Menagerie of Stories

Well, I'm writing in the blog a little late tonight because I'm a little jittery after having been first spooked by a cockroach the size of a small mouse, then having scared a rat out of our pantry, which fled through one of the numerous holes in our roof and into our attic. Eric doesn't seem to be very phased by our "visitors," as he continues to call them, but they're not my favorite! They make my skin crawl....

In fact, instead of thinking about rats at this moment, Eric is currently working on tracking down the items missing from our annual food order from the states, which arrived today! It was pretty fun to get home from work today and find all sorts of goodies in boxes in the kitchen. Food in Gabon tends to be on the expensive side, and a lot of things aren't available this far out in the jungle, so it just works out better to order food once a year. The food order comes by ship to Libreville, then gets trucked down to the hospital. It's a strange thing to make a yearly "shopping list" from an Excel spreadsheet inventory of 55,000 items, but fun when the packages arrive.

This little tyke is 13 months old and has congenital glaucoma. The pressure in the eyes is too high, which causes blindness, corneal clouding, and stretches the flexible tissues in a child's eye and causes them to enlarge. I saw this little girl a couple of days ago and she is scheduled for surgery this Wednesday, 5 days from now. The plan is to do a trabeculectomy for both eyes, which is a surgery to reduce the eye pressure. She will be asleep for the operation (under ketamine). She was very cute and clearly used each eye to grab for objects, showing that she still has some potential for vision. Please pray for her surgery and visual outcome. It may be a long surgery, which is a long time for her to be under anesthesia, and I've never done this kind of surgery before on a child.

Following up on another little girl that I've written about before, here she is about 6 weeks after her surgery for a ruptured globe/corneal laceration and cataract surgery. It's nice to have her come in so happy, and even a little glad to see me, I like to think :) . She's doing very well and was able to recognize small objects with that left eye when I saw her this week. In another 2 months we'll start removing her sutures.

No, this is not a war-torn land. This is our back yard. To improve general safety/visibility around our house, and to decrease the risk of snakes and bugs, some of the jungle was cut back. After it dried (several weeks later), a Gabonese fellow hired by the hospital stacked it in piles and burned it yesterday. For better or worse, that's how land is usually cleared here. There's not any risk of fires spreading because we are living in a rain forest and the vegetation is just too moist, even during the dry season. Burning actually makes the soil better for planting, so we plan to use this land to plant a vegetable garden. If we just left it alone, it would grow back in what seems like no time at all. One of the benefits of this experience was finding pineapple growing on our land.

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This morning at devotions at the hospital, the pastor announced that 24 patients made decisions for Christ this week, including patients from all hospital departments. This is pretty average around here, and is why Eric and I are in Gabon. The gift of sight is valuable, but the gift of eternal life and a savior who loves you is worth far more.

The conclusion of the matter about our rat tonight is that the brave warrior cat we're taking care of, Gentil, is going to spend the night in the attic. We'll see if she has any success! Doesn't she look ferocious?