Dear Family and Friends,
My 2015 started out with a bit of a whirlwind. Within the first 11 days of 2015 I had been in 3 countries, flown about 3000 miles, spent over 15 hours in a car . . . and that was the easy part.
While attending our mission’s field conference/retreat, I was awakened early one morning with a phone call from Emmanuel, who we call Ema and who works for us in Yaoundé. (He is the guy who does everything from mowing the lawn to fixing electrical issues and keeping our water running.) He had been in a motorcycle accident and was lying in a hospital in Yaoundé with a ‘broken leg.’ I was about 7 hours away at the time, but he was scared, obviously in pain, and needed help. Cawleys (who are the family renting our hostel this year) headed to the hospital to see what they could do. When they called me back, I found out that it was quite a bit more than I had been able to decipher from the first conversation. In reality it was him AND Innocent (a guy who works next door), they had both broken their FEMURs (for my non-science friends: that is the upper leg, the largest bone in the body and supposedly one of the most painful to break); Ema in two places, AND they had been lying in the hospital all night during which point they had not seen a doctor, their legs had not been set, and they had been given no pain medication. I suspect all the missionaries have heard stories about how bad the government hospitals are here, but most of us haven’t had to deal with it first-hand.
Cawleys were able to jump in and intercede for them to some extent. For example, they pushed until the guys were given pain medication and were given a list of supplies they needed to go out and buy from outside pharmacies to be used in setting the legs. Even so, it was obvious they weren’t going to get the kind of medical attention they needed.
Over the course of the next several hours, the Cawleys spent a TON of time back and forth on the phone with me, the SIL pilot, and several others, and by the middle of the afternoon Ema and Innocent were on a med-evac flight on the SIL missionary plane to Mbingo Baptist Hospital – one of the best hospitals in country with consistent care and a western-trained orthopedic surgeon (as well as another one visiting from North America). I was able to go up to Mbingo to meet them when they arrived (Mbingo is about an hour’s drive from Bamenda, where I was for the field conference), Ema’s father arrived shortly thereafter, and by the time I left that evening they had both been admitted and had x-rays taken.
Innocent’s break was pretty clean, and he was discharged by the end of the next week. Did you know that even when you have a break bad enough that they have to stick a metal rod down the center of the bone that they try to get you up on your feet within a day or two now?! He was actually on the worksite next door visiting the guys he normally works with a couple of weeks later. It is now a full month later, and Ema is still in the hospital. They have done surgery to put a rod in his leg as well, but with the compound fracture, it is a ‘bit’ more complex. Plus his foot was evidently pretty messed up too, so the ‘getting him back on his feet’ part of the equation isn’t balancing out as quickly as hoped. We know he has a long road ahead of him, but are praising God that Mbingo Baptist Hospital will provide him with the care needed to hopefully recover fully.
Quite a whirlwind, right? As you can imagine, this was an eye-opening experience for us in many ways.
First of all, we discovered the reality of government hospitals here. Our conclusion: if ANYTHING happens to me, put me on a plane to Mbingo! If it looks like I am gonna bleed to death before that can happen, call one of the doctors or nurses we actually know. The next week when the Cawleys and I were talking, we realized that if God had not put us in a place to intercede for these two young men, one of them may have never walked again and in the very least the other would have had a significant enough limp that he would no longer have been able to work. Quite honestly, my reaction has been anger – in this day and age of medical knowledge?! These are healthy, hard-working young men, and this isn’t a place where there are many job options for anyone with a physical handicap. When you think about it, a ridiculous number of people die here every day from completely curable diseases too! They simply lack access to the medical care and/or the medicine necessary to fight whatever ails them.
Likewise, God has been teaching me patience. Yep, we all hate that one, right? With Ema gone, we somehow need to keep this property running. So far, so good. We have had a handful of water issues, but I have been able to fix most of them (with the knowledgeable guidance of the hostel dad next door who can do pretty much anything). The electrical issues we have had so far have been annoying, but fixable. And, though I never thought I would be thankful for dry season, the lack of rain means the lawn doesn’t need to be mowed and many of the other ‘grounds work’ type of things can be ignored for now. I’m not willing to call it a ‘breeze,’ but at least the whirlwind has slowed down and we are settling in to what appears will be our new ‘normal’ for a while.
I suppose you might want to hear about the rest of my life here too instead of just the accident. As always, our third quarter of school has been packed so far. The first full week in February were our all-school retreats. Though I am still firm in my conviction that I prefer high school to middle school students, it was a HUGE blessing that I was assigned to the middle school retreat this year. That means I got to go home each night and get a full night’s sleep, which I really needed. It will be exciting to watch over the next few weeks and see what fruit God has brought from retreat this year. Some years it is a huge spiritual turning point for our students. Pray that the seeds planted and the seedlings nurtured during retreat week will grow strong.
I am also in the midst of trying to sort out my summer plans. I need to come back to the states for some training related to an AP course I teach that has changed, but I still need to sort out when and where that will happen as well as how much time I can spend in North America. Hopefully I will be able to visit at least some of you! We actually have nearly 6 weeks ‘off duty’ this summer, but there is a lot of work that needs to happen related to school as well as the fact that we have new hostel parents arriving sometime in July (Check out the Moodys on the NAB website to hear how they are doing as they prepare to return to Cameroon) and a new NAB couple arriving to teach at RFIS (Check out the Taylors on the NAB website too as they prepare for their first time overseas through the NAB).
Life continues to be a balancing act; in fact sometimes it feels more like juggling. But God is faithful, and I am so glad that He is the one doing the balancing!
In Him, Kristi TenClay