his face, from the struggle of trying to hustle to live. Sometimes it makes me wanna cry. Or the translator that works in our dept. She is so nice and lovely and full of life. Well one day she was talking about where she lives. It is a shack like thing with one room, no kitchen or anything. I was like OMG! She has to go find somewhere else to cook if she wants to eat. Its just all so sad to us but to them its normal... which some to think of it might be even more sad.

Today I met the cutest little kid. He was probably like 4 and he was helping his mother take care of his little baby sister. He was adorable. He came up to our table and shook hands. He didn't speak English or French though because he wasn't in school. One of the guys with us gave him some money, which we aren't suppose to do really because then everyone wants money. But he couldn't help it ya know.

I have really waited too long to blog because now there is too much to talk about lol... but thats it for today.

Here are some more random pics for everyone. I don't have much because I don't have alot of time to take pictures so everything I do have was taken from a moving vehicle or taken by the ship photographers at screening days.