The Nicaragua Adventure: October 2008

Monday, October 20, 2008

Change of Plans

We got back from Puerto Cabeza on Wednesday night, a day late. After all the excitement that a trip to town entails, we were planning on a nice, normal last two days of our week. Problem with that is, we live in Nicaragua . . .

On Friday morning I was settled in my hammock studying Miskito and listening with one ear to Jeremy, Zephan, and Rusty testing out the hand-held radios. Payton took the four-wheeler to Santa Clara to see if she could talk to us from there. (Speaking of the four-wheeler, yes, it´s still running, but the back right wheel falls off from time to time while you´re driving it). I heard the four-wheeler come back into our driveway, and suddenly Dawn started yelling for Bridget, our picture maniac, to come quickly with her camera.

I ran out with my camera too and foud Payton unloading a baby sloth from the back of the four-wheeler. Actually she was detaching its claws from the four-wheeler rack—sloths grip hard! Payton had found the animal on the road with no mother in sight. Some kids from the village who were with her wanted to kill it, but she wouldn´t let them. She had wrapped the sloth in a shirt and brought it back so she could beg her mother to let her keep it.

We all marveled at its sharp claws and squashed-looking face. Then we wondered what to do with it. What does it eat? Will it live in a box? How will we keep the dogs from eating it? We finally put it on a post of the verandah and let it do what it wanted, which was climb . . . slowly . . . around . . . all the buildings.

After settling the sloth, I became involved in a conversation with a man who was sitting on the porch with Zephan and Jeremy talking and asking questions about what it means to be a Christian. Zephan has the best Spanish, so he was doing most of the talking. I was amazed, though, at how much I could understand and even contribute with the little Spanish I know. God gave us such a thrilling opportunity to share—the man was completely curious and open to what we were telling him about living with God.

We asked the man to stay for lunch. I helped him prepare his plate, since one of his hands doesn´t work so well after having a bullet pass through it. Right after lunch while I was trying to feed the sloth, Payton suddenly remembered that Mindy and Jenny had told her to tell me there was a lady giving birth and I should go help.

I rushed down to the house of Amelia, the village midwife. Amelia´s niece was giving birth inside. She´s just a girl, seventeen years old and bearing her first child. She´s small, too, and it seemed that she was having trouble. Mindy and Jenny told me that her water had broken several hours ago, but the baby still hadn´t come. All we could do was sit and help her through the contractions while we waited for the baby.

Mindy and Jenny decided to go eat lunch, but I stayed with the mother and tried to help Amelia, Janet, and the other ladies attend to her. Soon after Jenny and Mindy left, her contractions grew stronger. The women were holding her shoulders and knees back with each contraction, and Amelia was watching the birth canal carefully. Suddenly I heard her say, ¨Tuks! Tuks! [Push! Push!]¨ I moved to stand next to her and saw the baby´s head crowning. Amelia told me to help hold the woman´s knees back so she could catch the baby. With the next few contractions the head came out—but slowly. And then just the head was out and no more was coming. Amelia reached in around the baby´s neck and pulled off the umblilical cord. It had been wrapped around the infant´s neck, strangling her.

Amelia yelled to the mother to push, and she grabbed the suction bulb and started sucking the mucus out of the baby´s nose and mouth. I didn´t know what to do—I felt in the way and scared. So scared—because the baby´s head was blue, bluer than normal for a newborn, and I didn´t know how long it had been without oxygen. I started praying hard.

The mother delivered the rest of the baby´s body, and Janet rushed in next to me, cut the umbilical cord, and moved the baby to a blanket on the floor. She started rubbing the baby´s body, holding it between her hands and desparately massaging. Another woman brought in salt and chicken feathers and started using a feather to tickle the inside of the baby´s nose and ears. She blew into the baby´s mouth while Janet kept rubbing. Janet handed me an ampule of atropine to prepare for injection, but I didn´t know where her syringes were. So I just sat there and prayed, and watched, and FINALLY--the baby started crying. Very weakly at first, but as Janet kept rubbing, it became stronger and fuller, until it sounded right, like a healthy newborn cry.

We all relaxed. ¨Mairin [it´s a girl],¨ we told the mother, and Janet gave it the atropine and wrapped it in some clean clothes. Then the women handed it to me to hold while they cleaned up the mother. It was so tiny! I watched and listened carefully to make sure it was still breathing, and I thanked God that its face was pink now.

