People who know me well know that I love the movie “Spies Like Us”, an 80’s comedy where Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd play a couple of wannabe spies. At one point, they find themselves posing as surgeons who have to do an appendectomy in front of an audience of doctors. As they start to wing it, Dan Aykroyd periodically disappears under the table to consult a textbook. My experiences here in Ethiopia have been a little like that at times.

This boy, of about 8 years of age, came to the hospital after a car crash. Among his injuries, he sustained a broken lower jaw. In an attempt to immobilize the fracture in the right alignment, I wired a bar to his upper teeth and a bar to his lower teeth. I then wired the two bars together after holding his teeth together in proper (I hope) alignment. How do I know how to do this, you ask? I read about it in two text books and watched a video!

This, in all seriousness, has been a recurring theme here, but it’s what we expected coming to the mission field. We have really been forced to rely on prayer here. We need God to guide us as we try to help these people. We need Him to heal them. It’s been encouraging to talk with the patients and their families about Christ and encouraging to watch them get better. If you get a chance, say a prayer for young Mamush that his jaw would heal.

Paul

We have met a lot of people from all over the world already. I (Becca) have started taking care of short term teams who visit (The picture above is me with 2 pediatric nurses who visited). It is fun to be able to interact with so many people with different specialties. Nathan has enjoyed meeting a lot of people too. He is everyone’s new best friend. He is doing great with being passed around and will enjoy going to other people now. This is a big improvement; before he would go to someone else and look back at me or Paul and grunt. I see people all over and if Nathan isn’t with me they ask, “How is your son?” Wubito helps us around the house in the afternoons. Nathan loves her, he lights up and smiles really big when she comes. She has taken us to the market a few times and she says now every time she goes to market everyone asks, “Where is the baby?” So this little white face has a lot of friends. Before we were even due to have Nathan I remember a friend telling me the advantages and disadvantage of having children on the mission field. She had experience overseas before and after children. She explained that you have more time without children, but with children a lot more doors open up. And you are able to share and get to know a lot of people who would not otherwise open up to you. I am starting to see how this is true. At first, all I saw was the lack of time I had, since taking care of Nathan and not getting to be involved at the hospital. Now I understand that he is opening doors and everyone really loves him and hence will seek us out or come by to visit. I have also found time in the evenings to be some time I can go to the hospital. We have a new Obstetrician here. She is just out of residency doing a post-residency fellowship with Samaritan’s Purse. She will be here for 2 years (at least), so needless to say she does a lot at night. Last night I went and spent some time helping here care for newborn. The newborn was resuscitated successfully after his mom went through 3 days of labor and finally got the c-section she needed when she got to Soddo. The newborn started seizing about 24 hours after he was born. We gave him medication and some IV glucose and prayed with the family. Please continue to pray for him as he is at a critical state and we aren’t sure what his neurological deficits might be after the prolonged labor, resuscitation and now seizures.

PS. Go Cowboys!!! I just checked Fox sports and we were at the “Top of the Heap.” If anyone wants to record any games and send them to Ethiopia let me know. Our neighbors have a projector and have been wanting to watch some American Football.

PSS.  There were several other pictures I wanted to post of people we have met, but I can’t find them right now, they are lost on some computer or card…so more to come.

My mom posted a picture of their house on Tiki Island on her blog. Click here. For those of you who agree the picture looks really bad, you should note that the ground floor is mostly storage and garages. Although there were a few irreplaceable items, the living area and bedrooms are on the 2^nd and 3^rd floors, and it is a huge blessing that they were not more severely damaged.

My parent’s house…although the house is refurbishable I thought it would be nice to recall some of my favorite memories on Tiki island.

• The many trips in college during reading week to “study” at the beach
• Paul meeting my parents for the first time and my college friends staring awkwardly in anticipation of my father’s reaction
• Paul and I taking a trip to surprise my parents to tell them we were pregnant. We drove up on a Friday and left two grandma (we couldn’t find a zso zso) and grandpa t-shirts at the door as we waited downstairs to yell surprise
• The annual 4^th of July parade we participated in down the main road
• Waking up to the best café au lait made by my dad
• Catching fish from the dock, I would throw out a weak cast and then take over my dad or grandfather’s pole after they had a bite
• Eating fresh crab caught outside our backdoor in the bay
• My friend Emily’s dog peeing on my parent’s bed (love ya Em)
• Fighting over which college flag should go in the middle and be the tallest (LSU usually won that battle since my dad had it placed on the largest pole. A&M and Tulane went on the sides as to bow to the LSU flag)
• Eating the best filet mignon grilled with mesquite (all of the mentions of food are because we are in Ethiopia only dreaming about good steak and seafood and cookies)
• Finally getting Nathan to take naps…he was 8 weeks old and in Galveston when we initiated Babywise, a lifesaver
• Making homemade candles with Jess, my sister for my mom’s birthday
• My dad taking thousands of pictures of Nathan and getting some award winners
• Making Christmas cookies and eating the broken ones along the way (Mike wins the best decorator award)
• Packing and repacking and unpacking and repacking and finally ending the argument of does Becca get to bring all 10 pounds of this shampoo to Ethiopia? (I brought half, so it was a good compromise)
• The place of many family gatherings, whether Christmas, Thanksgiving, Birthdays or just because.

