Everything Has Changed

Hello dear friends at St. Anne and St. John. My last post included the exciting photos of preparing to open the clinic in Rugari and my wonderful new bed. Well, sad to say, everything has changed, my new bed is now coated in soot and ash from the fire that destroyed our house a week ago. I am hopeful that we will be able to clean it once again and return it to its beautiful state, hopefully free of the smell of smoke, but only time will tell if we are able to accomplish this. Please go to http://www.gomanews.blogspot.com/ to read more about the fire.

For this post I will write about the children of Rugari and Kibumba Refugee camp that I was able to visit with in the last two weeks.

Firewood is a daily need for cooking here and these two girls were out collecting firewood for their families while the kids in the next photo were coming home from school. This shows the huge disparity of education here in Congo. If you have just enough money to pay the teachers you will be able to attend school, but if not, you will be left behind as these two girls are.

Notice the difference in the photo between the child from school and the one carrying firewood.

I have titled this third photo

"Different Probabilities"

It will be helpful for you to discuss the difference in potential for these children as they grow into adulthood. Then if you have questions and want to know more you can post to the blog your questions. There are two major factors that greatly impact the probabilities for these two children, one is education, the other is gender.

When I was at Rugari last week, workmen were continuing the building project for the community center and at the end of the day the children not in school helped to clean the tools used for laying block and brick. They were having great fun to help.

Now I move to the tent village of Kibumba Refugee Camp and you can see the tent clinic where I help from time and the site for which we purchased the medicines.

In this tent clinic in a very small, very dirty room I helped to deliver a baby two weeks ago. Below is a picture of the grandmother (tate, pronounced tatay), the mother(only 18 years of age) and the infant daughter. The next photo is tate cooking UJI WA MTAMA (pronounced oojee wa mutama) for the new mother to drink. This is a porridge made from the flour of Sorghum seed. It is very nutritious and the traditional food prepared for mother's who have just given birth.

Then I worked in a consult room to diagnose problems of the sick people who come for help. There is much work to do in this clinic every day. I hope to return this week and spend some days just working, I need to feel as I am doing something and I love the work of this place. Last week I also sent a boy to the village clinic for a diagnosis of Tuberculosis. He was about 14 years of age and had been sick for two years. I am very worried about him, he was very sick. Please keep him in your prayers.

Perhaps if I am there at the clinic of Kibumba camp often enough I can begin to work independently, but for now I work side by side with another nurse who can speak some English (a little). My swahili comprehension is still the big problem and I must still study to learn more. When I speak of comprehension it is about understanding the meaning of the spoken word. I am able to translate in my mind the words I hear, but often don't understand the meaning that is being sent. The reason for this is the different way of putting words together to form thoughts and sentences. It is different than English and I am still trying to put them together as I would in English and don't understand the form of swahili sometimes, so my education continues. The photo above is of some of the children who accompanied me from the car to the clinic. I gathered quite a crowd as you can see. Well, I love children and so for me it is a great joy to have such companions. I just had to take this photo for all of them to see. You should have heard the shouts of joy when they saw these photos. I entitled the above photo, "JOY."

This photo of the chugudu parked in the road above reminds us of the manner in which so much work is accomplished here in the Rugari parish. Abbe Louis says it is possible to carry 1000 pounds using on of these vehicles. This particular chugudu loaded with bags of charcoal which people buy to use for cooking fires. Charcoal is the next step up from having to use wood for your cooking needs.

Abbe Louis loves to have fun and shares his joy with everyone. We had a good time visiting with these youths returning up the mountain after taking their loaded chugudus down the mountain to the market. Below is a loaded chugudu on the way to Goma to sell. Do you think it could be carrying 1000 pounds of cabbage. Keep in mind there is another basket in front of the one you can see from the back.

Try to calculate just how many cabbages are in this one basket and then take an average weight of a head of cabbage times the number of cabbages. When you have figured the approximate weight of this one basket send me the answer via the comment link. I would love to hear the estimates.

These last two chugudu photos were taken on a different day above the village of Kibumba which is not the same as the Kibumba Refugee Camp (left tent village). They are close to each other but not the same. The refugee camp sits out in the meadow, while the village is up the road a few kilometers and closer up into the mountain.

This is the face of hope for me. I hope we can help her and children like her to go to school so they won't have to depend on gathering firewood or on brothers to push chugudus to market. I hope that education can change the difficulties of survival into the advantages of life.

Her name is Mwangaza (pronounce just like it looks), Mwangaza means light and I see the light of trust and hope and joy in her eyes.

Nice way to end this story of change.

I send my greetings in the love of Christ,

Jackie

Moving Day for the New Health Dispensary at Rugari

Good Afternoon and I greet you with the wonderful scenary of Rugari, the small village where I will be living during the week as I do my nursing work and see to the other projects of the parish. The volcanoe in the first photo is Mikeno Volcano. The name in Swahili means many teeth and you can see that indeed it is a bit jagged, not like many other volcanoes. The second photo is a view down the road from the driveway of the house we are renting for Abbe Louis, Abbe John Fidel, and myself. These next photos are of the new dispensary that has been built at Rugari. We hope to open next week, but I predict it will be later. There is much to be done before we are able to actually perform health care in these consult rooms. For instance, we need to build a bit of a road to access the site and next, a very important thing is that we need to build a toilet. I will appreciate that very much, even if it is a pit toilet like our grandparents and great grandparents used.

I was so happy with all the items we were able to rescue from the old dispensary which was ruined by the soldiers in the fighting this past fall. You can see that many items are still in very good shape and will be very useful in saving money as we prepare to open the dispensary.

Next is a brand new bed for me. Well, the term BRAND NEW is a bit of a euphamism. It is new for me, but hardly a new bed. My estimate is that it must be 30-50 years old, but a very good one and it sleeps so much better than the old one I had. This is another item we rescued from the old dispensary. So I say Thank God from whom all blessings flow, again!!!

Some of the children of village who were up to the spring to collect water came to watch us load our treasures. This location is high up the hill toward Mikeno Volcano and they must hike up the hill every day to find water. They carry it in 5 gallon gerry cans or smaller. It makes life very difficult to find all the water they need this way. Some of them walked down the mountain with me and I taught them a song in Swahili. We had a great time and on the way one woman asked me to visit her mother who was very ill. I stopped, but was unable to give any medicine. The next day I returned with some unga kwa uji and sukari. Uji is a porridge that you drink and sukari is sugar! I like this drink very much in the morning, but for people who are ill it is good any time and all the time, as it is very nutritious. The mix I brought contained flour from bull rush millet, soya beans, corn, sorghum, ground peanuts, and powdered milk. All of this is whole grain flour and so it contains very good nutrients. Well, one last look at my new bed as we were finished cleaning it. I left it to dry in the sun which is the best disinfectant we know and then I slept very well that night in my new bed and had no backache or neck pain in the morning. YAHOO!!!

Until next time, I send my greetings in the peace of Jesus Christ our Lord,

Jackie