Jenny and Mindy showed up too late for all the excitement. :D The women asked us to name the baby, but we couldn´t decide. We said the mother should choose one of our names. :)

We walked back to the house, tired and excited. Somehow I wasn´t surprised when we found a new animal waiting at home—a kioki, I think it´s called in Miskito. There is no English word that I know of, but it´s a rodent, bigger than a rat, with sort of kangaroo legs. A man had been selling it for food, but Rachel had bought it to rescue it. I held it and thanked God for the miracle of life—animal life, new human life, and new spiritual life in my friend from earlier in the day.

So you can see from this post that no day is predictable here in Nicaragua. My plans change over and over again. I run wildly from one new situation to the next, and pray that God will prepare me for each one. It´s utter madness, but frankly, I wouldn´t change it if I could.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Pictures

A turantula we found in the clinic the first day. I thought it was dead when i took this pic, but later came back and it had moved . . .

Francia kids hanging out watching us thru the clinic door. They hung there nonstop for the first few days we were working.

Jenny and Mindy sorting thru the cockroach-dung-covered contents of the mobile clinic suitcase.

A definitely alive turantula. I took video too. :)

Jeremy, Jenny, and Mindy running a mobile clinic in Wisconsin (a village, not a state). We meant to go to Esperanza that day, but got a little lost. Oops.

Packages

The other great God-thing from the broken clavicle experience was the fact that my first two packages from campus ministries arrived with Dawn just before we left to take Rusty to Waspam. Right in that moment full of fear and anxiety, I held in my hands my new Project impact Tshirt, all the Clocktowers and Ministry Matters, and, most importantly, the piece of paper signed by all my friends on registration day. It seemed that God had saved the arrival of that encouraging package until the moment when he knew I would need it most. I sat in the back of the truck wiping blood off of Rusty´s forehead every few minutes, reading the notes from my friends telling me to stay strong, that God was with me.

Never underestimate the power of those little notes CM is always asking you to write. They always bring me a huge blessing from God.

Monday, October 13, 2008

The Craziest Week in which Everything Went Right (Thanks to God)

A week ago last Sunday, our missionary directors and family, Rusty, Dawn, Payton, and Keegan Zimmerman, went to Port for groceries. That night, while they were gone, we got a patient to transport. He had a broken collarbone, and we had to take him to the ¨switch¨ where the bus stops so he could get to the hospital in Waspam. He stayed overnight at our mission, and we had to pray really hard for the four-wheeler to run the next day. It´s new trick is: it´s begun to turn off randomly, sometimes while climbing a hill, but always for no good reason. As if it didn´t have enough problems.

On Wednesday night Rusty got back. The rest of his family was supposed to come later that night with the Halversons, the missionaries who run the radio station. However, the Halversons´ truck didn´t come back. So the next morning, Rusty went on the motorcycle to look for them, supposing that they had broken down on the road. On the way, he came over a hill and ran into a truck he hadn´t been able to see. The motorcycle destroyed its front half on the truck´s front tire, and Rusty flew thru the air and landed on his left shoulder. Thanks to God, another truck came along just then and brought him back to Francia.

I was on the verandah feeding the parrot when Mindy ran up yelling for Jeremy and me and looking terrified. She had been at the MINSA clinic when Rusty was brought in. We hopped on the four-wheeler and headed down. Sure enough, Rusty looked pretty bad. His shoulder was hanging way lower than any shoulder is ever supposed to go. I thought it was certainly dislocated, and maybe also had some broken bones. We decided to take him to the hospital in Waspam. The owners of the truck that had brought Rusty back offered to drive us if we would pay for gas, but, again thanks to God, the Halversons and the other Zimmermans got back just at that moment.

So we four medical people, Dawn, and Rusty went in the Halversons´ truck. We got to Waspam and went to the hospital, but they told us that the emergency doctor and the orthopedic doctor were both gone and they didn´t know when they would return. Typical Nicaraguan health care. We were walking away to find somewhere to eat and wait, but just at that moment, thanks to God, we saw a doctor we knew personally. He pulled some strings, and Rusty was seen immediately.

The X-ray showed that Rusty´s collarbone was broken, and I mean broken. It was in two very separate pieces, about three inches away from each other. The doctor in Waspam said probably surgery was necessary to repair it. For that, Rusty would have to go to Puerto Cabezas, if not Managua or the States. The next step for us then was to get ahold of the missionaries with the airplane, Clint and Marilyn, to fly Rusty to Port. We sent out a radio message for Clint, but didn´t have to wait long. In about half an hour, we heard his plane landing. You see, by ¨chance¨ Clint was already on his way to Waspam. He had been in town in the morning to drop his mother off, and the hospital had asked him to come back with his airplane because they wanted him to take another patient to Port for them. Thanks to God, he flew in at just the right time to take Rusty too.