We didn’t grow up in that house, but over the past almost 10 years we have made some great memories. It is not only a home, but a place of refuge. Where Paul and I can go to be with great family, whom we also call friends.

Love you Mom and Dad!

If any of you have been around me and Nathan for at least 5 minutes, you have probably heard me call him

stinker bug.

I don’t know how it came about, but it has stuck so far.  Here are a few pictures of our stinker bug along with a few other nicknames…

Honey bear

Slobber Monkey

Cutie Pie

He is sporting his new hat from Nana, Paul’s mom, it is perfect for the morning times.  We usually walk into the garden and it is still around 60 degrees.  He has been a lot of fun lately.  And he has started crawling.  We have a DVD of it, but can’t upload such a huge file over dial up.  We are sending a DVD home to family in about a month, but then he might be walking too!?!  He absolutely loves the walker we bought him…and I love it even more…it gives my arms a break and he can chase me around on or concrete floors.  Not much about Africa today, Paul went to bed early after a few long and taxing days.

I should tell those of you who are wondering that I heard from my parents (they live on Galveston bay).  They are fine, but there house did take a toll.  It sounds like the bottom level (only garages and storage), is pretty torn apart.  The top two floors (where the living area and bedrooms are) survived.  Although there is a lot of work to be done, it could have been a lot worse.  They probably won’t be able to live there for a few weeks, but are thankful it can be livable again.

It is the Ethiopian New Year today.  So the date is 1/1/2001.  Last year was the turn of the millennium, I guess they didn’t have to worry about Y2K, since they realized we were all okay 8 1/2 years ago.

So today Paul has the day off and we did a few things around the house. Including make a small office, so our foyer can be used when visitors come in.  The house is still not presentable for pictures.  We need to paint and hang a few curtains and have some chairs and couches made, but it is definitely livable.

We should be able to send out another newsletter early next week.  If you have not been receiving our newsletter, feel free to email us your mailing address.  paulandbecca@gmail.com

Our fledgling ministry has been many things so far. It’s been exciting, interesting, at times uncomfortable, humorous, fatiguing and many others. For me, it has certainly been humbling. I may have trained at a superb surgical training program in the great U.S. of A., but I have a lot to learn about the roles and duties of a surgeon in Africa. Some of the humility I am seeing is due to the challenges of trying to treat advanced diseases of a broad variety with minimal resources. Some of it simply due to the inability to treat at all. I wanted to highlight a couple of patients for you.

Meet Fideyete. She is 21 years old and has had a progressively enlarging mass on her neck. It is now causing her difficulty with swallowing in addition to being unsightly.

Here in Ethiopia, goiters are quite common. They are due to a variety of factors, primarily lack of adequate iodine in the diet. In addition, a common grain used as a staple food further aggravates goiters by interferring with the thyroid’s function. When I first watched the two Ethiopian surgeons here operate on some of these goiters, I was rather appalled at their technique. Compared to the thyroid surgeries I have seen, learned and done in Texas, they seemed rather crude. There was quite a bit of bleeding and they never even looked for certain structures in the neck that we routinely sought in the US. I must confess that my general opinion bordered on arrogance. As is so often the case, my arrogance was reward with a big plate of crow to eat.

My first two attempts at removing these monsters (of which I have NOT seen in Texas) resulted in complications. Both of them were corrected and are doing well, I am greatly relieved to say, by the grace of God. Though I still intend to perform this operation closer to the way I was trained, in particular looking for those structures, I now realize that the method of operation I observed in the Ethiopian surgeons was for a reason. I, the new guy, have much to learn. I helped one of them remove Fideyete’s goiter and feel I am getting closer to doing that operation with skill. Humility is a hard pill to swallow sometimes.

