The Hospital is Hoppin'

We had a landmark event happen at the hospital this last week. Ever since Eric and I arrived at Bongolo over a year and a half ago, we have been showering, washing our dishes, washing our clothes, and caring for patients (even surgical patients) with unfiltered water straight out of the local river. Even after the water was filtered in our kitchen at home, there were still brown flecks in all the ice cubes and you just tried not to look while drinking your beverage. The water was often a little brown in the bathroom sink (we used filtered water for brushing our teeth), and our clothes never smelled fresh but rather moldy.
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But....trumpets please! We have been visited by the "water team," a group of 4 men from a church in Cleveland (sent by God, we know!) who volunteered their time to come to Bongolo and install a water filtration system! This system is commercial quality, quiet, filters the water to beyond drinkable U.S. standards, adds chlorine to disinfect our pipes, produces copious amounts of clean water, and takes hardly any electricity to run.
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Here is our rescue team right here:

And here is part of the system itself:

And here are a number of our missionary teammates and three of the water team fellows, giving us a tour of the new filtration system on Valentine's Day:

Here I am, drinking my first filtered water right out of the new system:

We'll have to wait about a month before actually drinking out of the tap at home or at the hospital, because the tiny amounts of chlorine in the system need time to disinfect all our pipes. But meanwhile, we are already enjoying just watching the clean water come out of the taps - no more brown! Sometimes now I go into our laundry room just to experience how great our clothes smell now as they're hanging to dry :) . Our ice cubes are clear, our toilets are cleaner, and my old fear that our new baby will get sick from swallowing water during bathing (after we get back to Bongolo in June) is gone! And our patients are going to be very excited that they no longer have to buy bottled water to drink at the hospital. I already feel better as I scrub my hands before performing surgery. Praise the Lord for all He has done, for the water team, and for our missionary teammates who have helped organize the whole endeavor!

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Speaking of surgery....it's been awhile since we've shared a patient story, but they're still happening all around us every day. Sometimes we're too busy treating illness to hear the patient's personal stories, but really that's where the healing is taking place as God works through our care to mend people's hearts.

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Here is a picture of Isabelle (seated) and her older sister. Isabelle is 49 years old, and has been bilaterally blind (light perception only) from cataracts for two years. She and her sister come from a village in the far northeast of Gabon, where Isabelle has been going to a local Christian and Missionary Alliance church for years. They have been praying faithfully for her eyesight to be restored for quite some time, and have finally come up with the $320 US dollars needed for the two of them to make the trip to Bongolo for the surgery. (The surgery itself is only $70 US.) How long was the trip? A total of 3 days one-way. That's a long voyage when you can't see your hand in front of your face.

This is Isabelle the day after her surgery. She was very excited to see again. I asked her how many children she has, and she has 5 kids from ages 10-27. I mentioned that the 10 year-old will have grown a lot since she last saw him and she nodded solemnly. She also has 4 grandchildren....who now have a grandmother who can see them and help care for them much more than before. It's neat to think of her returning to her village, with sight restored!
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Here is another patient from this week, who has also been bilaterally blind to the level of light perception for a long time. He has had an infection or inflammation in both eyes in the past, and from our exam it was very difficult to tell if he would see or not after the cataract operation. So we told him that we weren't sure how much his vision would improve after the surgery, but that we wanted to give it a try.

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This is the day after surgery, when the patch was removed. Initially, he was in shock:

Then he began to realize what had happened to him and that he really could see! He started praising God right there in the clinic.

And just kept right on praising God in his patient room with his wife :) .

I don't have a picture of one of the other patients from this week, but my staff was very touched by another patient, who, when the patch was removed after surgery, simply started weeping.

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Finally, I want to mention that Dr. Elisee's ophthalmology residency continues to progress well. He has now done 40-45 complete cataract surgeries himself, as well as parts of many other cataract surgeries and other sorts of operations. He sees patients in clinic, takes written exams, follows a textbook reading schedule, attends a PAACS Bible study (PAACS is the general surgery residency group), and gives presentations. Two to three times a year, he gives a presentation in front of the entire hospital staff, and this week he gave a "grand rounds" presentation on the effects of diabetes on the eye. Here is a photo of him presenting:

I was amused to see our sweet nurses all concentrating intently on Elisee's presentation, looking like quite the tough audience! But Elisee wasn't phased :) .