Afanu Akimi

The doctors are here!

And, while completely exhausting, the program we’ve put together with them is reaping some excitement.

Among the Lopit, excitement because they have reason to bombard the clinic, see a real live doctor and get some medicine (whether they really need it or not).

Among the Christians, excitement because people are hearing the Gospel—in their own language—from our team, the Bible students and some of the church folk.

So, like I said—excitement.

But it’s definitely been hectic. And stressful.

“Chaotic” comes to mind.

(Nonetheless… exciting!)

We had our first day at the clinic here in our Lopit village yesterday, and I think the whole of the mountain showed up. It was absolutely nuts.

Women, children, men—screaming, pushing, poking, cheating. Phew.

You see, every Lopit person—when they think there is medicine to be had—claims to be sick. And so you’ve got to get through all of those yellering, angry people and to the genuinely sick people, so you can help them.

Triage isn’t something the Lopit clinic workers understand, let alone the hundreds of people crowding around the door. So it was a lot of pushing people through, pacifying them with a “prescription” of multi-vitamins or de-worming medicine or ibuprofen, so they’d get their pills, be happy and get the heck out of the way. :)

I don’t know how many people we were able to get through yesterday, and I don’t know how many people we’ll end up getting through today. When I left the doctors, in a neighboring village, they’d been seeing a steady stream of coughs, headaches and rashes, and there was a crowd of 200+ kids who’d just descended on the place.

So, please pray for the doctors and our team—that we’d be able to keep up this break-necking pace through the whole week. And for the truly sick people out there—that they’d be filtered from the medicine-hungry crowds and given the attention they need.