Friday:
Another early morning starting off with breakfast at 7 am. Julius, Freemon, A.J, Gayle, Sierra, Heaven, and Domine all had breakfast and headed over to the same clinic area we went to yesterday. This was definitely an impoverished area and it was very difficult to see what people were dealing with. Today the team was very efficient, we saw 88 people the first day and 140 people this day. Sierra and I saw and learned so much today.
I saw horrific injuries, large goiters, and patients that had been dealing with issues for years but unable to pay for help. One very real problem was hypertension. I personally had some blood pressures with a systolic number of over 200 (120 is normal). We were able to help these people in a tremendous way, people that otherwise would possibly die. The amount of relief in peoples’ faces when we said we would be paying for their surgery made all the work worth it. We stayed at the clinic working till 6 p.m. We saw all ages of patients. The youngest I saw was a year and one month and the oldest was in their 80s. We even ended up running out of certain medications such as high blood pressure meds and allergy meds. It was very rewarding being able to provide medicine and referring people to surgeries. I’m very excited to be able to see those same patients this week in surgeries. We see patients struggling, pay for their medications, refer them to the hospital for surgeries, and then pay and help with those surgeries. We can directly see the impact we make, it is phenomenal. We got back to the hotel around 7:30 and ate supper. After supper we had to switch hotels. We packed up our things and drove to Arusha. It was about an hour drive and the hotel was a lot nicer here. The rooms were nice and we were able to sleep well.
Sunday:
We woke up and went to breakfast at 9:30 which was a nice break from the early mornings. We had breakfast at our hotel and went to church in downtown Arusha. We had a very nice service and fellowshipped with the congregation afterward. It was a beautiful time to worship with people of a similar faith even though they live so far away. After church we went to our rooms and changed and got ready to go to the market to buy food for hospice patients. The market was quite an experience. The traffic driving there was very busy and the market was even busier. It was definitely a unique cultural experience. We returned to the hotel and packaged the food for the patients. The plan tonight is to go to Julius’s house for New Years Eve.
Belle
We ask for your prayers as we go to clinic that we can help the many patients that we transferred to Selian. Thanks to all the donors that make this possible.
God bless,
Mama Gayle
