Stories from the Jungle

There are so many short stories that could be told....The first one is about one of the first men I did cataract surgery on at Bongolo Hospital in Gabon. Apologies if you are squeamish about pictures of eyes! He was bilaterally blind because of cataracts and came to have his right eye operated on. Unfortunately, he had something else wrong with that eye - something that wriggled - a worm! Loa loa, a tropical disease, is very prevalent here. So instead of removing the cataract from that eye, I removed it from the left eye instead and took out the worm from the right eye a few days later. Several days after that, I removed the cataract from his right eye as well. He is now seeing well in both eyes, and is less one worm! If you look carefully, under the conjunctiva medially you can see the sinuous, thin whitish form of the worm (about 1.5 cm long). It wiggled quite visibly and fairly quickly - to remove it, I had to pinch it and hold it in place so it didn't escape too quickly before I could remove it.


A few days later, a 4 year-old girl (I have a picture of her, but will have to load it later) was fighting with her older 6 year-old sister over a mirror, and somehow it broke and a fragment was jabbed into the 4 year-old's left eye. It lacerated the cornea centrally, breaking into the eye itself and causing a cataract. We did ketamine anesthesia for her and I sutured up the cornea, then prayed as I removed the cataract behind the cloudy cornea. It is amazing how the Lord continues to do small miracles in the operating room here. I never would have performed pediatric cataract surgeries in the states, and here we did it with minimal anesthesia and in the setting of a ruptured globe. Praise the Lord, and thank you for your prayers! I told the mother how the Lord had his hand on her daughter during the surgery, and she was very thankful as well.


Here are 3 of the 4 nurses that work with me in the eye department, along with the assistant head attached and working on our operating microscope! This microscope part was donated to Bongolo Hospital by Mercy Ships and will be essential after the arrival of the ophthalmology resident I'll start teaching in September. The eye nurses have been great to work with and have been very patient with me as I swim in French all day long, struggling sometimes with the African accent, among other problems....


Medical events aren't the only stories that have come our way. We mentioned in our last update that our house was broken into the same day that I first arrived, a few weeks ago, but we haven't yet related the events that followed. To start with, the screens on our porch had been slit, a significant amount of food (from our yearly shipment) had been stolen, there were holes poked through the ceiling into the attic, and a huge mess in the kitchen had been cleaned up by our amazing team of fellow missionaries on the station. The same day, the hospital administrator's wife (they are Gabonese) was walking in the jungle below our home, praying (for us?), when she looked up and saw a child with a box of belongings on his head, carrying them away from our house.
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She immediately caught up with the child, and by the next morning the "detective squad," comprised by fellow missionaries and Gabonese coworkers, had apprehended all 4 of the young culprits. As it turned out, the oldest one was 11 years old and not taller than Eric's elbows. The parents of these children were mortified, and brought them to apologize to us in the morning. The four small African children stood in front of us in a line, with their eyes cast downward. Each child was sternly told to look us in the eyes and repeat, "it was your food that I ate and your house that I vandalized." Then they were asked to kneel and repeat the same phrase. They did so, struggling to look at us.
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By the time the third child knelt, looking up at us, I was in tears and so were most of the surrounding adults. I was glad Eric was there beside me. With all four of the kids kneeling in front of us, I knelt down with them and asked them if they had wronged us and if they had sinned against God. They assented, nodding. I told them I had sinned often too, and I asked them how they could be forgiven. Silence. I told them that Eric and I forgave them, but how could they be forgiven by God? Did they know who loved them so much that he had payed the price for all their sins, so they could be free? One brave child said it was Jesus. Did they know what he had done for them? The child responded that he had died for us. I told them that was right, and he had died for them and for Eric and I too, and that the only way to forgiveness was to ask Jesus to be their own savior and to forgive them....What a way to start at Bongolo.
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The other good thing to come out of this is that these children are going to receive a lot of good adult attention over these next few months, which is what they need. Please pray that God would grant them eyes to see and ears to hear the good news.