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| First day exploring the streets and market in Togo |
Bon Jour from Lome, Togo! I can’t believe I’m back in Africa! It’s a little surreal. Part of me feels like I never left. The ship is still so familiar and many people are back this year for another field service. Reconnecting with friends and co-workers has been great fun. But at the same time, so many things are new. New country, new faces, new patients, new field service….
The ship is an excited place right now, full of energy and anticipation! Most of the nurses have arrived in the last few weeks and Screening day is Wednesday at the stadium. We are expecting around 4000 people to show up in need of medical attention and I am eager to meet some of our future patients. I found out this week that I’ll be back on the plastics team this year. My unit will take care of patients that have contractures from previous burns or snakebites or facial tumors such as Neurofibromas, with a few other plastic surgery cases mixed in. The first 2-3 weeks of surgeries will just be maxilla-facial patients though, so I’ll get a little experience in that area to start.
A few things to pray for:
-Our Screening Day on Wednesday February 1st. It will be an intense morning of screening potential patients and scheduling them for surgeries over the next 4 months. Pray that God will send those who we can help and that the ones we can not help will stay home. It will be hard to turn people away, but we won’t be able to treat everybody’s conditions.
-Good connections and friendships to be formed with all the nursing staff as we being working in our teams. We will meet our day volunteers tomorrow and start training them, so prayer for good, clear communication and bonding with them as well. These are the translators and local people we will be working closely with for the entire outreach.
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| Women from the fishing village church I visited this morning |
