OUT REACH

Out Reach

Yele Out Reach Team and friends

I won’t lie… knowing that I would be with medically adept people on this trip to Africa soothed many of my fears.  As it turns out Kyle probably imported some version of the nasty flu which was going around Alma before we left, and he was relieved as well.  He had a rugged night and spent our ‘work’ first day in bed, thanking God for flush toilets, as some of us headed to Yele for a ‘ clinic’, and the other surgical types stayed at the hospital to work their magic.  Dr. Moosavi also shared a similar misery with Kyle but no one else got as sick as these two. 

The Out Reach Clinic was in Yele, home town of Drs. ABD and Turay.  To get there, African style, you must load the vehicle to capacity, then add 2 more people, drive on a decent paved road for about 30 minutes, get suckered into thinking ‘this isn’t so bad’, then turn right and begin an hour of pot-hole-hell.  One must choose between sitting in the middle on the hump, or on the outside risking brain damage from whacking the side window when the driver doesn’t brake soon enough and dips  half the car into the core of the earth.    Ron Woolsey actually got to drive one of the vehicles on day 1.  I was a little jealous and a little relieved because a) driving in a different country = COOL but b) aquiring the skills of honking the horn, shifting the gears, and dodging the humans all at the same time = nerve wracking. 

Ah' Poo Toe!!!!!!

One of the highlights on these trips was the response of the children of the villages we were passing.  They would spot our white faces and begin shouting “Ah’-poo-toe!!”  as they waved or started running along side our car.  Ah’-poo-toe is the phonetic spelling for “white person”.  There is no racial slur in this pronouncement, it is just a joyful observation that seemed an automatic response to our presence.  Even on the hospital grounds I would be walking along and hear little distant voices singing out, “ah’-poo-toe!” like background music.  I learned that I could respond “Oh-knee-bee” which meant “black person”, but it just didn’t carry the same pizzazz that those cute shouting babies had. 

on the way to Yele

 The homes we passed were made of block or thatch, just like in the pictures I’d seen. And the further we got from the city, the more we saw children just buck naked or women with only a wrap around their waists.  Breasts are really not the Hooters turn on duo as they are seen here in the states.  They are very functional parts of a beautiful body that is staying cool in the heat.  Nevertheless, my shirt did, and will, stay on. 

don't let that ghost touch me!

Hard work starts early

Kid Vitamins, once a day

working on "waist pain"

Kendall and Mallory at the pharmacy

Yele is a large city that looks like a poor rural town.  No paved streets, but it has a turn about in the center of an intersection of rutted dirt roads. Funny.  When we arrived there were some people waiting on the back porch of the clinic.  This is a building where people come to see a mid-wife, or a doctor who has been there 5 years.  If there were any medicines there couldn’t have been many.  We brought extra to leave for their use.  We set up a “pharmacy” in the corner by stacking wooden plank benches to create a barrier.  Kendall was our ‘pharmacist’ with the help of Abdul who could translate.  Abraham and I worked on ‘registering’ which means on a small piece of paper (we had ripped notebook paper into 6 sections….fancy), we wrote their names, temperature, and complaints.  I learned that in Krio you say, “Whey  you wahn?” (what you want) which seemed a bit  direct, but they answered in a fairly consistent way.  “Waist pain, cough, gastric pain, body aches, fever.”  I had never heard of “waist pain”, but Kariatu’ who was later my interpreter explained, “these are all things from the hard work they do to live”.  Waist pain is really their back hurting because they walk EVERYwhere, often carrying a load on their heads and a child on their back.  They haul water and pound rice and wash clothes in the river.  They have heart burn or ulcers from the stress of making a living, a cough from, among other things, the dirt and the dust that is everywhere, and they have fevers from the malaria that each of them will have multiple times in their lives.  The few that were waiting on the porch swelled to hundreds in a few minutes.  Dean Wilson and Stephanie Benn set up in one room to see patients and Mike Karr set up with Dr. Turay in another room.  Mallory was the blood pressure/pulse queen, and Ron was crowd control…a formidable job the later it got in the day.  We had basics to give them:  vitamins, malaria meds, Sudafed, ibuprofen, cough medicine but to them we had relief and for four days they came, they waited, they hoped that this group of ‘ah’-poo-toe’ would be able to soften the hardness of their lives, even for a little while. 

going home without being see at the Out Reach