Cross the river in a crowd & the crocodile won't eat you...

‘It was the best of times and the worst of times...’

… okay, slight exaggeration, but to help distract from a recent bout of homesickness I had planned a little afternoon tea-party for my birthday. We’d been busy making our lemon curd, cupcakes, lemonade, rather anemic looking bread, labels, and so on, (not because we were going for an organic, homespun effect, but because it’s the only way to have these things here…)

It was all going well and I was thrilled at the rare opportunity to use my cake-stand and spotty teapot, but poor Asher was pretty miserable, and hot, and moany, which put a damp-ner on things. He had a nasty bite on his leg and the angry swelling was creeping up and down his leg in a sinister manner.

Sometimes I think one of the best-kept secrets of cross-cultural/mission work is the closeness and support from other ex-pats. It’s a unique situation where you have at least 10 nationalities at a small tea-party all with different characters, ages, and cultures and all with a story and reason to be in Arua: the efficient German, the generous American, the Polish artist, the diplomatic Canadian, the straightforward Dutch, the agricultural South Sudansese, the motherly Irish nurse, the business-minded Kikuyu Kenyan, the polite Brit (obviously not David..!) stereotyping?.. moi?

Within minutes, some friends drove to town to pick up antibiotics for Asher, other friends had washed up from the tea-party, another friend was trying to cheer up Asher by walking with him around the garden, another friend prayed for healing, another friend offered to fly us to Kampala then and there (an AIMAir pilot, not just a magician).

The next few days sort of blurred together in a worried haze of antibiotics, calpol, (thanks for the parcel Tracey) broken nights and an email to Interhealth, who said it sounded like an abscess which would need to be properly drained at a trustworthy, sterile medical centre. (That ruled out Arua then…)
Even the word ‘abscess’ seems to ooze grossness.

Our new friends in town are a missionary pilot family who phoned us to say a flight would be passing Arua in an hour and there was a seat for Asher and me.
And 1 hour and $160 later we were sitting in a taxi on the way to the best clinic in Uganda. Even in the taxi I was wondering whether I was over-reacting and whether it was a waste of time and money, but after the Dr confirmed it was a nasty deep abscess that needed to be drained immediately I knew I was in the right place.

As they prepared for the procedure: dosing up little Asher on Ketamine (which I vaguely remembered is what they put horses to sleep with) and getting all the sterile equipment ready, my eyes glanced on an electric saw in the room. ‘Does an abscess go away on its own?’ I asked quietly. ‘Oh no, it just gets deeper, even going into the bone, and then it’s very dangerous…’ the Dr said quite cheerfully.
The electric saw was placed next to a gleaming white suit labeled ‘ebola’, and some point between then, and the grossness of bursting the abscess I thought I might faint.

Anyway, before I feel lightheaded again, back to sweeter things and my tea-party, it wasn’t how I would have planned it, but seeing Asher deteriorate and the reality of some of the risks here, it made me take stock a bit this week (maybe my old age ;-) ) and realize how in this crazy, unpredictable, sometimes dangerous and sometimes heartwarming place, it is so necessity to have a wonderfully mixed group of friends on the ground who can express something of the ‘Body of `Jesus’ here on earth.

little ones teaparty

good recovery, welcome back little guy :-) thanks for all the prayers and concern

http://www.aimair.org/main
http://www.maf.org/
https://www.interhealthworldwide.org/
http://thesurgeryuganda.org/

If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. ~ African proverb