Greetings to everyone reading this!  My name is Joe Lazar, and I live in New York City (when I’m not living in Tonj, Sudan).  I am working here with my twin brother John for about a month during our break between our first and second years of medical school.  John and I are working in the clinic, seeing many patients each day.  Our work in the clinic is rewarding in so many ways.  I’m really amazed at the magnitude of the service that we’re providing for those that come in to see us.  We see between 50 and 100-some patients each day, almost none of whom would have access to medical care otherwise.  What’s really stood out to me is how basic the patients’ needs are.  For the most part, we’re not treating very complex, puzzling diseases; rather, we see things like infections, wounds, basic (but potentially dangerous) GI problems.  This is the perfect setting for a couple of first year medical students like us because we can assist meaningfully around the clinic even without the years of learning that lie ahead of each of us.  I’ve already learned so much during my brief time here (in American medical schools, student’s do not see very much in terms of clinical practice until their 3rd year), so I can tell that this experience will be an invaluable part of my education.  In general, life in the clinic has been exactly what I had hoped it would be: a chance to serve God through caring for others and a chance to learn more about medicine so that I can be a better student and ultimately a more sensitive physician in the future.

Today was a great day in terms of weather (for those of us not from Sudan).  To the Sudanese here, the day seemed more like a blizzard.  The temperature during the morning and early afternoon peaked at about 75 degrees Farenheit (about 27 degrees C based on my crude back-of-the-envelope calculation).  This was the first day that I felt comfortable—not hot and sweaty—in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt.  Some of the Sudanese in the clinic, though, were dressed as though they were going skiing.  There were lots of winter hats and coats.  We even saw one young boy dressed in an entire ski suit.  It was an amusing illustration of how the human body can adapt to different environments.  I—and I think most of the new volunteers here—are waiting for the day that our bodies are a bit more adapted to a climate whose heat we are not yet used to.

We concluded the day by watching a moving as a big group.  The volunteers, Sabet and Suzy’s family, clinical staff, and housekeeping staff piled into the dining hall here to watch the children’s movie “Cool Runnings” that tells the story of the first Jamaican bobsled team.  I looked around the dining hall where we were watching several times during the movie and thought to myself, “what a funny little family we make up here”.  There were children playing on the furniture, a few people reading or writing in journals, lots of us shoveling handfuls of popcorn into our mouths, and all this in a village in South Sudan.  It was a wonderful and light-hearted reminder of how special it is that we all came from different places in the world and from different walks of life to do the same thing: to serve God by serving others.  I went to sleep happy of this reminder of how unified we all really are in the world.