Sometimes, though, even when you do it right there is simply not much that can be done. Meet Tesebe. He is a late teenage boy who came to the hospital with chest pain and shortness of breath. He was originally treated at Soddo about a month before I arrived, having sustaining injuries from a car wreck. He was pretty banged up apparently and stayed a couple of weeks. He had some broken pelvic bones that did not require surgery and was also found to have an abnormal chest x-ray. He had a few broken ribs and air in the the skin and fat of his chest wall that was not supposed to be there. Normally, this comes from the lung, but the lungs looked OK on the x-ray, and, as he was breathing easily and swallowing easily, no further work up was done at that time. Now he was back. His chest x-ray now is shown for you. Some of you will recognize this as bad. His right lung was not visible. As we had no other diagnostic tools to help us, we placed a tube into the right chest in hopes of draining fluid that may have filled that half of the chest. It was possible that his original injury had bled into his chest and was not picked up on his original x-ray after the wreck. No follow up x-rays were taken. Unfortunately, the tube really didn’t drain much and his x-ray didn’t improve much.

To make a long story short (too late, huh?), we eventually put a flexible camera into his windpipe and attempted to reinflate his lung by opening his chest. There was nothing we could do and it appears he likely injured the main airway traveling into his right lung at the time of the wreck. Now the airway is nearly completely closed off and the lung cannot inflate. Our options are not very pretty, even if we had all of the technology available in the US. Unfortunately, we don’t have that and we have little choice than to to watch this. He has already proven he can live with one lung and now we much pray that he does not develop an infection in that collapsed lung. To attempt removing the lung or repairing the injured airway, especially after this amount of time and in a hospital without a ventilator or intensive monitoring, would be folly. Furthermore, his family is poor and he can’t be taken anywhere else (though, given the complexity of his injury, I don’t think there is anyone in Ethiopia who could fix him). The humility now is the realization that there is nothing more we can do. I’ve had the privelege of praying with him and his family many times, though. Even though there is nothing more we can do, I firmly believe it is worthwhile and effective pray to the Lord to watch over him and ask for healing. He has now left the hospital to go home. If you think about it, ask God to protect this young man. I thank God that he loves Jesus and knows true life.

This has been a humbling process and I suspect it will continue to be so. Given what the Bible says about humble people, I thank God for this humbling experience and pray He will mold me into the kind of man He wants me to be. Thank you all for your prayers and concern, your prayers are being heard.

Paul

Calling all blog sites and websites…We have lost our bookmarks on our computer.  If you have joined the blog world or have a website please email it to us paulandbecca@gmail.com or leave it in the comments section.  Even if you think we already have it please resend it or even if we don’t know you, but you are intrigued by our Ethiopian move.  Which believe it or not, it was through our blog that we have touched base with a medical couple in Australia who is interested in working at a Christian hospital in Ethiopia!

The sad part of this story is we cannot access blogspot blogs.  Which I am very sad about, however, you can send us your website anyway and maybe one day Ethiopia will release blogger sites.

If you don’t have a blog maybe this is your chance, even my grandfather updates a Blog once a week!

Hope to hear from you soon!

Nathan and I have taken a few trips into the villages and quite a few trips into town.  It is only a 10 minute walk into town and there are lots of little “shops” a long the way.  Shopping is an adventure and a hunt!  Which I find kind of fun.  (Obviously this is Becca typing, Paul not only doesn’t like shopping, but having to hunt for something is his worst nightmare.  That is why he, my dad and probably most men would rather have Wal-mart where they can walk right in to what they need and leave).  They make a lot of things with clay and I have planted some herbs into a few pots that I got at a local store.  They were each 5 birr or about 50cents.

This is a picture of us visiting the home of Etagainu (pronounced like yet-again-you).  She works here on the compound and is known for making excellent homemade bread.  She has made bread for us once a week.  It is great.

This picture is of the view on the way to visit Etagainu.  The picture doesn’t do it justice.  It is so pretty walking up in the mountains.

 When we first got here we went to someone’s house for traditional Ethiopian coffee.  The coffee is great and she roasted the beans and then ground them and served coffee with sugar.

Here is also another picture of Jess.  She is holding a monkey that is a pet at a local foster home.  People are always wondering what sort of exotic animals we see in Africa.  Well here is one.  If you want to see Jess’ blog it is http://jessinethiopia.livejournal.com  She takes really good pictures. 

Well, that is a little bit about life around here.  There is so much more to say and to describe, but maybe that gives a glimpse of what it is like.