And Still I Was

Monday I was not feeling 100% and by afternoon I was very ill. By the time I got back to the hotel I was incapacitated. I had some sort of stomach bug. I had severe cramps, all over body pain, chills, nausea, light-headedness, the works. I went straight to bed and it was even painful to roll over. It crossed my mind that maybe somehow I had malaria or something. We picked up something like Pepto-Bismol but it did not seem to touch it. I could have taken antibiotics but it may not have helped and could have complicated matters with side effects. I am highly allergic to some antibiotics. So I prayed and I was definitely still. Perhaps I was not still enough after Sunday’s sermon and I needed to be stopped cold. As bad as I felt, I consider it no small miracle that by the next morning I felt well enough to go back out to the training center for another full day. By the next night I was able to eat again and felt a good 90% better! That is why I am a little behind on the updates. Enough about me here is the good stuff.


Monday started off with a new teaching Doctor who is an Orthopedics resident from IU. Dr. Susan McDowell’s flight got in about 12:30 AM and she started teaching on bone and joint injuries at 9:00AM that same morning. The students really benefited from her specialized knowledge and her ability to answer difficult questions on orthopedic issues that Bjorn and I would not have been able to answer without looking things up and maybe not even then. Among many other useful things, she showed the students practical skills like how to set a broken bone or relocate a dislocated joint and how to splint a broken bone using an ace wrap with a Banana leaf stems/ Bamboo / or any solid straight stick type object. I got in on the fun as well with some gait training using home made crutches Me and Adong made on Friday afternoon using only what we had around the training center. Adong is one of the workers at the training center and can do amazing things with a Machete. He speaks fair English and is learning more with the help of our missionaries here teaching English.













Adong Making Crutches out of Bamboo and some other trees behind the training center. He mostly used the machete but we did use a saw for some parts.