Late one afternoon, as the clinic was closing down for the day, a boy walked up with his hand wrapped in a bloody towel. He and his parents had traveled from a far village by car. Normally, it would have taken a day to walk the distance, but this time, they drove. They explained his hand was all cut up after a ‘bullet explosion’. (Huh?)

Unwrapping his hand, we all cringed to see the mutilated fingers hanging limp and dead. The story fell together piece by piece as we prepared to suture. As a goat herder, he stumbled upon a bullet while wandering the fields and picked it up. Curious and as any nine year old boy would be, he decided to see what would happen if he beat it with a stick. I am not sure how long he hit it, but eventually it exploded, taking several fingers with it. There was even charred residue glued to his skin. It was bad. Fortunately, by the time he reached us most of the bleeding had stopped.

Once his hand was properly numb, Dennis (our clinical officer) removed a finger which barely hung by sinew and muscle. He left the main bone sticking out, saying it would die and eventually fall off. The other fingers were then stitched and wrapped tightly in gauze.

As he sutured, the boy’s mother, kept peeking at the carnage and mourning her son’s pain. She was a wreck. In fact, the boy kept comforting her: “Don’t worry mom, it doesn’t hurt at all. I promise.” It was really quite sweet.

I asked him if he was ever going to play with bullets again, and he shook his head emphatically. This lesson was costly but effective. I told him to tell his friends to stay away from bullets too, and reminded him that he was fortunate he only lost a few fingers. The realization of this truth stopped us all up short, and together we thanked God it was not worse.

Today, he came in for wound dressings. I’m happy to report that it is healing nicely. Pray for a full recovery. Perhaps one day, he’ll warn his son the dangers of playing with bullets… I hope so.

Hi Everybody!
Thanksgiving is pretty much just like any other day in Sudan, but it was a most extraordinary day for me.  It started out with the slaughter of the Thanksgiving goat, which was a little out of the routine for the compound–and the honor was given to Rachel,  who is apparently only the 3rd American woman to have done it here.  Thanks to the expert skills of Suzy and the staff, dinner was pretty much a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner with the goat substituting for turkey–it was DELICIOUS!
The dinner was a somewhat anticlimactic end to an extraordinary day.  Tom and I and part of the clinic team were driven out to the village of Malone for the weekly medical outreach clinic run by In Deed and Truth.  It is very hard to really describe this experience–It was very much like time travel.  The trip started out with a not quite 1 hour drive down a fairly well graded dirt road at about 60-70 mph (honest), which changed abruptly when the driver slowed down almost to a stop in the middle of nowhere, took a hard left across the road, and ran down the embankment and off into the bush.  The attached photo is from a little later when the “road” was at least kind of recognizable.
Malone consists of a couple of huts, and the container used by the clinic to store the larger items of the operation including tables and chairs.  Most of the families live in huts scattered around the area–all are cattle farmers.  The actual clinic consists of 3 tables and the box of supplies brought by us from Tonj–all set up in the shade of a giant tree.  The morning is usually slow, as it takes a couple of hours for word to filter out that the clinic is there, and the concept that the clinic is there every Thursday (during the dry season,) is apparently not an easily grasped concept in this culture.  Once word was out, though,  the people started arriving in large numbers–all on foot, many of the men carrying spears, and rarely wearing anything resembling Western clothing.  They are dignified, friendly people who live with next to nothing.  I saw many patients who could have felt  much better had they simply access to running water and the cool shower I was looking forward to at the end of the day.  We did not see many seriously ill patients–most of them (often children with malaria,)  had already made or started the journey to the Tonj clinic. (The Malone outreach often sees 60-70 patients.)  It was one of the most memorable experiences I have had in all my travels.
Today (Friday) was a fairly “normal” day at the Tonj clinic.  Rob in the meantime continues to “Wow” the pastors with his unique teaching, but I will leave that part of the story to him. Tomorrow we are off to the Leper colony.
God Bless You all, and thank you so much for your prayers.

God really is Amazing, He brings people into our lives for reasons that we can’t understand, and we’ll always remember them. Yesterday I was standing outside the medical clinic talking to the staff when a boy tugged on the back of my shirt. I don’t know how he knew I was the one in charge of wound care, but he came up to me and started showing me his three large infected wounds on his legs. I didn’t understand a word he was saying, but I knew what he was trying to ask me (Can you help me?). He was small, probably only 10 years, and he was dirty, which meant that he was from the cattle camps a long walk away. Putting my hand on his shoulder I took him inside and started washing his wounds. I could tell he had had them for a long time and that they hurt. Not knowing if he’d come back when I asked him to, I cleaned them really well and put tape over the dressing to help them stay longer. After I was done I gave him my last lollipop and said “Nhialem be dodge” which is God bless you in Dinka, and told him to come back tomorrow. He looked at me and actually said thank you (which is rare).  Even though I didn’t do much, I know that God started something in that kids life, who knows what could happen. I was just blessed to be a small part of it. A picture of him is still in my head, I know God brought him to the clinic for the reason of know that God loves him.

Last week’s prayer walk was a big success here in Tonj, Sudan! It was a huge blessing to walk the airstrip and pray for this ministry with the staff. We asked God to continue to grow our ministry and enlarge our territory for Him!  We asked for protection on everyone that works here, we asked for salvation for everyone that comes to the medical clinic and we asked God to give us strength and encouragement to “not grow weary while doing good”!

I love this picture, as it not only shows off the really cool t-shirts we have, but it shows off what we are about……showing the love of Christ in deed and in truth!

I pray today that you will “show off” too!