So Rusty went to Port in the little plane and we brought Dawn back to Francia so she could catch the bus to Port the next day. She went at 6 in the morning and took her son Keegan with her. Poor kid--that day was his 11th birthday, and he had been so excited to turn 11 for so long. We hated the thought of his day being ruined, so we all got up at 5am to have a party for him. We made mac and cheese--that´s really special food here, and he loves it. He got 11 little presents from his family and a scooter from all of us. He was so happy.

After Dawn left, it was just the ten of us student missionaries with no director. We were planning for the worst scenario--that Rusty and Dawn would be in the States for a long time and we would have to function on our own. We knew that we could handle it, but it was still somewhat sobering. We had our plans worked out for getting to Port and buying food. We were planning on taking the bus to Port yesterday, because Jeremy has only driven our truck (a 1965 military deuce) once and isn´t completely comfortable with it, especially starting it. It doesn´t actually start on its own--you have to roll it down a hill or push it. Plus we just fixed the brakes, so we weren´t sure if they were working, and we had just put on a ¨new¨ radiator, which we weren´t sure would work. (At this point in my conversation with my sister, she asked politely, ¨Does anything on it work?¨ And I replied, ¨It´s actually the safest, most functional vehicle we have.¨ To which she said, ¨Awesome.¨)

Because of all these concerns, we decided that Jeremy would only drive the truck as a last resort. And then the story got interesting. :) On Sabbath, we were sitting in church and someone handed in a note from Janet, the village nurse. She wrote that there was a baby being born and that we could come help.

We figured she didn´t actually need our help, so we waited till after church and lunch, then headed to the lady´s house. The baby, a little girl (Maidin in Miskito) had already been born around 1:00. However, the mother still had a hard lump in her uterus. The placenta had already delivered, so we knew it wasn´t that. She had stopped having contractions, but she said she was in pain. All she had strength to do was lie on the floor with an IV dripping into her arm. Amelia, the midwife and Janet´s mother, told me she thought the lump might be another baby, but she wasn´t sure. I felt it, and it felt like a baby to me, and when Amelia used the Doppler, we picked up a heartbeat. It was too slow for a newborn, though, and I wondered if we could be hearing the mother´s abdominal aorta, but Janet said no.

We asked Janet if the mother´s condition was serious. --Sí, es seriosa! she exclaimed, and told us that the mother could die if she didn´t get to the hospital in Waspam. We went and asked Mike Halverson, the radio station missionary, if he would take her in his truck, but he said no. So Jeremy and Mindy bravely went to start our deuce.

Mindy pressed the gas pedal with one hand and the starter button with the other. Jeremy worked the clutch and the brakes. The truck rolled down the hill and started, and it turned out we did have brakes, which was good. They drove to the mother´s house. She couldn´t walk, so we had to get people to carry her. I was going to help Ruth get a mattress and blanket from our clinic, but Jeremy told me he was worried about the radiator and asked me to go get some containers for water. So I ran up to our mission house, grabbed two big jugs, and ran back. By the time I got to the truck, the mother was loaded and ready to go. At the clinic we filled the jugs with water and discovered they both had holes in them. We laid them in the truck hole-side-up to minimize leakage.

After loading up all the people in Francia who wanted a free ride to Waspam (this is a normal part of emergency patient transport), we took off. Poor Jeremy--he was pretty stressed. He really hadn´t planned on driving the truck anywhere by himself. He wanted to drive carefully, too, so the lady wouldn´t get bounced around on our rutted roads. He did an excellent job, however—he even handled it when the truck tried to stall in the middle of going up hills. We prayed hard for the engine, the radiator, the brakes, and eveything else—and, thanks to God, everything functioned!

We got to the hospital safely, got the lady in, and hugged Jeremy and told him we were proud of him. The doctors said the mother didn´t have another baby in her uterus, but they didn´t explain what the lump was. They said she had sepsis and started her on an antibiotic. We saw her settled in bed with her baby girl, whom Mindy had been holding for her on the truck, and then we drove back to Francia.

When we pulled in at Mission Hill, we heard a familiar voice call from the porch, ¨OK, Jeremy, you can breathe now!¨ We looked at each other and said, ¨No way!¨ But it really was—Dawn! She and Rusty had gotten back on the bus that afternoon. It turned out that the doctors didn´t have to do surgery. They just set the collar bone and gave him a brace. We spent that evening praising God for all the coincidences that we knew weren´t by chance. We felt so blessed that He kept us safe through everything. And we felt so blessed by our delicious homemade pizza! No cheese except Parmesan to sprinkle on after baking, but it was still amazing. I think pizza qualifies as a blessing straight from God, too.